Adobe Max 2008 - Live Blog - Day 2

10: 45 Ryan Stewart - Formally announcing/demoing Flash Catalyst. Flash Cataylst is going to change the landscape of RIA's. The barriers between Designer and Developer will finally come down. A lot of people have stated that Flash Catalyst will 'finally' allow designers to make applications. Although this may be true, that really isn't the true power of the tool. Flash Catalyst will allow UI designers create truly rich RIA's and not simply try and 'skin' Flex components.

11:00 - Digital Alchemy is demoing their C++ to Actionscript converter. Allows Flash Player 10 to play formats not native to Flash, i.e, Orbis audio format and camera RAW. Quake and Super Mario Bros in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5.

11:05 - Flex Builder 4 (Gumbo) and ColdFusion demo - ColdFusion Centaur and Bolt. A lot of automated features to reduce redundant work. With Flex 4 and ColdFusion 9 there is a shift from Bindable data objects to managed data objects. This allows true reliable drag and drop connectivity and functionality between ColdFusion data sources and Flex components. This functionality is huge. Without getting into a ton of techy speak, this will speed up Flex and ColdFusion development about 10 fold.

11:20 Ben Forta quickly demoed a project they are working on that would connect Flex front ends to C# backends. This will allow .NET developers to easily make RIA's.

11:30 - Demoing Flash Google Search API. The Flash Search Player acts like a virtual user and clicks through every page and parses out 'text' so that Google can index Flash and dynamic content.

11:35 Flash Media Server 3.5 - Dynamic streaming feature - streamflashhd.com - monitors network bandwidth and switches the bitrate on the fly to display the best video for the throughput - totally seamless experience.
RTMFP - Flash player to Flash player live streaming with no server in the middle.