Reflections on Adobe Max 2011

Disclaimer:
First off, I’m not an Adobe employee and so all the thoughts presented are my own. I do however make a living off of Adobe products and use them daily… basically consistently. As such I feel that I have a good grasp of the possible pitfalls when using the tooling. Anyways, enough disclaimer.

Rather than just saying “I loved it” or “I hated it” I’m going to run you through my flow of emotions throughout the week to try and communicate my stream of consciousness – hopefully it doesn’t drive you too crazy.

PreMAX

The week started for me already on the road going to and coming from the Big Android BBQ in Austin. Being crushed with the stress of trying to finish up my Air App Challenge application and prepping for 8 presentations in the next few days I definitely wasn’t as social as I usually would have been. I took a train to Austin to give me some time to work and when I arrived the Android Guys were doing what they do well – drink heavily. It was fun to see friends from last year’s conference and many people immediately recognized me as the person that represented Adobe and AIR at last year’s conference – many of them telling me how well their Air for Android apps were doing.

I was extremely impressed the entire time in Austin how well the Android Community opened their arms to Adobe and Adobe is doing all they can to repay them in kind. Presentation 1 was a panel with Terry Ryan, Todd Sanders, Kevin Schmidt, and Liz Fredrick. The first question out of the gate was “what is up with html5 vs flash”. Interrupting the Adobe people there I got on my soap box that Adobe isn’t Flash, it is just one tool in the toolbox. Long story short – as I will talk about HTML5 vs Flash later – things went well and the Android folks asked great questions with very frank answers returned.

Crazy rush off to Max and sadly missed the BBQ itself.

Arriving in LA the festivities started and continued into the great community summit the next day. Community Summit is no secret but only available for community leaders. If you want to join then start leading a user group or become an ACP. Glazing over what happened at Summit presentation 2 went down pretty well.

Only thing that got me upset was having a phone robbed from me at the community summit. No I didn’t get my phone taken, but – listen up motorola guys! – I totally deserved that phone and had barely stepped out of the room. Robbed.

Festivities continue and we are now into Day 1 of Max.

Day 1
Day 1 started with the Keynote and I will say I was very happy to see this Keynote. Even as a developer I will say that the last few years Keynotes seemed a bit too Flex and Flash heavy. I was very happy to see the designers get some love and the new set of apps and Cloud services. Lack of Oprah moments aside I was very happy with it and rushed off to presentation 3 knowing that day 2 Keynote was supposed to be developer heavy. Seems fair to me.

During the Day 1 Keynote though the information dropped that Adobe bought PhoneGap. I was immediately very excited by this and happy for the purchase for both Adobe and Nitobi. Having worked with the PhoneGap guys previously for SXSW I was very happy because now Adobe seemed to have a very real mobile HTML story along with the Adobe AIR story. I felt there was a lot of “synergies” in this marriage and everyone should be happy. Having seen the PhoneGap cloud solutions at SXSW I felt between the different HTML mobile stories they were the most “complete” and have been nothing but impressed by their output. Again, great job Nitobi.

- SXSW Reminder -
Dedo Inc. was proudly picked to present at SXSW in Austin during the summer and brought together Adobe and Nitobi to each show off their multi-screen stories. With a few hundred people in attendance the presentation seemed to go pretty well. I already knew the AIR story by that point but while on the panel I even let Brian of Nitobi know how impressed I was by their solution. Even then I thought “if these two came together that would be awesome”.

I knocked Presentation 3 out and Presentation 4 by that evening and we got into the sponsor’s bash or whatever it’s called. Everything seemed to be going well and I was looking forward to a busy day 2, interested in the Day 2 Keynote.

Day 2
Day 2 keynote was a low point for me. Ben Forta did a great job, I don’t want to take that from him, but on the whole the pace was slow and we were walked through a giant horse and pony show of other people’s products when what I really wanted to see was what Adobe was bringing to the table.

Furthermore Adobe’s keynote was very focused on how they are supporting HTML5. Like day 1 I felt this very necessary and happy to hear but without a balanced message of the new Flash and AIR runtimes I felt that there was very little that spoke to me on the developer day. Walking away from the keynote I definitely felt that if I didn’t create games then the Flash Player was becoming not for me.

Nowholditrightthere!

I do know better. There is a lot of development in the pipe around Flex and AIR for many platforms. Even with just a little bit of my free time I’ve been able to create many application based on the same “core” that have received HUGE adoption numbers. These facts cannot be discounted.

Ultimately I think what happened was there was too much content and Flash/Flex got bumped for games and whatever-the-crap-that-tv-show-thing-was. The games are cool, totally cool, but how many people are creating triple A games and how many people are creating application for desktop and mobile for themselves or for clients. I left feeling that Adobe did a great job with the HTML segment and then completely talked to the >1% of high end game developers. The only thing that would have saved that is if Adobe spent all that time on games to lead up to and announced a third purchase of Unity. Then I would have completely understood the lead up.

I left the keynote pretty underwhelmed and now – except for sneaks – on the downward path towards the end of Max for 2011. No more surprises to be had.

I knocked out another presentation, missed one (sorry Ryan), gave the NerdRadio kings an interview, and finally joined in with Flash Jeopardy challenge. I’m very much hoping that a video of that is posted and soon because it was so much fun I hope others get to see it – even if I was robbed again at the end (Tony)!

Sneaks
Sneaks were awesome as always. Rainn Wilson knocked it out of the ballpark and as you probably know by now Adobe showed why they are leaders in the industry with showing off software that we only dream about.

MAX BASH
Awesome. Completely blew away last years. On par with the best ones I’ve been to. Again, great job Adobe.

Day 3
Day 3 ended strong with me starting off as a TA and ending with 2 back to back presentations. It was nice to close things up and talk with people finally and spend time in the community lounge – I barely got that time previously. I also had fun catching up with Jesse F over some breakfast between everything else – good times.

PS
Since Max many of the Evangelists have made posts saying that the message that came out was incomplete or miscommunicated. I do believe this is the truth, I just want to see the next few months to a year as proof of Adobe’s interest in application developers.

Requests

• Keep the Flex and the AIR teams going the way they are.
• Don’t side burner them or ship it (Flex, AIR) all overseas.
• Continue to innovate with Flash and deliver stellar releases.
• Support open source communities like Spoon. (SPPOOOOOONNNN!!)
• Continue to use your own tools to create applications (great job with those tablet apps)
• I’d like to see a cloud build system for Flex/AIR/Flash projects like PhoneGap has. (I’ve said that before and I’ll say it again)
• I’d love to see “MovieClip” have it’s own file type. So designers could create animations and hand over just the “movieclip” segment to a developer to be included with a larger project. Rather than FLA files which don’t play well with repositories.