Adobe MAX: Gumbo, Flash Catalyst and Johnny

This week I was one of the lucky ones to attend the Adobe MAX event in Milan. I just blogged about the general sessions on the event already at the Nascom blog. So I won’t repeat too much what I said there in this post. I just want to share with you what I got out of MAX for my professional career.

My top 5 sessions:

1. Anatomy of a Seriously Sophisticated Adobe AIR Application: Definitely the best session for me because it showcases the power of Adobe AIR. The presenters Rick Williams and Adam Creeger were involved in the Fiat ecoDrive project. We got a high level presentation about how they organized their development team by using Unit tests and Continuous Integration. The application also added a community aspect by uploading the data to ecoVille, an online community by Fiat.

2. Looking ahead to the next version of Flex: The session was a demo about the new FXG format that is going to be used in the new version of Flex. This basically means that we can represent graphics like shapes, paths, strokes, … in MXML. Also the new components will be based on this new format. Flex will also have better text support. For more information about the new component architecture click here.

3. Looking ahead to the next version of Flex Builder: The next version of Flex Builder (also called Gumbo) will have a lot of new features. The most important features are productivity improvements like generating getters/setters, FlexUnit integration, auto generate event handler functions and more. Te also added Data Centric functionality like being able to use the Client Side Data Management without LifeCycle DS. And last but not least the Network Monitor is back. You can download the Preview version of Gumbo here.

4. Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex: Well actually it’s not Thermo anymore the new name is Flash Catalyst. We had a quick feature tour of Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder Gumbo. Exciting times are coming for the Flex developers. Unfortunately the Preview version of Flash Catalyst is only available on Mac for now.

5. Flash Lite3: Learn to Package and Distribute Mobile Content: This session made it clear to me that building Flash Lite application is one thing, getting them deployed on all the different devices is a challenge. We saw a demo of the Adobe Mobile Packager Beta that makes it easier to create packages that can be deployed on Windows Mobile and Symbian.

Some of the other sessions I attended were a bit disappointing because they did not matched my expectations. Maybe this is because Adobe MAX is a commercial event where Adobe showcases their new technologies and products and they don’t want to scare people off, but for me it could have been be a lot more technical.

I had a good time in Milan, got to know my colleagues Rien, Michael and Sakri a bit better. We ended each day with a Johnny Walker at Hotel Johnny. Hopefully until next year somewhere in Europe.