Rumors a running wild these days. As a result, classify this as a "keep a careful eye on" story.

High-level sources, who wish to remain anonymous, have told me that the plans for a Macromedia / Adobe merger are not going as smoothly as they had hoped for. As a result, what was supposed to be an announcement just before MAX will most likely not take place till late November.

Recently, executive changes were announced; including making Kevin Lynch a senior VP with Adobe (these were made amidst several senior Adobe executives resigning for "personal reasons"). However, what was before a feeling of it being a "done deal" is suddenly not so certain.

As I said from the outset, this is all very preliminary. While the general consensus is that the deal will eventually culminate, it is no longer the certainty that it once was.

Stay tuned, more could be coming.

Charles E. Brown

Macromedia's next generation of software, Studio 8, is here.

While I am not going to try and go through ALL of the new features here (watch sys-con television, there will be interviews and stories running), let me relate some highlights.

First of all, Freehand will no longer be part of the Studio package. Freehand IS NOT being discontinued, but just sold as a seperate package. Also, Studio 8 will ship with ONLY Flash Professional. The non-professional version of Flash will be available as a seperate package.

One of the major features of Dreamweaver will be the ability to drag and drop XML data into the page. In addition, it is coming with  considerably beefed-up CSS capabilities.

With Flash, we see a strong emphasis on mobile technology. You will even be able to test your movies in a mobile simulation environment. For instance, you could test for a specific model cell phone and even get warnings if there are compatibility problems. There will be SWF Metadata to improve the searchability of your movies with search engines. The video codecs have been considerably improved with On2 technology.

Fireworks can now create pop-up menus using CSS (a MAJOR improvement in my opinion). In addition, considerably improved vector capabilities.

In place of Freehand, Studio 8 will be shipping with Contribute and Flashpaper.

Stay tuned to both Sys-con and the Macromedia site to learn more about these remarkable new tools.

More to come.....

I just had my first look at the proposed new version of Windows: Vista.

Microsoft has been developing this new version of Windows under the name of Longhorn (although, most of us have called it LongWait). Happily, I can sum up my impression of it with just one word:

YAWN

This took 4-years to develop (let's not forget that it is not being released till late 2006)?

It is Windows XP with a Mac interface and a few new security features added (which will probably be hacked within a week of release). Oh, and 32-bit technology. Interestingly, I tried installing Dreamweaver MX 2004 on it and it crashed quickly. In all fairness, many installation programs need to identify the operating system. But I saw no mention of the backward compatibility that XP has.

The All Programs option of the Start Menu is arranged a little more clearly and searching for a document is a little easier.

YAWN

There has not been a significant upgrade of MS Office in years (unless you want to consider the minor cosmetic changes in 2003), Vista seems forever stuck at the gate and, with the exception of pockets of usage, .NET really has not taken a significant percentage of the developer's market. Is Microsoft resting on its pile of money and feels it does not need to do much more? Or does it need an infusion of new blood?

After a close association with Macromedia's very creative and cutting edge technologies, Microsoft is really looking tired. While Macromedia is continually setting new standards, while Flash is becoming the tool of choice for an increasing number of designers and developers, while Flex is only beginning to show its potential, Microsoft is becoming the increasingly irrelevant (let's not even get started on how programs like FireFox and OpenOffice are increasingly taking traditionally Microsoft markets).

Whenever I do a Flash seminar, I hear a lot of excitement. When was the last time you heard someone get excited about Microsoft?

Can Linux be ready to finally take the market?

I had the problem of trying to split myself between two important sessions.  In the Grand Ballroom, Peter Barr-Watson was speaking about Mobile Flash and Guy Watson was speaking about Effective Flash Navigation in the Crystal Ballroom. Unfortunately, I could only do half of each (I also had to leave the conference early because of previous committments).

Both Peter and Guy had TWO tough jobs. Following Kevin Lynch and taking topics that could fill several good size books and bringing them down to an hour session.

Have no doubt, the future of Flash is in the mobile market. By the end of 2006, 98% of all cellular technology will be Flash enabled. World-wide, that is a HUGE market.

Peter is self-publishing a book on the subject and I am planning on closely following him with the journal. You can find his writings at:

www.peterwatson.com/extras/flite

My suggestion is to follow this site closely.

Guy Watson began by giving us good and bad examples of Flash Navigation. Two examples of good is:

www.elgrando.ee
www. drewmedia.com

Two examples of bad are:

www.nuspirit.com
www.red-design.com.uk

He also discussed about using JavaScript to pass information from the browser to the Flash movie.

My only quibble was his use of Framesets to do it. As many web designers know, this can be a rather dicey subject and most try to stay clear of it. However, overall, there were a lot of great ideas here.

Today is the finish. I will report later and, over the weekend, give some additional toughts.

Charles

Ok....the MXDJ was there today and being put into the welcome packet. I am happy again....:). Hey!!!! I have worked hard and earned the designation of curmudgeon. Age has its privileges.

