MAX 2004 Articles

Day 1: General Session

Today's general session began with Macromedia Chief Operating Officer Stephen Elop welcoming the audience and stating how the audience mix at MAX has changed over the years.

Stephen Elop, chief operating officer, Macromedia

A full 35% of attendees at this year's conference are from educational and governmental institutions, and over half of the attendees are from large organizations. People from all walks of life are attending MAX with common goals of sharing, learning, and interacting—immersing themselves in the future of technology. Like last year's MAX, the Intro Networks application is helping designers and developers of common interests connect.

The Intro application interface

Macromedia stands for great experiences, and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) are the platform for these great experiences. RIAs offer the look and functionality of desktop applications across multiple platforms, while leveraging the familiar Flash Player. In addition to the great experiences to which RIAs lend themselves, Elop went on to discuss—and give some examples of—the business results that RIAs drive.

Next, Elop explained that there is a "divergent devices explosion" occurring in such devices as cell phones, music devices, and even GPS devices. As they are on the web, excellent user experiences are important on devices. In addition, Macromedia has put a lot of energy into the experiences of customers by listening to them in some new and creative ways. One of them is the Synchronous Development Process approach to product development. Macromedia's product and engineering teams have been spending months in the field visiting customers and getting feedback on what customers need and want.

Finally, Elop demonstrated the possibilities of great user experiences by engaging the audience's participation in a Flex- and ColdFusion-based 2004 election poll. Using their cell phones, audience members sent text messages with their US presidential vote to a ColdFusion application using the new SMS gateway feature in Blackstone. The poll data was then displayed (guess who won) using Flex charting components on the auditorium video screen.

It's Happening: Rich Internet Applications

Over the past two years, Rich Internet Applications have "really started to happen," said Macromedia Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch, as he introduced five categories where Macromedia customers are creating excellent user experiences. He said that Macromedia is seeing revolutionary projects taking form in areas of expressive content, guided selling, visual analysis, streamlined business processes, and effortless communication. (For more information and links to site examples, check out Kevin Lynch's blog.)

Expressive Content

In the expressive content category, Lynch showed sites that integrate rich media, such as video, with other interactive elements. He noted that Flash Player not only makes possible the construction of customer players and experiences; it's also the most widely distributed video player on the web. Some of the sites featured by Lynch included Red Bull Copilot, Philips Home Entertainment, and Toyota Isis.

Guided Selling

Lynch introduced the concept of guided selling, an approach to presenting potential customers with purchase choices in a logical, hierarchical fashion. Some of the examples included the Vodafone Online Shop's Handy-Finder, where pictures of phones to buy appear (or disappear) as customers request specific features, and the ANA site, which guides visitors through the reservation process using interactive maps and timetables. He also showed the Nike iD site, where you can build your own shoe (down to the color of the shoelaces), and the interactive shopping cart on the TJ Maxx site.

Visual Analysis

Displaying data in meaningful ways has gained in importance, particular in light of the recent US presidential election. There have been many 2004 presidential election sites that relied on Flash technology in the past weeks. Lynch highlighted the BBC News site, which provides an interactive history of how states have voted in recent decades. He also showed the New York State Kids site, which displays education attainment levels in various New York counties; and a University of North Carolina site (not viewable publicly), which aggregates symptoms data for quick patient diagnosis and treatment.

Streamlined Business Process

The applications in this category focused on creating efficient user interfaces for business workflows, including selling, service, and billing. For example, PC and Mac Zones (screen recording of customer service rep app) uses drag-and-drop information on their site to construct sales quotes; Mazda constructed an interactive customer service call center application that also runs on a mobile device for use on the showroom floor; and Seven Worldwide's Flex application tracks over 100,000 invoices.

Effortless Communication

Speaking eloquently and clearly in an information-rich (almost crowded) environment is critical for today's companies. The applications that Lynch showed in the communication category inspired and informed audiences. They included the Microsoft Your Potential, Our Passion site, the IBM ForwardView Showmail site, CNET's featured editor videos, and instructional Flash Video presentations delivered by Salesforce.com.

The RIA Experience

Developers have been doing more with Rich Internet Applications every day, allowing customers unprecedented interactivity with products and services over the web. Ensuring that experience is important, the Macromedia Experience team's Michael Gough and Mike Sundermeyer explained key standards for building RIAs.

Mike Sundermeyer and Michael Gough explain the standards for building RIAs

As developers of RIAs, Gough and Sundermeyer said all developers should keep in mind the following points:

• The "soul" of the application: What is the problem you're trying to solve? This should be your core guiding principle.
• Focus and emphasis: Not everything should be equal on a page. Provide focus and emphasis on context-specific page elements that help your users navigate your site effortlessly. As an example, Sundermeyer showed HALO controls, which trigger menu controls to glow when a pointer hovers above them. The Experience Team uses HALO controls throughout macromedia.com.
• Content and control separation: Separate content from controls—it's part of making sure that you bring focus and emphasis to the content and controls. Put content into individual pods and place controls on the perimeter.
• Context continuity: Instead of rearranging screens every time the user interacts with the server, RIAs let users accomplish all tasks in an online store through one page.

