I saw this demoed at Adobe Max and was blown away. The experience they’re creating in AIR makes you want to read the newspaper. After seeing the demo I wanted to run out and subscribe. But some time has passed and the newness/hotness/gotta-have-it-ness of the application has worn off a bit and I’m left wondering, “Why would I pay $3.50 per week for content I can get completely free?’ Is the recreation of the newspaper-reading experience so good as to warrant a $3.50/wk expenditure?

The problem with this application strategy is that it hitches it’s wagons too heavily to the Newspaper Experience – not the content experience. Meaning that, is a dual-column, page-turning format the best for absorbing the content? Is it best for exploring content/concepts/archives/photos giving you related content, taking advantage of hyperlinks and rich media?

It may be an exact replica of the newspaper experience, but is that what customers really want? Mother economics will ultimately be the judge.

When going to a trade-show it’s natural to feel hyped about the products on display. Every car show I go to I leave convinced that now is the right time to buy that 2-seater I’ve always wanted – but it never is – it’s just the hype. Trade shows have been honing the craft of making you want what they’re hocking for years and they’re quite adept at it. The thing is, Adobe MAX was a little different. Of course I left wanting to run out and buy CS4, but not for shop-therapy or wanting something shiny or new.

When Apple launched their new Mac Books I wanted a new one – for about a minute. Then I looked down at my year-old MacBook with 4 gigs of RAM and thought how silly wanting a new one was when the one I have is bad-ass. Not the case with CS4. There are actually new tools to be used, new and easier workflows for creation and faster performance. We live in Adobe products and we make our livelihoods using their tools. Upgrades are key. The following is my recap of my thoughts at Adobe MAX this year:
Day 1 Keynote

• Flash 10. They’re gunning hard at making the Flash Player as richly interactive as possible. They showed a 3D cloth model with video playing on it and the presenter fully deformed it in real-time with physics. Minimal pixelation. Looked amazing.
• Air 1.5. Now Air is getting special. They demoed an application by the New York Times and International Herald Tribune of a newspaper/newsreader. Some highlights: Full copy-flowing from linked text-fields in Air (finally!). Better multi-language and font support. I missed the particulars, but they greatly improved their text rendering engine somehow.Since Air 1.5 now runs on Linux and most MIDs run Linux, this app seemed to have a smart way of re-laying itself out based on screen size. Not that difficult to implement 3 or more page templates based on browser size, but I loved the thoughtfulness of the output with regard to screen display.
• Hobnox. OMFG. Just play with it. That’s all I have to say.
• California Museum. Maria Shriver showed up to talk about their site. It looks like a content-browsing front-end with nothing too new in terms of content display. Maps, videos, audio, text, etc. They’re called Research Trails. What’s cool is that for educators, you can build a curriculum for your students and have a prep-center right there in the site. So students can take tests, write essays and then print out their “trail”, which is physically mapped to a route in real-life. They didn’t show this, but I think the next logical step for the California Museum is to make some location-based mobile site/app so that as user’s walk around certain cities in California their mobile provides information about points of interest. Its a push vs. pull mentality.
• acrobat.com/photoshop.com now have APIs & Web-Services for developers.
• Tour de Flex. An Air application for download that provides code samples and live filters for flex developers. If I were a flex developer I’d be VERY excited about this.
• Salesforce showed up and talked about their SAS/PAS services on AppExchange.
• Adobe Cocomo. Social Media web-services. Its a PAS for flex developers to add social components to their projects: shared whiteboards, crowd-sourcing, etc.
• They spoke about a shift in computer usage: mobile now outsells all others (PCs/Laptops/MIDs) therefore mobile is adobe’s #1 priority. People consume internet on mobiles when they don’t own or have access to a PC. Air is their mobile content player platform. Flash lite seems like it’s being phased out although they didn’t mention that. Air for iPhone isn’t ready but AIR for WinMo and Android are. They demoed some apps. Looks like it ran OK.

