Max 2005: Monday Keynote
More than 3000 people came to Monday’s keynote, which probably represents the size of the entire conference. It may be the largest audience I’ve seen at a Macromedia conference since 1999 at the Moscone center.
Ze Frank, programmer and designer, gave a humorous presentation showing some of his odd Flash graphics work.
Steven Elop, CEO of Macromedia, talked about the changes in products and support since the last conference. The most interesting thing was the all-out declaration of war on Microsoft. Elop said that Microsoft will try to make another competitor to Flash and made direct fun of Microsoft’s inability to produce anything so far in this area.
He only about one minute talking about Adobe and Macromedia. He said that the transaction will be closing soon.
“Thank you for 13 wonderful years,” he said. And “We request that you stay with us.. as members of the Adobe family.”
Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect talked about the roadmap for the future of Macromedia’s products. Record-breaking upgrades for Studio 8. It takes 12 months to reach 80% of the Web with a new Flash player. Flash Lite 2.0 will include AS 2.0, XML parsing and will be Flash 7 based.
Coming soon, Flex is going to become a whole product line, including Flash Player 8.5. 8.5 will include a new virtual machine which runs ActionScript 3.0 and should be much faster — “I don’t mean just a little bit faster.” A comparison of a while loop showed that 8.5 was 1594% faster than Flash 7. Regular expressions will be part of AS 3.0.
Announcing Macromedia Labs http://labs.macromedia.com, where they will release alpha-level software and allow for feedback. Flex Builder is the first product.
Lynch and several other speakers demonstrated some very futuristic uses of Flex and Flash that had to do with integrating many devices and consumer needs. It was all pie-in-the-sky type of stuff, which I didn’t like very much because this is supposed to be a developer conference, and very few developers can actually look forward to working on that sort of thing. I think the audience wanted to see more about the tools than about sci-fi applications.
At the end of the keynote, Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe spoke for a few minutes. Had said he hoped that the transaction would have been closed by the conference but that aeal will be closed sometime in the next few weeks.
For legal reasons, he said, he can’t talk about plans, but can talk about intent. Chizen noted that when the previous speakers were talking about new applications, that they left out PDF format, but “I encourage you to use your imaginination… Our intent is to make it Flash and PDF.”
He said there will be a more seamless integration between Macromedia and Adobe tools, including common user interfaces. “I promise you we will do it with minimal pain,” he said.
He closed by saying, “We will continue to provide you with the SDKs that you need and the support that you require. We look forward to working with each and everyone one of you.”