MAX 2005 Articles

MAX Sneak Peeks

Through the labyrinth of alligators and snakes “The Code Hunter” of Australia, Paul "Irwin" Gubbay, runs onstage to give MAX 2005 attendees a sneak peek of features that may appear in future product releases.

Figure 1. Paul "Irwin" Gubbay, "The Code Hunter" and cousin of Paul Irwin

Gubbay is senior director of engineering for Dreamweaver and cautions with his Aussie accent: “Now remember, this is pre-alpha software. It may work. It may not work. It may crash.”

Wowing the audience, Silke Fleischer, product manager for Captivate shows how new features in Captivate will help content contributors create interactive simulations and demonstrations through a new scenario simulation wizard. This is usually an onerous job for anybody, but with the new simulation wizard, a Captivate user can visually map scenarios that their end users may experience.

Figure 2. Creating simulations just got easier with features planned for the next release of Captivate

Fleischer showed how users will be able to edit background images for demonstrations and simulations in an integrated workflow with a specified image editor, and re-insert them without more than a minute of work. The crowd cheered when she said that users will be able to export their Captivate content for editing in Flash, too.

Matt Chotin and Todd Rein of the Flex engineering team shared what they've been working on only days after releasing Flex Builder in the public alpha through Macromedia Labs. They showed integration with Mercury Quicktest Pro for performance testing your applications. Integrated with Flex Builder 2, a developer can create a test script, record it, and, in a truly pragmatic twist, a developer can still use the same script after revising the code. All around, developers murmured “wow” and looking around, I saw many application developers nodding in agreement.

Figure 3. Matt Chotin and Todd Rein demonstrate Mercury testing in Flex Builder 2.

“If the designers change my interface, will I have to re-record my script?” Chotin asked. “No” he answered. Next he and Rein showed a collaborative shopping cart application written in Flex 2, where they could both log in, chat about what to buy, and then each place items in the cart.

Heidi Williams, Dave Zuckerman, and NJ Jaramillo of the Flex Builder team showed demos of skinning, coding features, and container visualization in Flex Builder 2. NJ showed how in one Flex application, the sample Flex Store, developers would be able to press a hot key and visually show the hierarchy of parent and child containers in an application. Zuckerman continued the preview with an “outline view” where developers would be able to view the hierarchy of everything in an MXML document, and then also, the hierarchy of an ActionScript class.

James Killich from ESRI, which is a mapping technology software, stoked the crowd by showing mapping innovations in the ESRI software and applications. Through Flex and Flash, they have created some amazing features for their customers. One feature in particular prompted a cheer from the audience: a zoom in on high-detail, vector-based mapping images in SWF files.

Figure 4. The ESRI mapping application

He said that not only does it create better performance than bitmaps; the images can be swapped out as needed. The interactive ESRI mapping application can find addresses by phone, URL, or name. The results are delivered seamlessly, without page refreshes.

Damon Cooper, director of ColdFusion engineering appeared stage to also show where they’re headed with the next version of ColdFusion. The most important development is the evolution of ColdFusion in Eclipse.

Figure 5. Damon Cooper of the ColdFusion team

Specifically, Cooper showed an RDS explorer and a query builder implemented inside Eclipse. One can imagine the possibilities as developers will start using Flex Builder to create more sophisticated RIA front ends for their applications, all while using ColdFusion on the back end.

Next up, VP of engineering, Pete Santangeli and software engineer, Nigel Pegg demo’d a Breeze Meeting Extensions SyncSWF application where they shared a collaborative journey from Australia to Anaheim. Nigel created a Flash Earth application using the SyncSWF API that allowed them to collaborate in two locations and were synced up in a Breeze Meeting. Nigel was in Anaheim and Pete was logged in from Australia. Within the Breeze Meeting, they passed control of the application to each other as Pete made his way from Australia to the MAX conference in Anaheim. By dragging the map and searching on locations on the map using the geo coder web service that the application was hooked up to, Pete made his way to the MAX conference. As each of them made changes to the application, the other could see the application update on their end of the meeting.

Figure 6. Navigating to Anaheim from Australia using the SyncSWF API

You can create applications like this by signing up for the SyncSWF beta.