10 After Effects Tips for Designers Who Use Flash.

This wasn’t the session I had expected. The presenter was extremely knowledgeable about AfterEffects and could have no doubt gone on for hours dropping some crazy knowledge on me but I was expecting to hear tips and tricks for integrating AE more tightly in flash. Sure he covered alpha track-mattes for screen-wide wipes, but beyond that it was mostly AE tricks. I guess I was looking for more idiosyncratic tips from someone who builds heavily video’d flash sites daily (think Big Spaceship). He seemed like he lived more in AE than Flash. Some takeaways were:

• Art Beats sells clean stock video footage of smoke and explosions that are good for use as track-mattes.
• The Wiggler is your new friend. I saw this guy make a star-field out of nothing but the wiggler and some period characters. Very cool.
• Expressions add code to your AE movies. He demonstrated how to use randomization to make repeated clips look different and less robotic.

The Holistic Design Process (by Ivan Todorov of Blitz).

This session was pretty much what I was looking for – a very process-centric look at producing and project management.

• He mentioned that for new projects, discipline leads from Blitz get matched with their counterpart in the client-side. He called it matching “Furbys”.
• A sales lead isn’t considered a sales lead until there is a $ amount attached.
• Place “–” before empty folders in the folder structure.
• He showed an awesome project-life-cycle info-graphic that everyone at Blitz has access to.
• They have adopted MS Share-Point for their intranet. I wonder if it’s better than Confluence.
• Training Videos: They took 2 weeks to produce training videos for every discipline so that new-hires all start with the same requisite base-line of knowledge about their process ,how to set up files, where to put things, etc. I think that’s a fantastic idea although I think we might have more of a shift in the knowledge base-line more rapidly than Blitz. But it’s worth entering a discussion about this. I can see integrating the videos with the new Adobe Configurator (more on that later).

Introduction to Adobe Thermo – Now Called Flash Catalyst.

This is a big one, Adobe has been listening to us say this for years now: we’re not just segmented into graphic designers and web developers, we’re more like 3 segments (if not more): Graphic Designer, Designer/Developer Hybrid and Developer. Adobe understands that developers are no more in a position to motion-direct interactions and interfaces than pure graphic designers are. Enter Flash Catalyst. Fc is a rapid prototyping tool for Creative Technologists (AKA Hybrid Designer/Flash) can use to import PSDs, add interaction styles and interface motion to, then hand off to Flex developers. Projects from Thermo get saved out as Flex projects using a new FXG file format thereby making round-tripping projects easier. Fc makes it easy to connect to Web-Services and APIs galore (Flickr, etc.) to sync-up with server-side data for richer, more accurate prototypes.

Playful Design.

This was by far the coolest session for me. The two Creatives that gave this session are individuals I greatly admire. Gaining insight into their process of creation was exactly what i was looking for. Marcos Weskamp and Remon Tijssen really blew me away with their process at XD (Adobe’s experimental design lab). It’s literally all about playing in Flash. They seem to receive a brief and begin by with visualizing the data-set. Then they add interactivity and refine from there. They showed some early prototypes of Newsmap, Spectra, S-W-H, etc. What struck me was that their early prototypes were really studies into very high-level concepts like 3D chips flying through space, text-input as navigation and visualizing very large data-sets. There was no polish at this stage. They then showed the different iterations they took to arriving at their final destination. It was like they “comped” in Flash. Totally foreign way of thinking but how can you argue with their results? Takeaways:

• Index – XD @ Adobe, their internal design group.
• Born Magazine, The Smell of Roses at Night – beautiful.

Day 2 Keynote.

• Adobe User Groups (groups.adobe.com) – I MUST become more involved. It’s silly that I’m not. It should be mandatory to go.
• Thermo/Flash Catalyst can do some nice out-of-the-bod 3D stuff like motion and transitions but it’s very buggy. Not ready for prime-time.
• The Flash Client 10 can connect media streams from one browser directly to another without server by creating a social mesh.
• Dreamweaver CS4 has a live JS toolkit tool palette. Users can now grab live AJAX code and slug it into a widget within Dreamweaver for a live preview.

Air Boot Camp. 3 hours of WTF is going on and all I have to show for it is a chrome-less cross-platform executable application. Wait, that’s freakin’ cool. I just wish I understood how it’s made a little better.

End of Day 2: Sneaks.