More Flex RIAs

Macromedia Flex 1.5 was released today, November 2. To prepare for this release, Macromedia invited at least 500 companies to beta-test it. The developer version became available today, too, and is free for non-commercial use. Download it from macromedia.com.

Throughout the opening talks, many of the websites Elop and Lynch demonstrated were running with Flex under the hood. In the University of North Carolina example, medical faculty treating cystic fibrosis explained how they built visual analysis into their applications using Flex and Flash. First, UNC's enterprise coders were able to create RIAs that helped doctors present measurements, sort results, and filter treatment options easily for their patients. By separating the presentation and application layers, the developers could present much more than they could with traditional HTML. Not only did internal staff become more informed, but patients benefited—they are much more informed of their options and treatment. "That's what having these tools is all about," said Dr. Peter Margolis.

Later in the session, George Riley, senior developer on the Flex team, explained how he built the voting application which Stephen Elop had demonstrated. The voting application let each person send his or her presidential vote through a phone SMS message; on the Macromedia end, a ColdFusion/Flex application stored and processed all the results.

Users send SMS messages to log their vote in the Blackstone/Flex voting application

To create the application, Riley used an SMS gateway to store the results in a database using Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion. Next, he created a Flex 1.5 client that uses web services. The Flex application code (or presentation layer) allowed Riley to invoke CSS so he could skin the voting result charts. Moreover, he explained, when everyone sent their votes over their cell phones, the application collected each responder's phone number! With a few slight code modifications, Riley showed the voting demographics of the audience, based on their home state.

Blackstone: The Next-Generation ColdFusion

Blackstone, the next version of ColdFusion involved the following:

• 15 months of development
• 2000 beta testers
• 7 months of customer testing
• 15,000 regression tests

Ben Forta, ColdFusion evangelist, and Tim Buntel, ColdFusion product manager, showcased some of the newest and exciting features in Blackstone:

• Flash controls through ColdFusion tags
• Maintaining states across multiple steps in forms
• Fixing the printing problems inherent in web browsers
• Making report creation effortless

In one example, Ben showed how developers would be able to use an updated cfdocument tag around HTML content to make it available for printing through Macromedia FlashPaper. The results were far superior to today's experience when printing web pages, where you usually get a truncated, pixilated version. Instead, by wrapping the cfdocument tags around the HTML content, users will be able to select the size and resolution of the printed page in FlashPaper.

This printing functionality extends to the new reporting features in Blackstone, too. Tim showed the new charting wizard, making color selection, type of chart, and selecting charting parameters a breeze. Coupled with the new printing features in cfdocument, users will be able to print high-quality, true-to-vision versions of what they see onscreen.

There's much more that will be available in Blackstone, so stay tuned. Better yet, join the public beta.

All Macromedia MAX attendees received an invitation to the Blackstone beta

Maelstrom: The Next-Generation Flash Player

Mike Downey, technical product manager for Macromedia Flash, took the stage—and stole the show—with a sneak peek at the new features in Maelstrom, the new version of Flash Player. He cited "dramatic performance improvements" as the most important aspect of the player. However, there were plenty of applause-inspiring new features as well.

Kevin Lynch introduces Maelstrom, the next version of Macromedia Flash Player

In the performance arena, Downey showed a demo of the improved rendering performance of Flash Player through a new "cache as bitmap" feature, which the player uses to speed playback of vector-intensive graphics. The demo showed thousands of vector-based graphics animating on the Flash Stage. The Maelstrom version played it back dramatically smoother and faster.

This feature will also benefit users of components. Performance of Flash files that use many components will become faster. Downey showed a page with hundreds of components on it, scrolling it first in Flash Player 7, then in Maelstrom. The Maelstrom version was extremely smooth and fast.

Numerous real-time graphical effects are also coming to the player. Downey showed a few of the runtime effects that users will be able to apply, such as drop shadows, glow filters, blurs, and filters on Flash assets. (Downey showed it on live video.)

Text rendering will also improve in the new version, thanks to the new text-rendering engine (codenamed "Saffron").

Downey demonstrated new video features that are going to change completely the way users experience web video. One of the biggest "wow" factors was a new video codec in Maelstrom. Downey showed a video clip onscreen, stopped it suddenly in a high-motion, low-light segment, and showed how much more detail the new codec adds—smoothly rendered details, even in shadow areas.

Mike Downey, Flash technical product manager, describes the features coming in Maelstrom

Downey went on to detail other new effects available through the codec. Alpha channels on video make it possible to layer semi-transparent video over other Flash elements, such as text, graphics, or even other video.

"We're already seeing these amazing experiences coming from early testers that we never thought we'd see," said Downey.

From the looks of the presentation, it seems like we'll be seeing a lot more in the future.

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