Category: Events

I saw Google’s booth at MAX, and was really curious. Before the interview with Sys-Con, I asked Jeremy what the heck was Google doing here. I remember seeing a couple postings for Flash / Flex stuff at Google, but haven’t really paid attention. He said recruiting, and he’d seen them doing the same thing at other conferences.

Today I finally had some time over coffee, so went to see their booth. I didn’t introduce myself and I could tell they were waiting for me to do so. Asking them to corraborate the HR on site, they did. They were mainly like 2 HR people and one web team looking for a front-end developer, HTML and CSS. Didn’t see JavaScript / AJAX so that raised some weird flags.

Anyway, asked them what they were doing here. They said to expose products as well as look for potential candidates. Although they were specifically looking for a web developer since they had the team there, they were looking for others as well. They HR lady directed me to a geek to answer some questions more technical. I discussed the apps I use, she asked about Sketch.

That was it. Pretty quick. Uncomfortable. Missed expectations. I think they could sense my unease but I tried my best to be cool.

I think they were waiting for me to seem interested or refer someone vs. doing reacon. They were nice, cordial, and polite. I don’t know any web developers so we parted ways.

Nice to see Google here, but uncomfortable nonetheless. Like IBM, Google’s a big company, and the nice HR lady confirmed that there are many different divisions so I’m sure if I found some Flash / Flex dudes in house, we’d hit it off.

The Verizon dude walked out, found a phone, and said “This is awkward…”. Kevin Lynch came up, and showed putting notes on PDF’s and sending an email that allows other to review it.

He’s now currently having a meeting with one of the retired Adobe founders, John, who is in San Jose in Breeze. You can see both their mugs there in Breeze. Apparently he didn’t play golf when retiring and made web sites instead.

Al Ramadan up next.

The theme of his preso is making money in the United States since people like me can’t really make dough doing this yet. He heads right to the Chumby. He’s discussing his son who uses it. Relaying how it is an opportunity. The peeps from Cumby are apparently here at the conference, running a birds of a feather (informal get together).

Playstation 3… what what? New CPU… 35 times faster than the ps2, 60 gig drive, wireless support, 7 wireless controllers, drives 2 HD TV monitors… of course, has Flash built right in… what frikin’ player!!!? Stop clapping crowd! NOOOO!!!!

Have to go digging in Google.

He’s discussing NttDocmo (sp?) leading the way building phones that have Flash on it. Discussing Koreans who are getting up to speed to. Some of the whole phones in Flash. D-900 from Samsung; the actual UI of the phone adapts. Light and dark based on light, weather, where you are at, etc.

John Stratton, VP & CMO of Verizon Wireless has a previously recorded video. He’s talking about mobile downloads and shooting large numbers. He seems positive. Verizon, Qualcom, and Adobe have gotten together to launch Flash Lite 2.1 on Brew. I love hearing C-suits say “Rich”… lol!

He says they many devices they have will have Flash Lite on it.

Chocolate device that launched this year, and apparently more next year.

Verizon dude again. Al’s talking to him. They are changing the phrase from “It’s the Network” to “It’s the Flex Developers”. He responds, “Good!”.

So, he’s pushing Brew. Peggy Johnson, president of Qualcom something and something systems. Did I mention I need coffee?

She knows we’re all hung over.

She’s got one of those headsets all the speakers have… I just noticed it. It’s like the one from Stargate Atlantis… maybe I can gank it for Halloween, I want to go as Colonel Shephard.

She’s talking about taking requests from Operators and talking about how hard it was because of lack of consistency, and thats where Brew came from. Devs make apps, testing groups ensures they can run across a few handsets. Operator looks at apps, and decides which ones they want to take to consumers. Operator takes app, makes catalogues, exposes it out to users, and then users can choose which one they want to download. The billing system already in place. User pays, money flows back to dev.

I am telling you now, this is NOT going to fly with agencies. I know devs might like this for apps, but for portals and design products designed around a brand, agencies don’t give a flip about this process, and will create a custom app/game/content and want to find some way to get it on phones. I don’t see how Brew fits into that. For me, as a Developer? Sure… but there are no brands I can sell without permission. Operators are a barrier to brands who wish to get themselves in front of consumers on phones.

Anyway, she’s talking about the dudes who made SMS in their garage, and now have mad bling.

