Digithoughts

Last week was the annual Adobe MAX event, where design and technology moguls share new innovations, visions and announcements. Every year, MAX carries the promise of game-changing technology, so a few Digitarians—Matt James, Tom Siebert, Michael Brown and I—caught the pre-sunrise Surfliner up to LA to catch early word of some of the exciting new products and services Adobe has planned for the next year (or later. Or never).

The most significant announcement, as far as Digitaria and our clients are concerned, was the official release of Air 3.0 and Flash Player 11 (both of which had been teased and hinted on Adobe blogs). Air 3.0 and Flash 11 bring hardware-accelerated (GPU) capabilities, enabling rich 3D gaming and also better 2D gaming to flash (demo here).  Unreal Gaming Engine and the next Angry Birds online game are being implemented in Flash.

As an Adobe Agency Partner, Digitaria has been working closely with Adobe and utilizing a pre-release of Air 3.0 to develop a multi-platform app -- both IOS for Apple products and Android -- created through a single build for our client the USA Network, which Adobe featured during the keynote.

Adobe has acquired, or is in the process of acquiring, new capabilities to improve backend and frontend technology. TypeKit (a done deal) pushes beautiful typography for the web, while PhoneGap (acquisition in process) will support open source technology of developing native applications using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. A new “creative cloud,” also announced, stores photos and files and acts as a software subscription service.

Innovative projects--created in both flash and HTML--were shown; there is no doubt that both remain of huge importance in the present and future of the web.  A few impressive Photoshop “on the go” touch applications (built in Flash) were announced, which allow mobile browsing and editing of photos. For more information on what was talked about at MAX, you can look here.

We especially enjoyed Tuesday night’s Weezer concert and it’s good to know that while so many things in the world of technology are changing, a few things remain the same: Weezer still looks like Buddy Holly!

David Pett Multimedia Developer

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