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Las Vegas / MAX 2006 Conference

I just returned from Las Vegas, where I spoke at MAX 2006, a conference sponsored by Adobe that covers a variety of technologies formerly branded as Macromedia, chiefly Flash, Flex, ColdFusion. My presentation was about a set of architectural approaches to building complex Flex applications; you can look at it here if you’re interested. I plan to write more about that architecture soon, so I’m not going to go into details right now.

Now Vegas is a weird and interesting place, and, of course, how could one contemplate visiting Las Vegas without a little… mountain biking? I took a bunch of pictures capturing various Vegas scenes of this and that, as well as part of our bike day trip with my buddy Jeff Vroom who works at Adobe (thanks to Chad and Escape Adventures for a great ride).

I stayed in the Venetian, an aggressive faux-Italian sprawl. Its architecture carefully funnels conference-goers through its small intestine, where clever organs named “the slot machine” and “the blackjack table” absorb their nutrients and cash into the hotel’s bloodstream. I saw a sign that said “When it’s no longer a game… PLAY RESPONSIBLY.” I ask this: in a bar, if you saw a sign that said, “When you’re blind drunk… DRINK RESPONSIBLY,” what would you think?

Anyway, apart from meeting lots of great people and giving my presentation, I found out a lot about Adobe’s new Apollo platform, which I think is going to enable people to build some really great new kinds of applications. Apollo directly integrates the Flash, Flex, DHTML and PDF platforms to an extent never before seen, and supports applications that can be installed by the user directly on the desktop with access to the file system, network, etc.. The apps appear as native application executables and are not Adobe-branded in any way. There is integration at the programmatic level (ActionScript and JavaScript can call each other’s code and see each other’s objects) and at the display level (HTML can appear as a display object in Flash with alpha, scaling, rotation, etc., while Flash can of course appear as an element in an HTML page). Furthermore, the HTML piece is a 100% fully functional browser based on WebKit, which also more or less powers Safari.