by Timothy Brook
Created
I’m just back from Adobe MAX in Las Vegas. Over 3000 designers and developers spending 3 days indoors learning about the current – and future – plans and products from Adobe. It was a great event – lots of buzz, lots of interest and lots of "WOW’s" from the audience when the speakers demo’d how Adobe technology was going to make a real difference to their day-to-day lives.
I even won $50 in the slot machine at the airport as I was leaving – so I came out of Vegas about even!!
Anyway, as with all these sorts of events there were a raft of releases and news released over the last few days. I won’t go into a huge amount of detail on the event as you can read that here and here.
One of the things we did show at MAX were some very early Apollo* applications – built both by Adobe and others. We have talked a lot about Apollo over the last 9 months, so to see real – albeit alpha – applications was great.
From a news point of view Adobe announced some pretty interesting things: Soundbooth beta; partnerships with Teleca and Verizon; Digital Editions beta; and some great news around RIA development platforms for Mac and Linux.
All of these stories are interesting, but I think for me the Digital Editions news is the coolest. Very basically, Digital Editions is a Rich Interactive Application – built in Flex -that offers a great solution for "e-books". The technology essentially takes PDF as well as an XHTML-based reflow-centric publication format, and delivers a great "engaging" way to acquire, read, and manage content, including eBooks, digital magazines, digital newspapers and other digital publications.
I sat in on a briefing about Digital Editions and whilst I may not be replacing my books with bytes (I still buy CDs and convert them to MP3!), I do see a time when I will be happy to read sections of books or magazines on my PC or PDA – especially when the experience draws you in. The beta also includes some great books (classics) that you can download for free to test it out.
*
Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being created by Adobe that will allow developers to leverage existing web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF to easily create and deploy desktop applications.