IE Designer Tom Holt reviews Adobe’s latest developments.


Last week the annual Adobe Refresh Roadshow rolled into town, with 2010’s edition touted as a “Dynamic live presentation that will refresh your understanding of the most recent initiatives in the areas of content creation, collaboration and distribution”.

Adobe takes this event across Australia and New Zealand annually, hoping to dazzle the faithful by showcasing the latest developments in Flash, Flex, AIR, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and more.

And dazzle they did.

First up was the Flash future technology sneak-peek. Hosted by Adobe Evangelist Paul Burnett, we sprinted through an array of new features due to be included in the next iteration of Flash.

We’re looking forward to having the following at our fingertips soon:

  • Version control support
  • Deep integration between Flash Builder 4 and Flash
  • Adobe Text Engine – a sophisticated text control feature similar to the text function in Illustrator and InDesign
  • Physics engine for animation
  • Code Snippets feature for rapid development
  • Updates to Flash Authoring Environment including code hinting, custom class completion
  • FLV Playback in the Flash IDE (Play, pause, scrub.)
  • Additional FLV Playback skins and customising skins to become a lot easier.

The Evangelist preaches regularly on his own show called Flash DownUnder on Adobe.tv

Multi-Target Applications.

The majority of this 45-minute session was dedicated to exploring the increasing need for contextual focus in designing and developing applications in today’s multi-target market.

As an example, they directed us to the online music service Finetune (from the people who brought you Napster, ironically) as it, like many new services, has deployment options for Desktop (AIR), Online (Embedded), TV, Mobile and even Wii.

In each case, the Finetune application had been tailored to integrate seamlessly into the different user interfaces, exploit the various hardware capabilities and most importantly keep the user’s learning curve to a minimum. You can see an example of such esoteric design during the Wii deployment, as an entire color palette was changed to ensure Finetune would ‘fit in’ with the Wii’s family of existing software.

http://www.finetune.com/FinetuneFamily/

Then came the moment we’d all been waiting for: Building iPhone applications with Flash. And it is cool. Mostly.

First, you have to navigate the Apple iPhone Developer process (let’s call them iHoops) and pay the man for the privilege (AUD$99 for an independent iPhone developer or AUD$119 for a organisation)

After that, though, it’s pretty straightforward.

First, create your application as you would in the Flash IDE, taking advantage of the new iPhone API packages such as GPS and Accelerometer. Then, simply Publish to iPhone.

So what’s the catch? For a start, no detailed explanation of the end product was given other than “It’s a native iPhone application”. Oh, and it takes a while. Okay, how long? Go and get a cup of coffee long. Ouch. And doubly so because, in Version 1 at least, you can’t simulate any of the iPhone API features in the Flash IDE. All of which means that to test them, you’ll be going and getting a lot of coffee.

Still, they did build an iPhone App on Flash in front of us, and that’s something you don’t see every day. I should also say that it’s important to bear in mind two things here. Firstly, this feature was showcased on a pre-release version of Flash, so there may well be improvements in the compile time and undoubtedly in its stability.

Secondly, Apple really aren’t making it easy for Adobe to run Flash Apps on their hardware, so for Adobe to step up to make this available is excellent, not to mention grown-up.

And finally, the Sneak Peaks Presentation.

There was some pretty incredible stuff here, some of which may never see the light of day, but certainly will contribute to the growing enigmatic reputation of the Adobe brand.

Take for example a possible new lasso feature in Photoshop. Let’s say you have an image of Steve Jobs standing in front of a brick wall with the Adobe logo on it, and you’ve wisely decided he shouldn’t be there. With this feature you can cut out Steve as you would do normally using the regular lasso tool, and instead of having to try and patch together the background yourself, you simply hit a button and Photoshop will neatly fill the space with a perfectly matched brick wall. Magic.

There were also new lifelike paintbrushes, amazing demonstrations using Dreamweaver, Illustrator, XML and HTML and the piece de resistance – bringing to life that shot on CSI where the detective zooms endlessly into a grainy image of a suspect and then hits an enhance button and boom! The face is revealed and he gets his guy. The presenters called it the “Deconvulsion Button”. Brilliantly done, but also lovingly faked for the audience. This one remains the stuff of Hollywood for now.