Thursday's General Session...SNEAKS!

Typed this all up on Word while I sat in the General Session today... Enjoy.

Got here a little late…work stuff. I didn’t miss much, they just had the intros..

Acrobat Connect (missed most of that, but got in on the end to see)… A neat little Yahoo *Messenger* plug in to view PDFs and it looks like a marriage between acrobat and Breeze. Kinda sweet if you’re messaging back and forth to collaboratively work on documents.

Yay! Tim Buntel! Scorpio demos!

Tim’s having problems connecting…if only there was some way to monitor the server…

This looks like a job for…SCORPIO MAN!

Is that Ben Forta? Noooo, couldn’t be…now I’ve seen everything. He has CLAWS for hands! Scorpio Man jumps in and shows Tim the new Server Monitoring tool (flex of course). Drill down to specific pages causing errors and actually shows you performance of the queries. Pretty nice. They find the query causing the problems, refresh the page, but the images are small… if only they had some way to…gasp…scale the images! Switch to code view and there it is, a cfimage tag that’s scaled the images down to 10 pixels. Switching the images back to standard size reveals the image of the person who’s been messing with Ben’s pages…it’s Bill Gates! Nooooooo!

Now we’ve got a little Soundbooth demo. New product from Adobe to allow people to edit and manipulate sound. Very drag friendly, trim a clip by simply dragging the ends, fade in , fade out by dragging…undo history, apply one button normalizing, etc. Pretty sweet. Unbelievable access to frequencies, the ability to clean up audio, etc. This one looks like a real sweet app. If you loved SoundEdit16, then you’ll flip your gourd over this one.

Fireworks! Here we go!

Did she say, “Flex”?

They’re calling Fireworks a “Rapid Prototype” Application. Smart components now. Buttons, interface elements that now have properties. Drag ‘em on your page and they now have properties. Dragging and dropping. They’ve brought intelligent scaling from Flash now, drag your stuff and it doesn’t ALL scale. They’ve added pages? A pages panel? Rapid prototyping to change variations of the same page, each with its own frames, layers, etc. Me likey! Me likey! She’s linking pages directly in Fireworks to different pages IN Fireworks then just exporting it all for “client approval”. Flex support now so pages export MXML. She exports the page, the flex team opens it, and it’s all right there, fully styled, and completely proper MXML. Fireworks 9 is in public beta, go get it NOW!

Now we’re going to see the Flex Data Services Ajax Bridge…this should be really good.

A little plug for Spry…A nice little demo of an Ajax application. Jump into Dreamweaver, change a couple lines of code, and now calls up the same page, but it’s now using Flex Data Services. With Ajax WITHOUT the Flex Data Service, the page wouldn’t be aware of any changes to the back end code. Now, with Flex Data Services the changes get “pushed” to the application. To demo this, they change the back end info, click “save” and the Flex Data Services automatically “pushes” the change to the page, and the page automatically updates the page without a refresh. Pretty doggone sweet.

Another demo of the Bridge and I’m sold. In summary. Page refresh, bad. Flex Data Services, good.

Next up, Flash and Actionscript 3…

Lots of cool new debugging tools. Error tracking. They’ve really added a ton of tools to aid the coders. I got a handful of text messages, so I got a little distracted.

Next up, Dreamweaver with…Scott Fegette? Whoa…

Dreamweaver and CSS Design… New cross browser platform checks for your CSS, nice! They’re linking DW to the Adobe site so when you do some CSS that might not work in a particular browser, the tool tip that pops up is linked to the Dev Center site with solutions to your CSS problem. Including sample code. Yep yep.

Now we’ve got a bunch of Partner Demos. This one’s SAP showing us some Flex Integration. Not a big SAP guy, and I’ve been getting several emergency messages on the phone, so I’ve got to step out for a bit…

*stepping out*

Okay, Crisis averted.

*stepping back in*

Next up is Beau Amber from Metaliq. One word: Zoomify. I just watched him zoom in, zoom out, and pan around a 1.2 gig image in realtime…over a network connection…really cool.

Machael Kaplan, Director of Engineering for Acrobat 3D.

He opens up a PDF. It’s a Motorola Razr Product PDF…nothing spectacular there, right? Wait…the picture of the phone isn’t really a picture of a phone, it’s a 3D model of the phone. Wonder what happens when you click on it? Yep, it opens….it’s a 3D model inside the PDF with Flash Interactivity mapped to it. Do the phone’s buttons work? Of course they do! It’s flash interactivity, mapped to a 3D object, stuck inside a PDF.

That, my friends, was a very cool demo.

Xif CEO Bene Nunez is up next to demo a CommuniGate Pronto! beta demo. They’ve developed a Flex front end UI for CommunigatePro. Realtime messaging, IM, inbox, draggable panes, etc. all built on the Communigate back end. This isn’t using Flex Data Services, they’ve developed an API that talks directly to the CommunigatePro back end. It’s really sweet, as they’ve added a windowing feature that allows you to minimize open windows within the program. Calendar Events, new IM, VoiceMail, etc all within the same program and all from the same UI. Manage your call forwarding, call managing, voicemail, a master control panel, etc. It’s a nice little app.

Final awesome little demo…

What was your favorite sneak? Well, you can send an SMS message to a number on the screen, and vote in realtime for your favorite sneak. As you’re voting (I voted for Fireworks) you get a realtime feedback to see your vote.

Looks like Acrobat 3D won. Darn.

Well, that’s the sneak! I’m off to go get a picture of Scorpio Man. I wonder why I never see Ben Forta and Scorpio man in the same place?