I've had a few days now to recover from and reflect on my experiences at this year's TODCon (a.k.a. "The Other Dreamweaver Conference"), held this year in Orlando.

I'll talk about the personal and fun side of TODCon near the end of this article, but for now I'd like to run through those things I learned while attending sessions, hanging out in the hallways with some of the smart people in attendance, and in late night conversations at dinner and the hotel pool bar. All of those add to the experience of TODCon, and you can learn a lot by simply keeping your ears open and making your own connections with what you hear. For more background you can read the postings I made from TODCon at my personal blog (see the end of this article), but this is what I took away after some time to think and reflect.

Adobe Is Worried About Microsoft, and That's a Good Thing
In the Birds of a Feather session where the head of Dreamweaver engineering was present, there was a great deal of discussion centering around the features that are built into the Microsoft Expression Web Designer. Expression Web Designer is currently available in a free beta version called by Microsoft a "Community Technology Preview."

When you look at the specifications and feature set you can see why. Some of its features will look familiar to Dreamweaver users, and while Dreamweaver 8 has made terrific strides in moving towards standards-based designs and provides much better visual support for designing with CSS layouts, clearly Microsoft has gotten the attention of the folks at Adobe who are working on the next version of Dreamweaver. Adobe would do well to be on their toes and looking at how they will differentiate their product from the new Microsoft offering.

All of this would appear to be a good thing for customers. If you look back on the life-cycle of most products that have a dominant market share the trend is to play things safe and avoid innovation. By providing competition for Adobe and their flagship web design product Microsoft has upped the ante. What should result is more innovation, competitive pricing, and a serious effort to keep Dreamweaver in its current position as the market leader. That should be a good thing for all of us.

Adobe's New Motto for Dreamweaver: Do No Harm
During the BOF session on Friday May 20th, Paul Gubbay and Scott Fegette from Adobe entertained questions from the audience. While the discussion was far-ranging, covering software from Breeze to ColdFusion to Freehand, most of the talk was centered around Dreamweaver. In particular, one topic seemed to get mentioned in several different question and answer exchanges: the need to build a web design application that doesn't get users into bad habits or use methods that they would have to un-learn later on in their careers.

This push from clients to maintain the integrity of code, to provide solid examples for both coding and design that demonstrate best-practices and to avoid highly proprietary methods in favor of standards seems to have hit home at Adobe. In several exchanges during the session both developers and designers lamented the fact that some of the code samples, methods, and techniques lead new users of the software astray, sending them down a path that is hard to recover from later on. The striking example in Dreamweaver 8 is the inclusion of table-based designs in Dreamweaver 8 that stand in contrast to the nearly useless CSS-P examples that are provided.

From the comments of the Adobe employees in attendance this message has been received loud and clear. And while it's difficult for the company to meet the needs of such a widely varied customer base, at least in their public statements it appears that the next version of Dreamweaver will attempt to strike a better balance between ease of use of those that are new to the software and providing examples and methods that are based not on marketing metrics but on best practices.

Adobe, AJAX, and Spry
There was a fair amount of discussion at the conference around the methods needed to produce the kinds of JavaScript-enabled cool user interfaces generally known as AJAX. There was a mixture of trepidation and excitement around the idea of a rich user interface that does not require complete page reloads when new data is needed, as well as some of the plain old cool things that you can do with this mixture of JavaScript, XML, HTML, and CSS.

Adobe's response to AJAX is the Spry Framework for AJAX, currently available for download at Adobe Labs (http://labs.adobe.com). As they describe Spry on the site, and as lead engineer for Adobe Paul Gubbay elaborated on, Spry is "... a preview of the data capabilities that enable designers to incorporate XML data into their HTML documents using HTML, CSS, and a minimal amount of JavaScript, without the need for refreshing the entire page. The Spry framework is HTML-centric, and easy to implement for users with basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The framework was designed such that the markup is simple and the JavaScript is minimal. The Spry framework can be used by anyone who is authoring for the web in their tool of choice."

The reaction from those in attendance was somewhat mixed, with some participants praising Adobe for placing a flag in the sand by releasing a framework with functional examples that anyone can pull apart and examine. Or, if they are so inclined, users can start using the samples provided, such as the image gallery shown in Figure 1, without fretting too much about the methods being used or how the scripts were coded. Since the Spry examples work right now, it gives developers a leg up and provides the opportunity to begin working with Ajax-based designs.

