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

ff06: day two

Today’s festivities kicked off with the Adobe keynote, featuring an introduction by Homestar Runner and Strong Bad in a funny animated “retrospective” of technology conferences.

Kevin Lynch’s keynote included an overview of the merged Adobe/Macromedia product suite, an early preview of the next iteration of Flash (codenamed “Blaze”) and a new project (“Apollo”) for Flash-enabled, Internet-aware cross-platform desktop applications (shades of Macromedia Central and Apple Dashboard Widgets).

The keynote highlight for me was Sho Kuwamoto’s demonstration of Macromedia Flex, a more programmatical approach to creating Flash content using a kind of XML markup. But I was wowed by the ease with which he constructed a simple music player in the space of just a few minutes, to the point where part of me wished that I’d attended the Flex workshop yesterday instead of the video one.

There were a couple interesting Adobe/Macromedia items of note in the final session of the day, a Q&A with product managers for Flash, AfterEffects and Illustrator. The response to a question about ImageReady and Fireworks confirmed that Fireworks will continue to be developed as a standalone product, while hinting that ImageReady may eventually be fully folded into Photoshop (as many of its features have been so far already). Another audience member asked about Illustrator and Freehand, and while no one said anything specific about the fate of Freehand, the question one of the product manangers asked in response — “What features of Freehand do you want to see in Illustrator?” — made the answer pretty clear. (Incidentally, one of the most-requested features for Illustrator: Support for multiple pages in a document.)

The highlight of the day for me was the session by animator Sandro Corsaro, who, using some of his own work as an example, explained the notion of “limited animation” and demonstrated how to make animated characters just that much more believable through.

The session afterward, featuring Matt and Mike Chapman of Homestar Runner, also was pretty fun (though not quite as educational). I enjoyed how proudly defiant they seemed at having stuck with Flash 5 for most of their animation.

I was less enthused by the Erik Natzke and Dane Howard sessions. While Natzke’s work is amazing, his presentations are never very different, and he doesn’t dive into the code nuts and bolts of just how he does his thing. And with Howard’s presentation, I wanted to learn more about his awesome photo gallery templates and less about Picasa workflow. (They always lose me the second the word “paradigm” is uttered.)

I’ve been posting photos from the conference up on Flickr. Other folks’ Flickr-uploaded photos are tagged flashforward.