Furthermore I wanted to keep you up to date on the video of Gary’s Sessions. It’s really coming, as soon as I get a small->small firewire cable. I had a look back on the material; the quality isn’t the best, but I’ll try and edit it into something decent.

Furthermore, I lost my Ipod (it broke just before) somewhere along the journey back….so…maybe time for a paypal button? Getting me a piece of cardboard, saying : “Will post sources for Ipod Video 60
GB” (I did some work on the 8.5 fluid dynamics demo code yesterday. It lacks some in structure, but for the rest it’s basically turned back into the Processing demo it was, with some flash code in there to make it work.

Anyway, first things first, so here’s the final max update.

Tuesday started out with trying to plan the day, and damn, that was hard, seeing alot of the sessions I would like to see simultaniously. Offcourse I could have avoided this by keeping to the schedule I had planned, but hearing more in depth what some of the sessions where about I swapped some off the sessions. In the end my focus of the day became the Flex sessions. Yes, I’m a Flash coder, and yes, I would like to keep on doing that. Doesn’t mean I can’t see myself doing Flash Code in advanced Flex projects. I’ve been very interrested in finding out standards for doing code in Flex. The Iteration 2 (I mean, Macromedia) guys got started on this a bit already Monday morning, but how will all this relate to Flex 2 ?
The days that I’ve been back here in the Netherlands I found myself playing around with both Flex as AS3 only projects. I really see alot of potential in Flex 2 in serving purpose for our clients RIA’s, which have been mainly Flash. I did a 9 month long project for one our client, and I think I could have saved myself alot of pain with Flex 2 (or Flex 1, for that matter). I’d like to see some good training on this subject, though.
I thought about going to see the 180 minutes Building You First Flex Application with Zorn session, but didn’t. Afterwards several people told me this was actually a great session. Foolish me.

I don’t recollect details on all the sessions, so I’ll just take you through the things I do remember of that day.

The General session was kind of theatrical this day. Good for some amusement, but maybe it’s a more “American thing”, generally I just like the info, and don’t really need the entertainment. (Although I must say, Eric Natzke’s session have been hugely entertaining in the past). The theme for “the show” was taken from one of the XD demo’s for Studio 8 : “Meet your Match”. For a minute I went all nerdy there and took a picture of the “secretary girl” on stage. Through this plot all speakers where presented, and it was somewhat amusing. Some heavy stabs to Microsoft in this session. In the Netherlands it has been forbidden by law for a long time to make take out at your competition in any promotional activitity, so I’m not used to this. My question would be if this is necessary? Do we flash developers need to be afraid? Is MM afraid ? Well, personally I don’t think the stabs where that necessary, although one of them was kind of funny. (“Anything with the word Sparkle in there can’t be really that expressive”, during the Adobe After Effects demo/sneak). Think the attending Microsoft people became kind of small during this presentation. Did they blow their covers because of this ?
Anyway to give some feedback on this : I would like to see more actual content, and less “show” next year.

To add a word on the whole Sparkle thing (like there haven’t been enough words on it). At the moment the Flash Player is the leading plugin to add this kind of interactivity to the user experience. There is a large group of people from different skills who know this technology extensively. There is a HUGE group of end users who have this technology installed and are able to view it. I’m not going to sum up all the plusses and minusses on the both techniques or comparing how much they are, or aren’t alike. I just don’t think there is any need to be “afraid” of this technology. I do think that during MAX there were too many words spent on this discussion. Yes, I’ll be watching this technology, like alot of us, but they are simply not there yet. I’ll just focus on the Flash Platform right now, and leave all speculations on Sparkle and M$ intentions with it for what they are. ‘nough said .

During this day I also made my Certification for Flash. I never found this necessary, but since I was there anyway, decided on doing it, going for the speed record, since I had a meeting half an hour later. At least one question in there got me by surprise; it was something about duplicateMovieClip(), which I haven’t used for about more then a year right now. If they would’ve supplied the interface for open answers, mine would be : “Don’t use it”. By the looks of AS3, I’m not the only one (MovieClip.clone() anyone?). Made it. (as did Martijn, in about the same timespan and with the best score of the day..congrats Martijn!). Even worse was our friend Michael van Leest, he won the best score twice (no, not the same).

One of the nicest things about MAX has been being able to meet all the MM people developing the tools which allow me to make money. After the Certification, I ran out to Hall A, because I was supposed to have a meeting with Paul Betlem. Paul is the senior director of Flash Player engineering, and had sent an email out to a group of developers, seeing if they would meet and talk about 8 and future products during MAX. Of course this is a great opportunity to ventilate your personal oppinion and get some direct feedback on it, so I was happy to be meeting with him. We had a half an hour chat about everything 8 and 8.5, and I got the chance to put some of my ideas in there. Before this turns in one big narcistic/ego post, I would like to explain my point one telling you this. The Senior Director of Flash Player engineering came out to meet me; just one of the developers out there. From a PR stance this is great, but the points a gave where actually taken seriously and I could give some serious input on what the next generation of our software should look like. Great. I like this road MM is going on (and yes, I realize they don’t have the time to talk to everyone all the time), and would also like to thank Paul again for his time.

