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