Ethan Malasky

First off, thanks to everyone who came to Brent and my sessions at MAX. We had a great time doing them. It was a blast to meet so many people I’ve only known from email lists and blogs. People seemed really interested and excited in Apollo. Judging from the great questions, a lot of people had put some hard thought into what it’ll take to make Apollo successful.
I’m sure the final slides will get posted somewhere central, but I’d like now to summarize the key points of our presentation.

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I’ll leave the detail-heavy blog posts to someone else. Brent and I still have to finish up the demos for our session this afternoon. But I want to get some thoughts down while the impressions are still fresh.
The strongest theme running through the presentations was the integration of separate products to support real workflows. Fancy products like Flash and Photoshop and ColdFusion can be used creatively to do almost anything. That’s great power and freedom. But it doesn’t mean that the most common tasks can be ignored.
I was especially impressed when Sho Kuwamoto demo’d a workflow between Illustrator and Flex Builder. Using well-designed assets in Illustrator, he mapped those to Flash symbols which were used to skin Flex components.
Focus on that kind of developer experience will be huge for the Flex community. By optimizing the common task, designers and developers will be able to make their Flex apps more distinctive. Can’t wait to try that out!