Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals Everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the WOW organization and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Adobe Max 2008 conference in Milan Italy. I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with Mark Niemann-Ross, Developer Evangelist for Adobe Systems Inc. Mark?’s had a number of sessions covering a wide variety of topics including “using Adobe Flex and Air to Automate Creative Suite 4 Workflow and Use XMP Metadata to Label, Track and Manage Assets within Creative Suite.

Mark provides an excellent summary of his sessions and an overview on the products and how they enhance workflow and integration. Mark also provides additional detail and links.

Check out the three minute podcast on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.

Today’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by the Web Pro Community Challenge

Sponsored by the WOW and the Adobe corporation, the Web Pro Challenge offers an opportunity to showcase your talent, gain industry recognition, win prizes and benefit the community by designing and developing a site for a non-profit organization. For more information and all of the challenge details check out WebProChallenge.org website.

Transcript of Adobe Max 2008 Milan, Italy-Interview with Mark Niemann-Ross
Length – 5:03

BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute at Adobe MAX Milan at the Web Pro Community Challenge Table Top. I have the pleasure to be interviewing Mark Niemann-Ross, Developer Evangelist from Adobe. Thank you for agreeing to this interview Mark. I appreciate you taking the time.

You?’ve presented a couple of times, multiple times, both in San Francisco and now today in Milan. I?’m curious to know, the session had an element of Flex and Air, correct?

MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yes.

BILL: Could you for the subscribers of this podcast, give us a better understanding of Flex and Air and then maybe talk specifically about the elements of Flex and Air, summarize the session and a couple of walk-aways in terms of developers, designers, Web Professionals. What would you want us to know about your session on Flex and Air?

MARK: Absolutely. To back way up, the concept behind Flex and Air are really the ability to use all your Flash XML skills and transfer that into more of a front-end type of product, more of a [indecipherable] sort of thing. Up until now a lot of action script has been done in Flash, which is very time-line based. Flex is based around developing an application that allows you to talk to a database service. Air is very much like Flex except that instead of running inside of a browser, Air runs on your desktop. You don?’t need a browser. You can take it and run it somewhere and not even be connected to the Internet and still be used for work. It?’s something that you?’d want to take a look at, especially if you?’re doing Web work. It?’s not an answer to every solution but it?’s really exciting. For us in the Creative Suite it?’s particularly exciting as we start to look at Flex as a programming model. Up until this point if you wanted to automate or integrate Creative Suite what you had to do was either go with some of the C++ interfaces or some of the scripting interfaces, alpha scripts [?], beta scripts [?], the Basic scripts, things like that.

Unfortunately what this means is that everybody out there who?’s been using Flex and Air had to learn an entirely new set of languages in order to satisfy automation-type things. This wasn?’t a problem because it used to be the Creative Suite community over here and the Web community over here. Well, now you can use and design and export to Flash and you can bring movies into Illustrator and Photoshop. It becomes very, very blurry as to what?’s in the Creative Suite and what?’s in the Web.

Along with that blurriness what we?’ve found is that many, many who were being asked to do Flash or Flex projects before are now also being asked to do integrations with the Creative Suite. So how do we bridge those two worlds? The exciting thing that we?’re introducing here is something called Switchboard Patch Panel. These are technologies that are available up on labs at adobe.com. It?’s free. You can download it. You put them into a Flex project. If you?’ve done any Flex program at all this is very simple for you to do. You link it into your project and then suddenly now you can use all of your Flex programming skills and control and automate Creative Suite.

So for example, if you had a situation where you wanted to pull up a set of pictures from Flickr, rotate those 90 or 75 degrees and do an image correction because they?’re all photographed under fluorescent light for example. Well, you could do that by hand. Download the image, bring it into Photoshop, do the correction, do the rotation and send it back out again. Or you go do it, if you chose to, in one of the scripting languages, assuming that you know how to Apple script in Visual Basic. But if you know Flex or Air, you already know how to go and get images from Flickr, Air allows you to download those to a local partner and now using Switchboard you could then pass those individual images on to Photoshop, ask it to do the manipulation and then come back. Again, that?’s a way of leveraging all of that information you have about programming Air and even Flex and integrating it in Creative Suite. Again, that?’s done by a technology called Switchboard. It?’s available on labs.adobe.com. It?’s free and it includes complete documentation.

