MAX Europe
For the first time in Europe, Adobe is hosting its MAX developer symposium in Barcelona this week. Below are a few distilled key pointers from the keynotes, sessions, briefings and roundtables I’ve been dipping in to over the last two days.
The four key industry trends of importance in the Adobe world are explosion of digital content, spiralling Internet usage, proliferation of connected devices and new business ideas.
Coming as this does straight after MAX USA it was difficult to separate the repeat news from the “new news” so to speak. That said, new to the party this week is the Adobe Developer Connection - a portal for developer and designer resources designed to fuel the next generation of RIA (Rich Internet Application) development. It’s at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/
Adobe is building in support for the H.264 video compression standard within Flash – and also in the pipeline is the desktop video player Adobe Media Player. The next generation of Flash Player (codenamed Astro) was previewed - this will ship with advanced text layout support that will be capable of handling bi-directional text and will support the word wrapping rules of languages such as Hebrew, Arabic and Japanese, which do not follow standard English.
Also announced: Adobe Scene7 open APIs (these enable developers to build custom rich media applications with dynamic imaging); and a new file sharing service (SHARE Beta preview) for users to share, publish and organise documents online.
With so many attendees (1200 I understand) and some 210 sessions, it’s interesting to see the presentations pitched at so many different levels. While some are quite heavily simplified, the hour devoted to SWX - the native data format for the Flash Platform – was fairly conceptual and left many attendees seemingly still interested but none the wiser.
Big news on day two is Abobe’s new relationship with the BBC for delivery of web video. The Beeb has adopted Flash Player software to drive its free catch-up TV service BBC iPlayer - available as a streaming service across Macintosh and Linux, as well as Windows, by the end of year.
All this, plus octopus at every meal break – breakfast, lunch and dinner. I kid you not.