• Flash Player – to – Player media streaming.
• Some crazy image compositing tool demoed by some Greek guy. He’s a genius. This thing actually knocks out any background no matter how complex nondestructively, so that you can place the image anywhere on your canvas and you have seamless edge-quality.
• Video tool for auto-creation of metadata. Essentially as a video plays metadata is logged for:
• Face recognition queue points
• overall color tone values of the frames
• whenever “movement” happens (think of security camera footage that has nothing new for hours on end only to have short bursts of motion when the burglar shows up)
• Auto transposing of audio speech to text.
• This has so many applications. Pretty soon the machines will be making our content for us.
• Photosynth/SeaDragon-like application. It was cool how the software found ways to stitch seemingly incongruous images together, but I really don’t see this going beyond a cool slide-show plug-in commercially.

Building 3D Environments in Photoshop

Ok. It’s here. Photoshop can now do 3D. Not just importing models and surface painting. You can create a scene of multiple objects and lights and then render out an animation. Wow. So for all of those micro-sites that require a 3D house or trees or a car or whatever to slide a little bit in perspective as a transition, our software solution pipeline just got infinitely easier. One tool. Done. Highlights:

• You can drill into the texture map while painting and toggle on/off the wireframe-map of the object. This will increase the accuracy of painting the object’s texture.
• You can composite multiple objects/lights into a 1-camera scene.
• Can render using ray-trace.
• Sketch-up is a free 3D modeler. So is Blender.
• Adobe acrobat supports the 3D object from photoshop as a live object. Meaning you can open Acrobat and spin the 3D model right there in the page. You can also embed the motion in Acrobat so what you’ve just animated is viewable.
• Export to any popular video file format.
• High quality 3D models will become the new “hot” stock item. Mark my words.
• There is a new auto stitch feature in Photoshop CS4 for you to create full 360 panoramas from multiple photographs.
• Different camera lenses are supported in the 3D camera.

Photoshop Deep Dive

The geeky highlights:

• Direct upload and packaging from Adobe Bridge to a web gallery. Easily make client-review areas from an image collection in bridge.
• Change brushes on the fly with option + control + click. Hardness with option + control + command + click-and-drag.
• Download pixel-bender plug in and use with open GL in photoshop. You can also download and install other plug-ins from photoshop.com to extend photoshop. These extensions are just a flash/flex file that slugs right into the application.
• Edit camera RAW properties in nondestructively in Adobe Bridge.
• Better filtering and image-set-creation in bridge. Also a new carousel view that allows you to whittle-down your selection visually.
• You can warp smart objects now with bezier warp-maps (like a cloth).
• Acrobat connect now supports live screen-sharing from within the Photoshop IDE!
• Adobe Configurator is live on Adobe Labs. Configurator allows you to create any tool palette from any tools available in the entire Photoshop tool-kit. You can also include web content and video. Meaning I can create a palette that has the move tool, some color swatches, a you-tube video and the 3D tools if I so wanted. Then I can download the custom palette and load it into photoshop and use it like any other palette. But the real trick comes when you think about training. Now educators can create a how-to video on youtube and package that with a custom palette which includes all of the tools necessary to complete that tutorial. Lynda.com will not be the same. You will also see agency-specific palettes for internal training and mentorship.

Introduction to AS3.

It’s all about the Class-Path, no more “_” before attributes (like alpha), small “v” for “void” and passing even stricter data-Types in functions. We ended just as we got to external classes which just happened to be exactly what I needed help with. Then again it was the last session of MAX and my mind was mush. Maybe it was for the best.

So that’s it. That’s my recap. As I was leaving the conference I thought if I didn’t know Adobe was also a serious player in the prosumer video-editing software market, I would think they were only a web-software company. Hey, with a limited amount of resources you have to make tough decisions. I’m glad Adobe is going in the direction they’re going with their web content creation tools. They really seem poised to raise the bar for all of our web-experiences. Globally. Adobe, keep pushing the envelope and we’ll keep running out an d buying your software the next day.

MAX 2008 North America

San Francisco, California — November 16 – 19, 2008

The functionality and promise of Adobe Connect is mouth-watering. The idea of what this thing could be isn’t an application, its a revolution. Collaborative screen-sharing, web-conferencing with integrated audio, video and text chat, file-sharing, the cure for blindness and cold-fusion. Great where do I sign up? Oh – its FREE?! We’re saved.