Anyhow, back to FlashForward.

Today was about Kevin Lynch. In case you are one of the rare people who does  not know who he is, he is the product manager for Macromedia. His talk, primarily, mapped out a lot of the future potential of Flash. I am wording this carefully because I do not want anyone to think he announced any sort of update (like they did with ColdFusion last year). I mean the still relatively under utilized and untapped potential of the existing technology. To quote:

"There is a tremendous opportunity to deliver better user experiences for hundreds of millions of people across the Internet."

Flash is definitely aiming for mobile platforms. He also laid out the potential of Flex.

My sense is that Flash will be central to the Macromedia family of products (with Flex at the enterprise level) and other products (such as Captivate) hubbing from Flash. I may work-up aspects of Kevin's talk into articles for the journal

I have to confess, I have only recently started digging into Flex. That is one area of journal I want to develop more. I strongly feel, especially after Kevin's talk today, that it is a sleeping giant. As developers wrap their hands around it more and more, it will be a major player.

Again, I found some of the grumblings kind of curious. I even heard one person say, after Kevin laid out the tremendous potentital of Flash, that "Flash will never be much more than an animation tool".

One of the staples of the classical music world are the Mozart String Quartets. While regarded, by those who listen to classical music, as a staple of the repertoire, they were initially regarded as impossible to play and would probably be of no interest to audiences. Some things have not changed even after a couple of hundred years. There will always be the detractors.

I will discuss the other seminars in the morning.

If you are at FlashForward, please say hello.

Charles

Sorry I did not post late last night. Exhaustion took over and I decided sleep was a much better idea.

After the somewhat negative experience I reported on yesterday morning, things took an upward swing. As I reported, Robert Reinhardt's discussion of Flash Video was excellent. For many, his talk clarified a lot of the terminology and mechanics involved.

After that, I attended Peter Hall's fine talk: Google, where's my Flash site?

Peter discussed the problems associated with Flash and engine indexing. His solution was an open-source tool called Ripple which can be found at:

http://www.peterjoel.com/ripple

This tool uses JS to link Flash content to XHTML data that the engines can recognize.

What I found most curious is that I heard many participants grumble, when leaving, that all he was doing was pushing a third-party tool. My feeling was....so what? Tools from a whole variety of sources are a part of our professional life. The whole idea of software, today, is expanability with additional tools to save us time and trouble. It is called RAD.

In the afternoon, Amit Pitaru presented a fascinating talk called Introduction to Processing. This one is hard to describe in a couple of paragraphs. To quote from his description:

"Processing is a programming language and enviroment built for the media arts communities. It is created to teach fundimentals of computer programming within the media arts context and to serve as a software sketchbook."

I will be asking Amit to work this up as an article for MXDJ. I feel this fascinating subject will be better served that way.

Finally, kudos to Rich Shupe for his Introduction to ActionScript. After the experiences of yesterday morning, it was good to see ActionScript presented properly. I only wish more people were at the talk. I hope it opened a lot of ideas.

If any of you are at the conference, please say hello. I had several talk to me yesterday.

When I arrived, I found the registration process to be more than a bit chaotic and disorganized. I was told my press credentials were on the 4th floor. The people on the 4th-floor then promptly sent me back to the lobby, who told me I would need to go to the 4th floor. After 30-minutes, or so, we finally got that a bit straigtened out.

When I opened the Welcome Package, I found a copy of Layers Magazine (a publication dedicated primarity to Adobe), a copy of Pocket PC Magazine, and a copy of Photoshop User (again for Adobe). But NO copy of MXDJ, which does report about Flash (this is the FLASH Foward Conference). I wish my parent publishing firm, Sys-con, had a sales department that stayed on top of this more. I can only hope we will be better represented at MAX convention (ever feel like you are fighting a losing cause?).

I got into Brenden Hall's talk about ActionScript As A Toolbox. I had to double check myself to make sure I wasn't hearing wrong. If we follow Mr. Hall's advice, we should all move back to Flash 5. After some superficial comments about loops and variable names ("you should use a for loop instead of a while loop". Of course he never spoke about the other loops and when to use those) he gave us this advice:

Do not use OOP
Put all of your code in Frame 1 of the main timeline
Do not put code in Button or Movie Clips
Do not use cutting-edge techniques

Of course later on he spoke about reusability. Didn't seem to phase him that the techniques he advocated severly limits reusability.

I am outraged that a convention that purports itself to be devoted to the state-of-the-art Flash usage, would put something like this on.

About half-way through I had had enough and wandered over to the Flash Video Workshop by Robert Reinhardt. For many there, some of the Video technology and terminology was quite new. I thought Robert gave and EXCELLENT presentation on the subject and delivered a lot of new ideas. For me, it was the highlight of the morning.

I will be on later with more news.