Radley Marx

Adobe Max – Day 2 round-up

Day 2 was much shorter for me. Last night I had a bout of insomnia and didn’t fall asleep until after 4am. There was no way to make it to the general session, let alone my morning session. But I had plenty of time to make it to my only workshop: Air Boot Camp.

Air Boot Camp

The room was *huge* with seating for 500 or more. The session started a little slow, but picked up quickly once everyone was familiar with the basic “new file…” process. We flew through several projects, most of which took only a few lines of code:

• Hello World pt 1 - basic AIR publishing
• Hello World pt 2 - exporting, signing, and distributing AIR apps (via Export… Release Build)
• Chromeless apps – editing the Adobe AIR application descriptor file template (i.e. foo-app.xml) to change settings
• Simple webcam display – quick & easy using flash.media.Camera;
• Fullscreen AIR apps - StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN_INTERACTIVE and showStatusBar=”false“;
• AIR as web browser – aka mx:HTML (tooooooo easy)
• Rich text editor - including saving and loading files to local disk using File and FileStream
• “ScotchesIDrankLastNight” – aka drag and drop lists using ArrayCollection
• “Wines” – binding an external XML to a datagrid component
• “myContactDB” – create a basic SQL-based local database of contact names

All in all, one of the best sessions I’ve attended so far, but everything else was presentation-based. After the workshop, I waited around for 30 min until I could attend the Max Awards and Sneak Peeks, the latter being everyone’s fav show-off session.

Sneak Peek

The sneek peek was divided into 3 groups: clients, tools, and services. Each group had 3-4 presenters. It went pretty fast, so I can only give a quick overview of what the advanced labs are working on…

Clients

• (group favorite) Torrent-like Flash P2P distributed live video streaming
• Nitro – shared widgets (portablewidgets-at-adobe.com)
• Durango – shared components between AIR apps