The Sneak Peeks session was a highlight of the day. I missed some of it, but I came in during the Dreamweaver/AJAX session. It wasn’t aware of this path taken with Dreamweaver, and at first I went like : “why?”. The realtime coding demo on this was pretty solid. I don’t know how much of this is public, but I sure would like to play around with these features. The contribute sneak was pretty cool too. I wasn’t that familiar with this tool before, and don’t know if I will do this much with it, but it could be certainly handy for some people.

Next up was “Birds of a Feather” where we went to the Meet the Zorn team. The room was the most packed of all of them, maybe this was because of the drinks bar? Or was it because of the major buzz around this tool? Anyway, everyone there had a chance to meet the MM Zorn Team members, and have a nice informal chat with them.

The conference party was the same evening, held in a “suburb of Disneyland”. I’m not going to say more on it, let’s just say I wasn’t up in time for the first session the Next morning, which was incidentally Waldo’s session on Flex/Flash Intergration. Luckily he took the time and put the presentation and source files online here!

Wednesday had one highlight I have to mention; Christophe Coenraets session : “Next Generation Flex:Data Services” Wow. This was really one of the best sessions; Christophe showed us hands-on demo’s of Flex Enterprise services, sockets, etc. I am getting more info on all this for sure. It also gave me a good view on the added value of Flex Enterprise services, although there wasn’t a word on pricing yet.

I missed out on some of the sessions I wanted to see during this conference, but man, I came back with alot of info, and enthousiasm about the upcoming products. Things I have a special new/renewed liking in after MAX : Flex, Flashlite, AS3 (duhhh…). I’ll be focussing on these topics the coming time. Just doing day and night currently, wish I could just drop the day job, and go all in on these things. Well, not for me yet, but I’ll take every hour I got to spend on it and do it. Results to be posted on this blog. Let’s see where we are all at, at next years MAX conference.

So anyway, it’s the last post on this, but expect the video to be up soon.

So, Monday started out very early. I had little sleep because of the release of Flex Builder, and the opening of labs.macromedia.com. I just tend to be unable to stop then, so I went building the Fluid Dynamics 8.5 demo. Funny to make a port of a port. (the object tag is also correct now, so if you couldn’t check it out before, try again) Tired, but happy with the work I did, I went to the first session of the day together with Martijn (you’d probably know him as the FLV Player guy…turns out he is more famous then he thought). We went to Advanced ActionScript 2.0 session. The first slide popped up on the screen, and although it was doing all the right topics, we both decided we were way beyond that. I’d recommend the session to any intermediate AS’er though. I’d also like to see some advanced advanced actionscript sessions somewhere sometime. I know it will put of the bigger part of the audience, but like to see it anyway.

We decided to quickly swap this session with the Iteration::2/Macromedia session on Flex Frameworks/Cairngorn. They did a very good session, and it clarified some small things I hadn’t gotten before. Main material was their version of the FlexStore, the Cairngorn Store. The presentation room was packed, and they did a great job in explaining what they were doing with Cairngorn, aswell as a nice walkthrough the architecture.

Next session up was Next Generation Flash Player by AS guru/implementer Gary Grossman. I can’t stress enough on how good this session was. Although alot of people probably expected a different kind of session, I am sure that the hardcore flashcoders in the room had really enjoyed this session. Gary went into the architecture and outlines of the new Flash players. He started with the 8 player, and how they changed garbage collection. I had read up on this on some blogs already, but the information was extensive, and very clear. From here on we went on to the new AVM, and we got a quite exact explanation of the inner workings of the flash player, and it’s two headed avm (hence the code name Zaphod).
Things went really “hardcore code’ from that moment on. Gary went into the working of the JIT Compiler, the runtime exceptions, Traits, and the Verifier in the 8.5 player. I got this session on video almost entirely, and I’m sure to watch it entirely again. Currently I don’t have acces to firewire, this laptop doesn’t have it. If I get home I’ll try and compress the entire thing and get it up here if it’s not going to cost me too much bandwidth. Maybe I’ll torrent seed it otherwise. Gary ended the session with some pure runtime bytecode, and I think that’s were it really went to far for the bigger part of the audience. It made me appreciate this session even more, since normally the averaging on level for the entire audience of a session pulls it to far down to make it really something new. Great session.

Now it was time for the Keynotes. Entering the ballroom was amazing. The sheer size of the conference in people became apparent when entering the room, and the room ended up being packed with more then 3000 people, before the sessions started. Keynotes started, and Ze Frank went on stage. This guy was really warming the audience up, and it was just pure fun, nothing more and nothing less. After this it was time for business. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t take notes, and don’t remember everyone, and exact orders.

