woodwing

As always Adobe MAX was an inspiring event with lots of information and inspiration. Here are some highlights.

Flash on the iPhone
Despite all the hype about the announcement that Flash will be running on the iPhone, I can't help feeling quite dissapointed. However happy some will be that it is now finally possible to get their Flash games out in the app store, the fact that we now have to specifically compile our applications to a native application is a just a step back.

What happened to "compile once, run everywhere"  that Adobe preaches with the Flash platform? Next to that the fact that you can only compile from Flash Professional means no Flex applications (No Content Station..). If performance was ever an argument, the new Flash Player (10.1) is supposed to be a lost faster, use less memory while consuming less battery power. This new Flash Player will also be the first full feature version to run on mobile phones, replacing the old Flash lite. With both Google and RIM to join the open screen project, there is just that one name missing..

AIR 2.0
The single most requested feature (certainly by us!) for the AIR runtime is the ability to open files and applications directly. Unfortunately this did not make it into AIR 1.0 so for Content Station we resolved this by using Enterprise Agent. Now, AIR 2.0 adds the ability to launch and communicate with native process, lowered memory consumption and processor usage in idle time and UDP support. So, better performance and no more Enterprise Agent. Nice.

Flex 4
Flex 4, estimated release: early next year, sounds very cool and should make it a lot easier to skin applications. For us the most interesting feature here is the ability to (finally!) use the new text engine, so we no longer have to embed all CJK languages but can rely on system fonts.

Multi-touch
One of the coolest new features of the Flash Player (and thus AIR) is support for multi-touch. As this is supported by both Mac OSX 10.6 and Windows 7 we should be seeing more and more touch screens the next few years. Very interesting times for application developers as this opens up many possibities for interface design. Applications practically have to be build up from scratch to take full advantage of this, because obviously any interface that you can interact with using your fingers instead of a mouse requires rethinking the whole UI. Although it remains to be seen how (if) the touchscreen will ever be commonplace on the desktop in some cases the added value is very clear. Imagine a 50 inch touchscreen with the Publication Overview or a scrapboard view on a Dossier that you can use to organize your contents!