BILL: Excellent summary. I certainly appreciate your perspective and your time today Mark.

MARK: Sure. I?’m glad to have you around and folks, if you get to MAX, we look forward to seeing you.

BILL: Thank you.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by Web Pro Community Challenge. Sponsored by WOW and the Adobe Corporation the Web Pro Community Challenge offers an opportunity to showcase your talent, gain industry recognition, win prizes and benefit the community by designing and developing a site for a non-profit organization. For more information check out the WebProChallenge.org.

Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the coverage from Adobe MAX that took place this week in San Francisco, CA.

Today?’s video reflects a minute of high impact visual graphics of the events keynote and a few minutes with Kevin Lynch, CTO at Adobe Systems Inc. The theme of the presentation is the changing world of the software industry. Kevin refers to the main trends as “tectonic shifts” in three key areas:

* Client and Cloud Computing
* Social Computing
* Devices and Desktop Computing

Check out the four minute interview on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by Web Directions North taking place in Denver Colorado February 2-5, 2009 Web Directions North is one of the world’s leading conferences for web professionals, bringing together the leading experts from around the nation and around the world to educate, entertain and inspire our attendees.

WOW will be participating in a session entitled Educating the Next Generation of Web Professionals For more information about the conference visit the Web Directions North website.

Transcript of Adobe MAX keynote Kevin Lynch

KEVIN LYNCH: It?’s great to be here with all of you again. It?’s terrific.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We love you!

KEVIN: The magic is all of you, it?’s not just me.

[Audience laughter]

KEVIN: We?’re going to be talking about a lot today. There?’s obviously a lot of change happening in the world. There?’s also a lot of change happening in the software industry. We?’re going to cover a lot this morning. At the end we?’ll have a link that you can go to and see a summary of everything we?’ve talked about here so if you want to learn more or go to sessions, it?’ll be a great index for you.

So this morning I?’m going to be talking about the main trends that are really transforming software, probably relate to all of us, relate to Adobe software and the community all around us. Those three trends are really techtonic shifts. The first is client and cloud computing, where we really have a shift of how people are developing software from being purely on the client, or even just purely on the cloud, to really a blend of both client and cloud computing working together.

The second trend that?’s happening right now is one that?’s more of a social trend, social computing. It?’s about how we?’re all more profoundly connected to each other via the Internet and how that really changes how we experience software. Software is no longer a solo experience, it?’s really one where your friends are involved. There?’s definitely humanity around you that?’s using the software. So how does that change what you do?

Then the third trend that we?’re going to talk about this morning is devices and desktop computing and how there?’s a real major shift to a multi-screen world where we?’re using not just one big screen to access content, there?’s a variety of different screens that need to work together to help people succeed at accessing content over the Internet.

So these are all major trends. Each one of them is really significant, but they?’re all happening at the same time. So it?’s a very interesting time for us all to be in this industry, building these applications, designing this content and really rolling with all of these changes that are happening around us here.

So let?’s start with client and cloud. With the cloud we really see an amazing opportunity to combine client computing and cloud computing and really balance the two together. So to do it we were taking very much a balanced approach with each. Our belief is the future of computing is really combining processing on a local clietn and taking advantage of a bunch of different services across the cloud. To give a little overview of what we?’re doing in this space, first I?’m going to give an overview of the client side, then we?’ll talk aobut the cloud side.

So on the client, of course we?’ve been doing some really great innovation with Flash Player 10. It?’s already been released. It?’s being adopted broadly and it?’s reaching, already with Flash Player, pretty much all the computers on the Web today. The situation we?’re in is pretty amazing because we can actually update that software now in less than a year, in about nine months, we can actually upgrade the capabilites on the Web and induce new capabilities for everyone who are using these applications interacting with content. What this means for you is that we can innovate at a much faster rate. We can deploy new technologies, like Pixel Bender or new 3D effects or a faster scripting engine. We can get that out to everyone on the Web in a consistent way. And you can start taking advantage of it very quickly.