$700,000,000… ? Apparently they are paying out this much money to developers this year. Hrm, must have gone to Java developers, hehe.

Atom, FunMobility, Smashing Ideas. Where is Dale’s endeavor? These companies are hosting the Flash catalogues for Brew. I guess Dale doesn’t do Brew, hrm.

Bill Perry is coming up to stage to show some Mobile Authoring. He’s showing a game in Flash 8. It has Flash Lite 2.1 in it. You have to choose a new option in the Flash Publishing Settings via the post processor dropdown; something for Brew.

Brew has a publishing wizard that comes up after you publish. You can download this update today on Labs to Flash apparently. You have to give your app an ID and applet name. 2nd screen, more info that you have to fill out. 3rd screen for icons. 4th screen for generating mod and nif…iff… files. 5th screen, finish. It creates the files, puts on a folder on the desktop, and launches in the emulator.

The folder has 3 files. The mod and qmif… you transfer these to the phone. He us using the Brew AppLoader. Dropped .mif folder to root; it has a dialogue that he types a path in. A .mod file is like a SWF. A .sig file apparently allows you to test on handsets too. Smells like someone needs a JSFL script, hehe.

He’s now showing a phone that has VCast on it, a Verizon Wireless one. The game is on the phone, and has sound. Apparently this application can be purchased by users today. He’s going to his phone, Get it Now again, Get games, get an applciation… connects to network, he downloads the Mini Arcade… Shockwave? Haven’t seen Shockwave in awhile, the term anyway.

Bottom line, Verizon handles the Operators on your behalf. The download is kind of slow, but that depends on your phone. Sorry, “Mini Arcade for Shockwave”. He now downloads all mini games to phone. He’s got a menu to choose a game to play, shows a menu, and he can purchase a game.

Geez, he’s to do 3 clicks to buy something. Technically, once the client is downloaded, it’s 2, but dude… 1 click purchases! You need to make this easier Verizon. Less clicks to content == more bling.

Bill’s showing Photoshop now, he’s got an interface for Flash Lite in it. Photoshop has a “Save for Web and Devices…” menu item. Wow, it has mobile emulation in Photoshop. You can change phones from a menu to see what it looks like on other phones. It even has filters to show you what it looks like if the phone is outdoors, stuff like that. The Adobe Device Central appears to be an app that allows you to test this stuff outside of Photoshop and Flash. Sorry, need coffee.

LOL, library from a Flash Lite dev in Japan looks so typical; no folders, no organization. Either way, hot wallpaper that can get device information, and change the way it looks like time of day.

They are now doing performance emulation… finally! He’s showing a spinning touris knot. It’s running a calibrate test on the phone. If he now checks the checkbox for emulate performance, it slows the animation down, showing how it’ll probably run on the phone. FPS wasn’t really a problem in building 1 game in Flash Lite 2, it was the amount of “things” you do per frame. Either way, mega frikin useful! I don’t have to test on my handset all the time now. That’ll save booku amounts of time.

Al makes a final rally call to creatives and developers.

Kevin is congratulation Georgio and Barbara on getting married here.

Youngest attendee at MAX is 14. You have to be 21 to attend, but somehow got special permission. His name is MAX, he’s a long time ColdFusion Developer, hehe.

MAX is on stage.

What have you been learning?

A lot of Flex stuff… amazing what it can do.

What did you do in it.

Wrote a ccouple components in it.

If you get your components ready you can post on your site

Ok, hehe.

Got you a backpack full of MAX items. Also have a Lego Mindstorms kit.

Crowd digs this kid.

Glad you’re at the conference and looking forward to things you create.

Thanks.

Bruce Chizen up next. He wants a PS3, one for him and one for Max. Not much to report. He’s showing apps, summing up their initiative, being positive for investors. I thought there were 3000 people here, but there are over 3500!

MAX awards. I’m sure they’ve got these peeps posted on a website. People are getting awards. Good on them!

We had to vote for the winner via SMS; they had a Flex and ColdFusion app that showed the results of voting live as it happened with what state you were from.

I went to the 5th floor, the Exhibition Room, to get some coffee and see if I could help at the booth. Snagged my wife from the 4th, got the coffee n’ biscuit goods, and headed up.

