What will Adobe announce at MAX?

MAX is the venue where the big Adobe news are announced and all the product teams are gearing up to tell what they've been working on such as AIR for mobile and devices, Flash Player 11, FlaCC, FMS 3.1, Flex 4, Thermo, Pacifica, Cocomo, Genesis and Centaur. This is our summary of what the 5000 attendees are likely to see at The Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Every second MAX conference, a lot of new things get announced. This year is such a year. With CS4 out of the way, Adobe has now focused on the development of CS5 and new features for the Flash Platform. The conference is close to Adobe's SF office, so we're expecting the highest percentage of Adobe officials ever. With almost 5000 attendees, this event will be the biggest Adobe event to date and they have to feed the crowd. This years MAX kicks off in just two days and this article outlines what we expect to be announced.

Flash Player 11

As on former MAX conferences, there will be a Flash Player Internals session. The session outline talks only about Flash Player 10 features, but it's common that Adobe shows an early demo of upcoming features at the MAX keynote. If they do, expect to see some Flash Player 11 in the internals session as well.

The Flash Player team did a great job with the latest version, but we always wish for more. What are the community hoping to see? Improvements to the 3D rendering, hardware accelerated 3D, multi threading/multi core support, microphone waveform access, improved stability for generated audio, Flash Player on the iPhone and Android, interactivity in video and new graphics methods for even more speed.

While we wouldn't get your hopes up, a mute all sound / stop annoying banner animation feature in the Flash Player context menu would be extremely popular. Reading an article is really hard when there's a banner making visual noise next to it. A simple way to manually disable any SWF from the context menu would be a great addition that could silence a few critics as well.

Our main reason for thinking there will be FP11 demos is that it's been really silent on all the Flash Player team member blogs lately. This usually indicates that they are working hard on something exciting!

Flash Player 9 on PS3 will probably be showcased as well (despite the fact that it offers terrible performance)

FMS 3.1

Flash Player 10 offers some Peer to Peer functionality and the server side of this is yet to be announced. What better time to announce this than on MAX?

The goal is apparently not setting up for massive P2P functionality. According to a GigaOm interview with Kevin Lynch "Our current goal is to lower the cost of online video deployments so you [can] take advantage of P2P. We are being super targeted in how it is being used. Most of the overall web video traffic is in Flash."

FlaCC

Last years MAX attendees got a massive jaw-drop when Scott Petersen showed Quake running in the Flash Player! FlaCC is a tool that converts native C++ code into Flash Player bytecode that you can then re-use in your code. The performance is screaming - up to 10 times faster than standard AS3 code, so this is highly optimized stuff. Scott's been working hard at FlaCC since that and we can expect to more at this years MAX (and maybe even a beta at Labs?). There's some details about FlaCC in our Ying and Yang article from FOTB as well.

AIR 1.5

The 1.5 version of the AIR runtime is expected to be launched or at least announced as beta at MAX. This is not a major release, but it will contain Flash Player 10 and the latest version of the WebKit engine. According to our recent interview with Mike Chambers, this release is "really about solidifying 1.0" so don't expect major new features. Air for Linux should catch up with the Mac and PC versions by this time as well. You can already find early builds of AIR 1.5 in the Flex SDK code repository.

There's two things we'd hope to see at MAX. A preview of AIR 2.0 with USB support. This has been talked about a lot, but nothing has been showed publicly. It's also time to ditch FlashLite and it's odd AS1/AS2 code. We expect to see a mobile version of AIR that could bring a consistent AS3 development experience to the mobile and devices world as well.

Thermo

Let developers and designers work better together is the premise of Thermo. At MAX, Thermo will be announced and probably released as a beta on Adobe Labs. It will also get it's final product name rather than the codename "Thermo".

Initially, Thermo really thrilled us, but we have to admit that the more of it we've seen, the less exciting it is. All demo's shown thus far indicates that this is a one-way / one off tool. Once the Designer leaves the code in the hands of the developer, they can't re-edit it or make graphic/layout changes. We're also looking forward to having a close look at the source code it outputs since that's our second concern about the product. The MXML shown in early demos didn't look very impressive.

If these two issues are solved however, Thermo could become a brilliant tool. We're expecting a lot of hype around the product. See fresh screenshots of Thermo here.

Gumbo (Flex 4)

Flex 4 is being developed in full openness, so you can go grab a copy of the software in it's current state. We're not expecting anything revolutionary for Flex or Flex Builder, unless there is something new in the upcoming Flash Player that Flex can use. We're sure hoping for some performance enhancements to the compiler as well as Builder though.

Yakov Fain has a good list and Clint Modien has another list of Flex 4 wishes as well.

Pacifica

VoiP in Flash! Though no longer an Adobe exclusive, Pacifica will open up a new world of possibilities. The new Flash Player 10 Speex codec will probably be used for this as Adobe is looking to get rid of the licenses that prevent Open Sourcing the Flash Player.

Cocomo

Cocomo is the future of collaborative platforms for Adobe. At MAX you'll get to see Adobe veteran Nigel Pegg demo Cocomo publicly in his session Cocomo Deep Dive: Building Social RIAs with Flex + Adobe Hosted Services

Genesis

Mashups baby! Not much is known, but Genesis let's you "combine web applications, enterprise apps, and documents within one workspace on their desktop and provides sharing as well as real-time collaboration". Genesis includes a desktop client based on Adobe AIR and Flex as well as hosted collaboration services that leverage Adobe Acrobat Connect via Cocomo.

Centaur (ColdFusion 9)

Details about this release were slipped at MAX last year. It should now be time for a public beta. Expect to see Ben Forta (and maybe a guest appearance from Tim Buntel) dressed up in funny costumes.

Adobe MAX Awards

This years MAX features a premiere - The MAX Awards. In direct competition with Festivals like FlashForward Film Festival, Adobe now put's on it's own show with lot's of great looking entries. Expect a higher "corporate factor" compared to similar shows and a lot of glamour and sponsored drinks.

There's also a lot more that will be announced. Some of it we can't tell until it's announced and there's bound to be a lot of surprise announcements as well. Best of luck to Ted and his team - we're looking forward to some exciting days for the Flash Platform!

 

 

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