Things I specifically remember:
Mike from the XD team showed us one of their visions. It was a cross device personal library of Music, Video and other media. It included p2p recommendation engines, mobile phone ticket ordering, a really nice UI for sorting data, etc. It was a nice vision, but for now still a bit far away. A feature to mention was the “filtering while you type”, leading up too a nice backdrop showing the content selected. I know this was mainly a mockup, but I do have a serious comment on it. Why did they use blur filters on these large moving movieclips? You could see performance drop, and personally I do think this doesn’t enhance the UI. Although it looks cool, it isn’t worth the performance load, and the application hickups. I hope the guys from the XD team will take that in account, since performance is still an issue in Flash, and can and will generally give it a bad name with the over-usage of effects.

I think the SAP presentation really was the thing in there which pleasantly surprised me. Their Flex application builder really blew me away. Although I’m not really into the kind of business this was about, the application really looked slick, and very complex indeed. Some great work there. Generating MXML from other apps was just something which didn’t occur to me as being that viable, but actually these guys did some really nice, and very complex work.

Sho’s session was great, he just had some little problems at one moment, which made everyone a bit nervous. Most of the people there went hoping for him to get that fixed. Read his story on this… Great session anyway. In that perspective, Zorn & Flex 2 & Flex Enterprise Services have been the biggest thing at MAX 2005. Here. I said it. It was the BOMB. People have been getting pretty excited, and will probably go home with their enthousiasm, and let’s hope everyone will get some people over and have a look at it. I’ll know I will. Personally I am really happy with it. I can try and get some backend people to have a look at it, aswell as taking the java coders through AS3. No more : “Dude, where’s my strong typing”. (and alot more of those)

After the keynotes, we went to : Next Generation Actionscript. Like Gary’s other session : this was brilliant. In-depth information about AS3 is always welcome, and this was more then good info on it. Same as with the Next-Gen player session, I’ll try and get a video up soon, one way or another. Seeing the perfomance on the new AVM is awesome. The team is also cleaning the api up quite nicely. (just have to remember to do a import flash.util.trace;) More on AS3 later.

The rest of the day were some pretty basic sessions. I had a good time, but I don’t think I need to be blogging on that, I want to get my hands on AS3 now, soon as possible.

For the evening we had the luck the Zorn & Flex teams invited us over to have some dinner. After getting almost totally lost in the empty streets of Anaheim, we reached our destination, and we could have some food. I suggest the team builds a mapping and routing application in Flex next time. The rest of the evening was great, but my personal highlight was Heidi’s joke of the century :

“How do you call a Fish with no eyes? FSSSSHHHH!”

….

It actually did take me a second to get that one too, before not bursting into a laugh….from that moment it was downhill with the jokes, to that level it actually became funny again. I said I would blog this, so here you go. Anyway, the teams were really nice to us, and on top of that : delivering brilliant work. To add one more compliment to the conference organizers, and the Macromedians : You were all there, and people really had an opportunity to talk to you. That’s great, and I think all attendee’s were really happy in being able to talk to you guys & girls. Enough with the sweet talk now. More on all this later. [opens up flexbuilder 2]

I was on the plane here together with Waldo Smeets and Martijn de Visser, and we have been hanging around today too, meeting up with several people. We went to have a drink in the hotel bar before trying to sleep out the time difference and got to hear some of things on the upcoming alpha’s of Flex and the 8.5 player, which will all be presented tomorow. I’ll try and put some stuff up tomorrow evening

Saw a substancial part of the Flex team walking around this evening, so decided to say hi. Very excited about what these guys will have in store for us the coming days. Macromedia is really being open on their upcoming products, and the Flex team was no exception, and a pleasure to talk with. I’ll post more on this the coming days, after the presentations.

Even though this is old news I must say I am still pretty excited about Macromedia doing the Flex 2 Builder on top of the Eclipse IDE. Eclipse is pretty solid, and an already recognized development platform, so seeing MM building on top of that IDE makes me wonder what they could do in unleashing even more efficient and powerfull authoring tools. Sho told me they were pretty happy in developing for Eclipse, and how efficient it is to develop stuff upon the existing IDE.

My program for tomorrow is very exciting, to say the least. The two main items in my program are Next Generation ActionScript and Next Generation Flash Player. Hearing some stuff about it, these things are bound to create a major buzz in the community and at the conference, and will probably have a very bright future.
I’ll post about it soon as I get a laptop, some time and a connection, after those two items.

Will have to catch some sleep now, early up tomorrow. Ohhh…almost forgot : if anyone is actually at the conference, and wants to meet up, let me know!

So, I got the blog setup in a rush. No time to create custom styles, but I thought it would be cool to start blogging from here at MAX 2005. Going to the opening drink now, but expect more. I also hope to get some videos up during the next days, so keep on coming!