Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff2003: keynote (part 2)

Other things of note from the Macromedia keynote:

New components - Fellow DC-er Mike Chambers, rich media community manager for Macromedia, said that the next Macromedia Developer Resource Kit would be coming out soon. The new kit will include 8 new Flash components (including tabs, a textfield with data validation and icon support, and an accordion pane) and some Cold Fusion content. As a later example showed, the new accordion component would be very cool for multi-step form processes in Flash. The CD also will include the source code for a nifty RSS encoder/reader, which Chambers demonstrated.

Meanwhile, Paul Gubbay, cofounder of Cybersage, introduced “Firefly,” a new component set that looks like a souped-up datagrid. The component also can also load and save data via XML, Flash Remoting or SQL server. I’m not sure how this latter part works on the backend.

Macromedia.com - Tony Lopez, of macromedia.com, discussed the site’s recent redesign. Lopez (and Kevin Lynch) said that the Flash-heavy redesign taught the company a lot about working with their own products and the challenges the design/developer community face in developing sites. Macromedia has been fairly actively soliciting user feedback about the site redesign, and have been fine-tuning their site as a result of that feedback. The company has also posted a beta report about the feedback they’ve gotten. (Some of the biggest complaints: site performance (especially for Mac users) and the inability to right-click.) The web team has also been working with the Flash development team to add or improve features for Flash 7.

User testing in Flash - Joe Tan, vice president of engineering for Vividence, spoke about the user testing company’s new support for tracking user activity within Flash. Flash developers have to add some extra code to their movies to allow the Vividence tracker to follow users’ movements.

DevNet subscriptions - Chambers also introduced DevNet Pro and DevNet Essentials, a subscription service for components, licenses and server software. This stuff will be available for download or on CD.

New version of Flash for Pocket PC - This new version can integrate Flash 6 content with animated themes, play Flash video, and run Flash applications via a standalone Flash player (rather than through a browser). More info…

Flash Communication Server MX 1.5 - This updated version includes http tunneling (not sure what that is) and Linux support. Macromedia is offering a free developer edition. More info…

Kevin Lynch also promoed a pretty example of FCS at work at the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Company’s “home delivery” department (click on the link for the most recent magazine).