Others remarked that Spry is a good start, but weren't convinced that Adobe has provided that best possible examples either in their applications or the type of code they created to enable these functions. As one participant said, "there's way more that could be done and I'm disappointed that Adobe has done so little in this regard." And of course, there are long-standing concerns about accessibility that have to be addressed along with the old bugaboo of "what happens when JavaScript is turned off by the viewer?"

Still, the examples are solid, and the code appears easy to understand and well-documented. Along with the actual download from Adobe for the source code, linked above, you can also read Paul Gubbay's article at DevNet to get background information on the hows and whys of Spry.

Adobe Labs: Much More to Come
Along with Spry, Adobe has been quite active in releasing early versions of their products to the public in order to gather feedback and input on the features they plan to offer in the fully engineered versions of the software. As Paul Gubbay stated in one of his sessions, taking this tack has huge advantages for them as it allows their product managers and engineers to get feedback early in the development cycle of their products before the inevitable feature lockdown and bug-hunting process begins. As Paul stated in the BOF session, there is a short period of innovation in the development of any new or updated software product followed by a much longer period of testing and fixing. Releasing an alpha version early allows the engineers to see what people think and helps them map out their path to the full commercial version that may still be many months away.

Currently at Adobe Labs you can download a number of pre-release software products such as Lightroom, Flash Player 9 and the Actionscript 3.0 library. It appears that Adobe is committed to this policy of releasing early versions of their software and asking for community input in order to get the features that most users want built into their software. Expect to see even more in the future.

Flash Video Is Huge, But It Ain't Easy
Judging by the number of participants in the Flash video session, interest is high in the ways that video can be incorporated into both sites themselves and how site developers can use this ability to generate new sources of income. Certainly the latest versions of Dreamweaver and Flash make it easier than ever to pop a video onto a web page.

While it's easy to incorporate Flash video into a site, it was also evident that the path to getting good Flash video that loads quickly, looks great, incorporates nice effects, and is engaging for the viewer is a little trickier than just converting your family reunion videos into the FLV format, the popularity of YouTube notwithstanding.

In several sessions by Scott Fegette of Adobe and Tom Green of Community MX much was made of the integration between Adobe After Effects and Flash video. After Effects is generally known as the Swiss Army knife of video effects and, as we saw, there are awesome things that can be done with video in After Effects. But all of those capabilities require a whole new skill set involved in editing video for publication to the Web. As Scott and Tom zoomed through a few of their presentations, what I was left with was the firm conviction that there's an awful lot I still need to learn about how even basic video is produced. Learning how to best optimize video for playback in Flash video format is yet another skill that will be required of professional web developers in the future if they hope to make money by offering those services to their clients.

While there were broad hints dropped about future integration of After Effects and Flash, there still remains a great deal to learn in this arena. Adobe may make it easier in future versions of both products to do edits from simple to complex and to add special effects, but even with the coming marriage of the two products Flash video is not nearly as easy as it may appear. (see Figure 1)

Future Product Releases from Adobe
There were no stunning jaw-dropping announcements from any of the Adobe employees in attendance at TODCon, but there were hints. In addition to the coming integration between Flash and After Effects, other products mentioned included Adobe GoLive, which will not be released as part of any future Studio packages, but will live on for a while longer as a standalone product.

Fireworks and Photoshop were mentioned as part of a "natural workflow team" that allows images to be prepared in Photoshop, compositions prepared and sliced in Fireworks, and the final assembly completed in Dreamweaver. Photoshop's current web production plug-in for Photoshop, Image Ready, would appear to be headed for the scrap heap with the common sentiment being "Thank Goodness". No word on whether Freehand is heading to the same final resting place, but the lack of any commitment to Freehand at all would not seem to bode well.

In other news, Adobe appears unlikely to release a consumer version of Dreamweaver or any other web design package. When asked, one employee stated that he did not see that as a direction that the company was interested in taking, despite the appearance of web design software packages from companies like Apple and the coming web features that are reportedly built into the new versions of Microsoft Office. Contribute appears to be one software product that may have some interesting new features for the casual web publisher, including rumored support for blogging tools such as RSS feeds and basic blogging templates.