Then you load the application itself up, load the required plug-in and invite a colleague to join your virtual meeting and it all goes to shit. I’m really starting to hate Flex apps. Chuggy. Chuggy. Chuggy. When will the makers of these apps stop trying to be cute with animated fly-outs, pulsing, glowing buttons everywhere and (most likely procedurally generated) gradients and bevels and when will they start making web-applications that are snappy, zippy and responsive. Adobe Connect feels like I’ve just dipped a baseball bat in ink and I’m trying to write a love-letter. It’s cumbersome and unresponsive and generally kills my vibe.

Now there are some great things about Adobe Connect – the feature-set, oh the feature-set. I’m sure on someone’s computer somewhere in the world works like a charm. And that’s a sight I’d want to behold.

But for now, I’d prefer it to look like crap and function well. And I guess that’s what’s really at the heart of this rant. I’m tired of beautiful things that don’t DO ANYTHING (and I’m not calling Adobe Connect beautiful, but it’s certainly nicer than goToMeeting). Maybe Air will change things by running processes locally. It better, because as it exists now, I can’t use Adobe Connect (on a MacBookPro with 4(!) gigs of ram and a Core2Duo 2.4). It just doesn’t function properly.

My first impression playing with Adobe’s TV/Media player has left me with two overwhelming reactions:

First is that if the Adobe TV content channel for professionals keeps growing there may be an enormous opportunity to carve out a niche for researchers, professionals, DIYers and just about anyone else looking to learn or spread knowledge. I just fired up the Flash in a Flash episode and immediately saw the potential. Now they just need ot beanch out beyone using Adobe apps and encompass many other areas of science and technology. Leave YouTube to the kids, this can be a great professional resource. But it has to remain free. And ditch the third-rate B-roll content from the Fodd network (pitcured above) and others. Waste of time.

The second is the feel I get when using this “app”. Ahhh Adobe AIR. Taking all of the power of Flex and the experiential richness of Flash to the desktop for use on and off line. But just because applications are being written with richer toolkit doesn’t mean they should utilize glows and tweens and transitions and blurs too liberally. I still like my applications feeling zippy. Especially once I’ve left the exploratory experience behind and I’m just looking to drill down into the content I’ve self-identified to. I first encountered this issue when I was at AOL with Boxlee, again with using the first release of Adobe Bridge and now with Air apps (yes I’m generalizing). How come every Air app feels the same? Somewhat sluggish in response to the user’s wishes. Overly caught up in transitions. Chuggy. They all feel like Adobe Bridge CS2. I actually think this Media Player app is one of the better Air apps in that it commits these transgressions the least (I’m looking at you Ebay Desktop). Is is just me? Nah mean?

A lot is being written about this today so I’ll just offer two thoughts…

OK so clearly Adobe can pull off a fantastic RIA with tons of functionality – but not tons more than some competitors like Picnik. And what’s with the limited online-photo-sharing-site integration? Px currently offers integration with Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa… What about me, I use Flickr? (maybe I’ve chosen to align myself with a child of a corporate-parent competitor and I’m being punished)

The logical next thought regarding this lightly-featured (lightly by desktop application standards) RIA is: Why would I use this if its so easy to obtain the real Photoshop? Especially if I’m a Flickr user (as I’d be using Picnik)? I believe the answer is : “start kissing easy access to cracked or educational versions of Adobe products goodbye”. Seriously. This is the first step to further siloing power and casual users. Once casual users gets hooked on Px they have no choice but to purchase the new, future, very difficult to crack, very expensive, Adobe Creative Suite. They already do this to some extent with their Photoshop Elements offering – but the problem is that if people are going to go through the trouble of installing an applicaiton, they’ll jsut install the real thing. Bringing the lite version of their software online allows Adobe to further segemnt/partition/silo their user-base.

Illegal/edjucational software useage crackdown to follow in a big way.

Buzzword is a web-based document editor owned by Adobe. Now that Microsoft Office 2008 is out in Universal Binary for Mactels, users are realizing that there are many many alternative options to the shackles of Word/Office. I’ve been a iWork user (+ Sun’s Open Office for spreadsheets) because of the dismal performance of Office 2004 (Mac). I don’t honestly know why offices prefer forcing Mac-Using employees to use MS Office. It crashes, slows down the system and is generally distracting to the overall pleasure of using the Mac OS. So I’m glad it looks like viable alternatives to the oppression of Office are starting to gain traction and acceptance. Oh – and it looks like buzzword is a flex application – it’s zippy and responsive UI is a pleasure to use.