So with Flash Player 10 we introduced a few different areas. These are driven, acutally, by communication between the Flash Player team and all of you, really driving forward where Flash should go. We saw some people doing 3D graphics libraries, we thought, how can we make those go faster? We saw people using text more inside their applications. How do we make that be higher quality? So we?’ve really driven the functionality of Flash Player 10 based on working with all of you and the edges you?’re pushing on and what you?’re actually creating with Flash.

Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.

I?’m podcasting live today from Adobe MAX 2008 San Francisco. The Max event description states that the “event is an experience unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community.” From a Web professional and a WOW exec director perspective, I couldn’t agree more!

Mark DuBois, Professor at ICC and WOW Education Director is here as well and we’ve been roaming the halls to absorb the great content and to cover the goings on for this podcast. Along the way, we’ve met with many of WOW members, advisors, supporters and Adobe executives within the product categories, education team and evangelist at all levels attending the event. Stay tuned for more summaries of this great event in future podcast.

For today?’s podcast, I had the pleasure to interview Ben Forta, Director of Platform Evangelism at Adobe. Ben’s an incredibly bright, talented and an easy going guy. I asked Ben to summarize his keynote address with a focus on the walk aways for Web professionals. Today’s podcast also includes a short clip the morning session as well The theme for the keynote focused on how companies are breaking through the status quo for designing, developing and deploying engaging web experiences through seamless workflow and its definitely worth checking out.

Check it out on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.

Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProtraining.org, offering a complete solution for all your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out at Web Professional Training website.

Transcript of Adobe MAX 2008 Keynote with Ben Forta, Director of Platform Evangelism at Adobe

BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute, with a gentleman that needs no introduction, but for those that are not familiar, this is Ben Forta from Adobe Systems. He?’s presenting today as the keynote speaker. I?’d like to ask you Ben, could you summarize that session for us today?

BEN FORTA: Summarize a 19-minute keynote?

BILL: Yeah, in a couple–

BEN: How much time do I have?

BILL: Take as long as you want.

BEN: This morning?’s keynote focused on products and technologies, both ones that we just announced, like the CS4 products, as well as some that we haven?’t announced yet which will be coming out next year or so. We covered a lot of areas. We started out talking about some of the productivity gains in Flash CS4, making animation and interaction a whole lot easier both for professional designers as well as those that aren?’t professional that want professional results. We showed some pretty phenomenal functionality of Photoshop, allowing designers to do some very impressive things that would have taken many hours before, cleaning up images and working with comps, making them a whole lot… getting them to do what you want them to do in minutes as opposed to hours.

Then we showed one of the highly anticipated products, Flash Catalyst [indecipherable], which lets you to pull in a comp from Photoshop or Illustrator and actually start building a real live application and put it into actions that generates underlying Flex code. So that?’s exciting. We demonstrated, back into that, how to take that comp and put it into Flex Builder, and actually build it back into Flex Builder 4 [indecipherable]. We showed them sneaks of ColdFusion ID, coming out next year. We showed how you can take CS+ Builder and run it from–

BILL: Yeah, that was exciting.

BEN: Very cool stuff. Got a kick out of that. We showed very important work that we?’re doing to make Flash content searchable, so that Google and others can find it.

BILL: Totally awesome.

BEN: Very important stuff there. We showed the new Flash media server, so lots of very exciting technologies we showed. And the response has been phenomenal.

BILL: Yeah, it has been. Excellent stuff. And tonight?’s the sneak peek.

BEN: Tonight?’s the sneak peek. This is an annual event and we?’ll have a dozen or so presentations of stuff. It?’s a little less baked, some futuristic, some might see the light of day, others not. But it?’s a chance to show the crowds what it?’s working on, some of the innovative ideas.

BILL: Excellent. Thank you so much.

BEN: Good. Pleasure.