Melbourne's Adobe Refresh : debrief

Yesterday I attended Melbourne's Adobe Refresh event. This event gave you a little bit of that excitement you get when you attend an event like MAX. Sure all the news had been blogged a month earlier. Personally, I looked at some of that news in detail and some I'd just glanced at. Refresh was about making some time to hear and see what matters in detail. We do a lot of Flex work. So it was the Flex related stuff that got me excited and there wasn't much that wasn't Flex related (in one way or another). The most interesting project for me is Thermo. The demo we saw showed a Photoshop comp converted into a working Flex application by selecting graphics (or groups of graphics) and telling Thermo what sort of component they are. This included creating a horizontal scrolling List and adding states and effects to the component. All this is done in the same format as Flex development so the converted comp will be ready for handing over to the developer (and back to designer for tweeks if necessary). This could make a very real difference to our workflow.

A lot of the other exciting things they demoed related to applications built with Flex ; things like Adobe Share, Buzzword, Adobe Media Player to name a few.

With Media Player they demonstrated some in player advertising. In case you've never seen it Media Player allows you to subscribe to video feeds and then watch selections from that feed when you are ready. One example feed they had was for CSI. Great idea but I found the advertising a bit invasive. I can see how the media owners might find this attrative but I wonder how comfortable the end user will feel. There are some very compelling alternatives out there for accessing TV shows. Media Player offers a very painless alternative as long as it isn't over-burdened with distracting features.

Some of the things (i.e Pacifica) seem like they might take a while to have an impact. But that doesn't mean I didn't come out churning over the potential these offered for the future.