Results

MAX 2008 was spectacular this year. The event was great for networking with others in the community, the new technology previewed was amazing, and Adobe’s party at the California Academy of Sciences was unprecedented.

Gabor and Tony have posted the files and reference links from their presentations here.

Gabor spoke about developing interfaces for MID devices using Adobe AIR alongside representatives from Intel. During the Q&A many seemed really interested in MID devices themselves and where they fit in, next to modern day smart phones like the iPhone. The devices being shown at the event featured an OS called Moblin, which is a version of Linux powerful enough to easily run Adobe AIR unconstrained. Regardless of how you may predict the future of MIDs to turn out, seeing AIR run on a mobile device of that type is exciting, It certainly raises some interesting questions when it comes to building “Write once, run anywhere” apps with AIR, and the Flex framework.

Tony spoke about Multiscreen development and got to demo Flash Lite 3 apps compiled into native apps on a few phones. He also demonstrated an early version of AppZone, which is a new application catalogue that will be installed with future Flash Lite player versions, that allows developers to easily distribute their mobile content.

Both sessions went really well, and we want to thank those that attended.

The Konductor booth in the Community Pavillion looked great and got a lot of attention. The Konductor team was showing off the Dreamweaver Extension, and the AIR app designed for content contributors. To find out a little more about Konductor, or to get involved in their beta program check out their site.

Teknision also hosted a panel at the FITC Unconference Lounge. The topic was “Flash Lite in an iPhone dominated landscape”.The panel turned out to be quite a success, and we are thinking of doing it again as a bigger session in the future.

The panel featured Tony as the moderator, acting as a flash developer interested in getting more into mobile development looking at both Flash Lite and the iPhone SDK. Where should one focus their time? The two panelists were Rhett Woods and Dom Sagolla.

Rhett works for Adobe on Flash Lite 3 and the Open Screen Project. He argued that Flash Lite has a much larger reach worldwide, and has a much larger potential to be an effective platform across devices. He also pointed out the fact that Flash Lite is supported by a very robust set of development tools, and a very large development community.

Dom also works for Adobe, but he is a co-founder of iPhoneDevCamp and an avid iPhone developer himself. He conceeded the fact that the Flash Player has a huge current and potential reach, but argued that the iPhone has all of the “mindshare” when it comes to mobile rich interaction. He made a case that the iPhone has acted like an industry wedge, that builds an audience that will now expect more from their mobile experiences in the future. Regardless of what dominates later, the iPhone has moved things one big step forward and is in the minds of both developers and consumers (more importantly).

The “AppStore” was a big topic that kept coming up. Dom explained the process of rolling an iPhone app to the public, and all the goods and bads involved in dealing with Apple. Rhett showed a preview of Adobe’s “AppZone”, and explained how it is an attempt to get Flash Lite apps out there to people, without the carriers acting as such a harsh filter for content.

It was a great panel, and we hope to do it again. It is definitely the right time to be getting involved in rich experience design for mobile, and people are interested.