I figured since I had some time to kill before lunch since everyone from the keynote was on 3 and 4 in sessions, I did some recon. I wandered around to the various booths, making my way towards Google’s. I ran into Jeremy Geelan at the ColdFusion Developers’ Journal Booth. We chatted about the mornng session amongst other things, and he figured we’d do an interview.

I was still on my first cup of coffee, small one at that, and have a scratchy voice from last night so appear under the weather, but I feel just great. I managed to find Paul Reilly I think his name was from the Flex mxmlc compiler team. It was great to talk to him, so I did so for hours, thus hurting my voice; it was worth it. The interview was your usual Adobe stuff, relevant about the current conferece and applicable to the industry.

I am now finished with lunch, sitting in one of the developer chill areas. I’m on the floor so my wife can have a bean bag – Count of Monte Cristo style. This place is packed, yo!

Gotta do some more recon; I really want to see some of the various vendor booths. I know I’ll see a celebrity, though, and just end up chatting for too long. Ah, here’s Leif, gotta jet.

Apollo… what a lot of people have been anxiously awaiting. Adobe’s effort to have a desktop runtime to work offline, have some OS integration for extra features not available on the web, and work with exiting AJAX and Flash / Flex applications with little to no porting.

Kevin Rowe (I think) is showing launching an Apollo application. It has a desktop icon. It looks and works like a regular windows app. He shows how the app can read a file from the local machine. Browsers can do that, so nothing new here.

He shows the same app on Mac. Looks the same. Us Flashers who’ve been doing mProjector, Director, Zinc, SWFStudio, et al aren’t impressed, but apparently the crowd digs it.

He’s talking about the role of the Apollo runtime. How it can support SWF, HTML, and PDF as well as HTML, JavaScript, CSS, AJAX, and any combination thereof.

He’s showing Google maps running on the desktop. It’s running apparently in a desktop app via the Apollo runtime. So, crowd likes it; we recognize that if Google Maps works on Apollo, a complicated AJAX app, we’re good.

He’s got transparency over Google Maps He’s also got drag and drop over Google Maps and Google Maps is showing the markers it has for destinations. Hrm… nice.

Reading and writing local files on the user’s hard drive will be available to both AJAX / JavaScript / DHTML apps as well as Flex / Flash apps. Yum.

Supports the obvious custom shape windows, multiple windows, transparency… we all already expect this since we’ve been doing it awhile with 3rd party projectors.

He’s discussing the deployment via a deployment package via the browser and how it copies the files to the local machine and is now an app the user can run.

Key point: apps you’ve already built can be ported and used.

Kevin Lynch is showing early apps created by some beta users. It shows the standard Flex fare with an integrated PDF and HTML dialogues. Nice mix!

MySpace has a beta IM client… cool. eBay has an app too. Looks pretty simple. Kevin searches for a mint Jaguar. Has some god real data. Crowd digs the presentation of data. You can apparently bid… wow, he bid and it already outbid him. Man, eBay’s tough. It’s got webcam integration, so he’s taking a picture of an Apollo shirt with him in the picture, hehe. He’s posting a bid on eBay through the app. they are donating the money they get from it to a local Nevada charity. His profile looks like him.

He is now showing Nimbus by Virtual Ubiquity, a Word Processor. He opens an existing file; he has to log into his network share via Flex… whoa. It’s got fonts, images, tables, and the formatting and re-positioning of text is wicked fast. Its ot multi-user annotation. You can filter comments as well as toggle them on and off.

He’s showing Rocketboom, an Internet TV video application via RSS feeds. Looks like a feed reader for video. He plays some of the videos; Flash video obviously. He adds the MTV pimp my ride feed, and shows the video running fullscreen. Crowd likes fullscreen. Lab release soon.

Investment fund for Apollo; $100,000,000 (one hundred million dollar fund) to help invest in companies that are building Apollo apps. Got an idea? Get bling!

He’s doing a sneak of tomorrows keynote. WTF… a car is driving in here. Kevin is getting in the car. It’s a Jaguar. Hah, apparently a lot of the crowd didn’t know it’s got Flash in it. They are showing him in the car showing how the Flash is integrated with the hardware of the car. It also has built in GPS. Flash is the GUI for all of this. It’s right there in the dashboard above the AC button.