Session opened with a live-action “Meet Your Match” faux-dating segment that didn’t really go much of anywhere that I could see.
David Mendels, a name known to many of us from the old Director days. He discussed the increase in video usage on the Web, in advertising and other models.
“Flash video has quickly become the premier solution” for video on the Web. Does he mean “Premiere”? 26% of people reported in a survey that they didn;t want to install a player. Flash integrates video, etc. Went over Flash 8 Player improvements.
Another segment of the dating skit.
Jen (whose last name I missed) gave a quick demo showing how to add video in Dreamwaver 8.
Steve Kilinsky (Adobe After Effects) and Mike Downey (Macromedia Flash) came on to demo. Steve talked about how to get rid of “palletosis.” He dropped out a green-screen, added a new image for the background, animated a text string, dropped in some particle effects. The he previewed an FLV export from After Effects. Mike linked the video into Flash 8 from a server, stepping through the playback and skin options in the new workflow.
More of the dating skit.
Jeremy Allaire came on to talk about his new venture, a video and media hosting, internet TV system that I can’t really figure out why you’d want to use. It does have its own “monetization” system and custom Flex-based players, as well as an advertising system built in. Soon publishing APIs for developers to incorporate Brightcove into their own applications.
Several mentions made that the “whole Cold Fusion team is here” at MAX. The Director presence here consists of, uh, Tom Higgins.
Tom Hale, a Sales VP came out to shoot the Breeze. 1,600 enterprise customers. Breeze to be embedded into Cisco’s upcoming releases. Displayed a Breeze use from a Japanese company called Binessa (sp?) that drew geometric shapes and symbols. Intoduced Room Extensions and SyncSWF. Nigel Pegg, David Yun, and Peter Rice showed a collaborative magnetic poem application. Not screen-sharing, they point out. Sort of like something that could have been done with the Shockwave Multiuser Server about eight years ago. Beta sign-up at http://www.macromedia.com/go/breeze_developers
More dating skit.
Al Ramadan of Mobile and Devices is introduced. Ran down changes and growth since last year’s conference and announcement of mobile plans. Nokia has licensed Flash. Announcement that Qualcomm’s Brew service will now support Flash Lite.
Bill Perry of Mobile Solutions showed a Yahoo!-developed Flikr image search tool for phones in emulation mode and on a phone, searching for MAX2005 images.
Josh Ulm hit the stage “on a short leash,” as he said, to show off some mobile customization, where the UI programming has been divorced from the data, and incorporating FlashCast, which is a push server technology for content. Gotta go to lunch