I attended Adobe MAX 2008 in San Francisco this year. In comparison to the last two MAX events I attended I have to say this years MAX was good overall but not as EXCITING as the past two years. Part of this had to do with the fact that there weren’t as many new BIG announcements. Alot of the news and sessions were geared around progress made on Flash Catalyst (Thermo) and Flex 4 (Gumbo) fronts since the initial announcements at last years MAX.
Day 1 – Keynote
My co-workers and I attended the keynote session, where Kevin Lynch broke his presentation into three different trends which will be big over the next year, these included client and cloud computing, social computing, and devices and desktop computing. At one point during the presentation he held up an iPhone and the audience exploded with applause. He then informed the crowd that “we are working on it”.
The MAX 2008 sessions are suppose to be available the first week of December on Adobe TV.
I won’t get into the details of each session, but I highly recommend you check these out on Adobe TV when they are available.
Day 1 – Best Sessions
Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex
This session was given by Ely Greenfield who always gives some of the best sessions at MAX. In the past two MAX events he got my vote for best sessions I attended. This year he tied for first.
Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex
Ryan Stewart and company demoed and discussed Flash Catalyst (Thermo) which is Adobe’s upcoming interaction design tool, it is supposed to improve the collaboration between designer and developer workflow. They also previewed the next release of Flex Builder which includes many updates and features getting it near the class of functionality in the existing Java eclipse IDE plugin.
One of the presenters said the release is still “at least a year out”. I asked several of the Flex SDK guys if Gumbo would be on the same release schedule and they didn’t think it would be. Maybe 2H09 for the Gumbo release.
Day 2 – Best Sessions
Next-Generation Flex Skinning
This session was presented by Marc Dennert and was overall good, content was solid and fit the description. The best part of the session was when Ely Greenfield did a 20+ min Q&A and the end of the preso.
Day 3 – Best Sessions
Wireframing Experiences and Applications with Flash Catalyst
This was by a slight win the best session I attended at MAX. Peter Flynn from the Flash Catalyst team did a great job by demoing a full example of building a wireframe in Catalyst and then bringing it to life. Definitely a must see.