On the MAX eve, I went to speaker’s reception.  First of all had to meet with three other panelists participated in Monday’s session "Flex Architecture Faceoff" - Chafiq Kazoun, Todd Anderson , Joshua Noble are very experienced software developers and published authors.  We’ve expressed our views on how to do things in Flex.  

Then I started bugging some Flex team members:
“Please tell me a secret”.
“What secret? “
“For example, what will be announced as a new name of Thermo tomorrow?”
They refused to answer. The only useful information I managed to get was this mysterious phrase, “Flash Player 10 on mobile device”.
“Are you saying that FP10 will be available on iPhone, please…”
He wouldn't answer.But now we all know that my guess was correct, and I’m so happy that I knew about it a night before than the rest of the progressive mankind.

On the opening keynote, this message “Mobile First” was delivered loud and clear.  Lots and lots of people treat their modern phones as powerful mini computers, not just the means of keeping in touch.In 2009, Adobe expects to reach one billion of Flash Player enabled mobile devices.

The general session was interesting. The CEO of Adobe used Sheryl Crow in his slides. This is a clear steal from one of my Flex presentations that I did back in 2006. But I used Sheryl in a more creative way. Take a look at the slides 5 and 6 of this presentation: http://tinyurl.com/66n7xy . The first slide had a quote from her song “No one said it should be easy, no one said it’d be that hard…”. And the next slide reads, “Sheryl was singing about Java Swing”…But that’s OK, no hard feelings.

Four major sports leagues networks are using Flesh Player for the online video streaming – MLB is the latest addition. You can’t underestimate the importance of this for fact for Flex and Flash developers. These beer-bellied sports fans will ensure that the latest version of the runtime required for RIA made in Flex will be available in every household.

By the way, the number of the AIR downloads reached 100 million.

Yet another important work from the Monday’s keynote is “cloud”.   Get yourself ready for the need breed of application that may look like something like this - an iPhone with a Flash Player talks to Amazon or other computing cloud.  In my opinion, this is a place to be for those developers who are trying to figure out the next big thing.
 After the keynote, I’ve attended the session of Andrew Trice who presented a couple of interesting AIR case studies.  At the end of each session at MAX, attendees have to fill out evaluation forms that were used in the drawing for free O’Reilly book. It’s hard to believe, but I was sure that I was going to win. I never had this feeling before. And I did win a book!


The room with our framework panel was packed – more than 350 people were attending, which is a proof that the subject of Flex frameworks remains one of the most important decision to make in Flex IT shops. It was a very lively session and I hope that the we will receive good grades in the evaluation forms.

After that, I’ve attended a session on internals Anatomy of a Video Player that was perfectly delivered by David Hassoun.

At 5 PM, yet another session on Thermo…oops it’s Flash Catalyst now. I’m yet to see the demo of the iterative designer-developer workflow to get sold on Catalyst. But I can confess, that I’ve seen a project created in Catalyst is being read by Flex Builder. Presenters also showed some new features in the Flex Builder 4 - improved refactoring, template-based code generation, conditional debugging, a network monitoring tool and more.   I’m still hoping to see serious performance improvements though.

At 9:30PM, I was running a BOF session on Flex frameworks. I was not expecting more than several people to show up that late.  To my surprise, there were about 40 people in the room and we had a very live discussion on what framework to use and when.  

At the end of BOF, a girl from the audience raised he hand and said, “I’m one of the creators of Mate”. Her name was Laura.  Mate has not been officially released yet. In my opinion, this prevents Mate from being more widely adopted in the enterprises.  Architectural committees don’t like any zero point something software.

It was a long day, they kicked us out of Moscone building, and we had to finish our discussion on design patterns on the street.

Stay tuned.