Following Nigel and Pete was Dreamweaver engineering manager, Jorge Taylor. Jorge demo’d a potential “cleaning product” feature that may make it into the next version of Dreamweaver─AJAX. There has been a great deal of buzz around AJAX, (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) lately, and the Dreamweaver product and engineering teams have been listening. As the audience watched, Jorge created an XML-based AJAX data set and built an application that updated a detail section that included an artist album image and artist detail info just by rolling over a table rows containing a list of artist names─all without having to refresh the page.

Figure 7. The New Ajax Data set dialog

Next up was Contribute engineer, Deeje Cooley. Deeje demo’d some of the Web 2.0 integration features that might make it into the next version of Contribute, code-named Hunter. Among the new features is the ability to post to blogs without having to create a new page or save the page. Deeje showed the audience how easy it is to connect to a blog and post a blog entry in no time at all. Deeje also showed how the next version of Contribute will be able to play Flash content in Contribute while editing. Another feature that may make it into the next version of Contribute is the ability to edit web pages directly from your browser of choice using “headless Contribute.”

Figure 8. Connecting to a blog from Contribute

Following Deeje was Director technical product manager, Tom Higgins. Some of the features that will possibly be included in the next version of Director include:

• A full-screen tabbed editing environment
• A script explorer
• The ability to dock the timeline panel vertically
• The ability to unfloat any tool window and the ability to adjust the window stack so that certain window are not always in the foreground

Another feature that may make it into the next version of Shockwave Player is an updated version of the Flash Asset Xtra that is compatible with Flash 8. Tom demo’d several real-time bitmap filter effects without writing a single line of code by applying behaviors.

Figure 9. Real-time 3D bitmap filter effects in Director using the update Flash Asset Xtra

“We don't sleep on the Flash team,” said Jethro Villegas, Flash engineer, as he kicked off the Flash section of the sneaks. “The next release of Flash Player is the biggest one I've ever seen.”

Jethro showed the “Boids” test, which features a school of 150 animated swimming fish that swim to the location of the mouse as it moves. The test, which the team frequently uses to measure player performance, shows the maximum frames per second that a Flash file can attain in a complex animation.

Jethro did the Boids test first using Flash Player 8 and ActionScript 2.0. Next, he played the file using Flash Player 8.5 and ActionScript 3.0. The results?

• The Flash Player 8/ActionScript 2.0 version played back at 2.5 frames per second.
• The Flash Player 8.5/ActionScript 3.0 version played back at about 14 frames per second.

Note: Flash Player 8.5 is currently available in alpha in Macromedia Labs; developers can use the alpha version of Flex Builder, also in Labs, to build content for the alpha player.

Figure 10. The "Boids" performance test

Villegas also showed some features that the team hopes to include in the ActionScript code editor in the Flash authoring tool. Future versions may include code-collapse: Developers can choose to collapse a selected section of code, or collapse all the code outside of a selection.

After wresting an alligator to the ground (albeit an inflatable one), Bill Perry, manager for mobile and devices developer relations, showed a new feature for Flash Lite 2.0 development as well as some ideas that may be included in future versions of the mobile authoring environment in Flash.

The first oohs and ahs came when Bill showed a new feature for the update to the mobile emulator in Flash Professional 8 to support Flash Lite 2.0 testing—video playback.

Next he showed a new CPU and memory usage feature, which will help developers track memory consumption and heap size during the development cycle. “You can adjust the CPU speed (in the development environment) to more accurately represent performance on the handset,” he said.

Figure 11. Planned mobile device emulator

Bill then revealed an idea for device features and events. This feature would recreate device-specific events like battery consumption and time of day. An example of how developers would use this would be changing the time to test if the background of an application changes depending on the time of day.

For mobile designers, the team is considering adding screen brightness controls to the emulator who are emulating different viewing environments. Also, the new authoring emulator may also include recordable events, which developers can play back later to simulate a series of user actions within the mobile application.

Finally, Bill showed an idea for a mobile projector setting. Developers could use this setting to create a projector that contains a device-specific profile, and the mobile app will appear as if it's playing inside a phone. On top if this, since the device profile is included in the projector and emulates the behavior of the real phone, developers could give clients a true-to-life desktop demo, letting them interact with mobile apps that are in development.

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