Today's Keynote - Sneak Peak Session

Posted At : October 26, 2006 4:52 PM
Related Categories: MAX 2006

The Sneak Peaks are usually always interesting. They offer a glipmse into the future of Adobe products, whether they are potentially new products that are unveiled or enhancements to existing ones. Here's the rundown:

Acrobat Connect

They showed integration with Yahoo IM 8. Version 8 supports plugins and they developed a plugin that allows two users to launch an Adobe Connect Meeting on the fly.

Within the meeting, they demonstrated that PDF's will now be abled to be rendered directly in Flash - very cool.

ColdFusion - Scorpio Man saves the day!

Tim Buntel tried to log in to Ben Forta's blog to see what was new, but the blog was unresponsive. Well, who better to save the day then Scorpio Man (Ben Forta arrives on stage dressed in a complete scorpian costume). Scorpio Man was able to show how in the future, CF server administrator can open up a new server monitoring tool that will show where the hanup is and enable a developer to quickly target the problem. A quick demo of some new image manipulation functions were shown as well.

Sounbooth

A demo of the new Soundbooth product was shown. At first I was a little hesitant about Adobe getting into the already flooded audio market, but after seeing this I completely changed my attitude about it. They showed some AMAZING spectrum analysis that easily allows for quick removal of unwanted sound effects in a waveform. This app should be available on labs.adobe.com now.

Fireworks - prototying a FLEX application

I'm so happy that Fireworks isn't going to be discountinued. Instead, it's taken on a whole new life. You'll now be able to prototyp FLEX application in FW by using a FLEX symbols pallette, and when you export the design, the .mxml file will automatically be generated on the fly! This is the type of cross-product integration that I've been hoping for.

Dreamweaver

The DW team showed off some new CSS enhancements. When creating CSS pages, it will detect any potential cross-browser issues and recommend a fix for them, while also linking directly to the page from the results/problems panel (can't remember which panel it was from).

Acrobat 3D

This was the sneak peak that stole the show today and won the People's Choice award via sms messaging, where the results were scored in realtime via a FLEX charting app powered by CF on the backend. Imagine a PDF where you can now embed Flash objects for realtime interaction. The demo was a cell phone (I believe it was a Verizon Razor phone) that could be interacted with. The phone would open and close just like any other 3-d model, directly within the PDF. The buttons could be interacted with. When the presenter clicked the right button sequence (which was the theme to Close Encounters), the phone rotated to the side, emulated the UFO from the movie by displaying different colored bars on the screen, then started playing the movie inside of the phone - WOW!!! Now THAT'S integration among product families. Just think of the possibilities of any PDF now being able to support Flash directly within it!