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October 26, 2005
Great article on Flex product line + videos posted
Hey there. Two quick things.
If you haven't read Steven Webster's article on the Flex product line, you should. He does a great job of outlining the benefits of Flex Enterprise Services as well as touching on the framework changes.
Secondly, videos of the keynotes have been posted, in case you haven't seen them yet.
Posted by sho at 07:53 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 19, 2005
MAX wrap-up
Here's the email I sent out to my team with my thoughts about MAX.
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Hi folks.
Quick wrap-up of thoughts from MAX.
1) The people - I don't know about you, but for me, I feel it is a real privilege to work on something that so many people care so much about. I met hundreds of people from all over the world this week, and it was both thrilling and energizing. Attendance was up from last year. I hear that there were ~3000 people there.
2) Flex 2, Flex Builder 2, and Flash Player 8.5 -- People seem really jazzed. I think some people were in danger of having their heads explode. At the most basic level, they are excited by how fast AS3 is, the fact that we have a real development tool, and that the price is within their reach. There was lots of interest from traditional Flash authors (maybe more than we originally thought?) and there was also lots of interest from CF authors (who now see Flex as an exciting way to build complex front ends more quickly for the apps they are already building). It will be interesting to see what people build with our technology.
3) Flex Enterprise Services -- Enterprise services are obviously not targeted at everyone in the MAX audience, but the people who understood what it was universally loved it. I am not exaggerating. I think this is a really good sign. I had several people come up to me to say that the Enterprise product was the thing they were the most excited about at the entire conference.
4) Flex and Flex Builder sneaks -- Matt and Todd showed sneaks of Mercury (automated testing) integration, which allows you to record events in your Flex app, play them back, and verify the results. Matt and Todd kept drifting in and out of their Australian accents while they were doing their demo, which was hilarious to us (I was sitting in a row with Ely, Dave G., and Christophe). Heidi, Dave Z., and NJ showed demos of skinning, coding features, and container visualization. It's nice to think that as more and more people use Flex Builder and run into things that they wish were in the product, we will be able to point back to some of the sneaks to hint at the things we are working on.
5) CFEclipse sneaks -- Damon showed an RDS explorer and a query builder implemented inside Eclipse. Imagine that + Flex Builder for end to end coding. WooT!
Other stuff not directly related to our team:
6) Ze Frank -- Hilarious intro to the day 1 keynote. He runs a website (http://www.zefrank.com/) that combines humor and art, all done in Flash. Definitely worth seeing him speak if you get a chance.
7) Keynote demos -- We showed two cool vision pieces during the keynote. One was focused around a travel scenario, and what a rich online/offline experience might look like. I don't think Kevin has shown this internally yet. We should get him to run through the demo for the team. The second was one that the XD team did to show how you might interact with media a few years from now: music, movies, games, etc. The design was really beautiful and exciting. For my money, this was my favorite demo of the show.
8) Adobe -- Bruce Chizen gave an address during day 1 keynote, but he couldn’t say a lot because the deal hadn’t closed yet. Meanwhile, a product manager for Adobe After Effects got onstage with Mike Downey and did some demos around Flash Video which I thought were pretty compelling.
9) Day 2 keynote skit -- The keynotes on day 2 were anchored by a skit based on the "Find your Match" campaign for Studio 8. Tim Buntel MC'd the show, pretending to be a cheesy lounge lizard. If you’ve ever been to a MAX with a Tim Buntel skit, I'm sure you can just picture it. Also, the outtakes from the video shoot for the Studio 8 campaign were especially funny.
10) Dreamweaver -- The new Dreamweaver features are great. The coding side feels more and more like HomeSite with each release. The visual features definitely felt more visual than any year I can remember. What I was most excited by was the Ajax demo that Jorge gave during the sneaks. He put together a page with a simple data grid, client side sorting, and updated client-side data without page refreshes, all within about 10 minutes.
-Sho
Posted by sho at 03:54 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
October 18, 2005
More on MAX demo glitches
Well, it's 2am, and we've been out carousing all night. I have this to report.
People have come up to me all evening to talk about the Flex Builder demo. The breakdown is like this:
80% -- "Wow.. you really kicked @$$! You totally pulled it out of the fire. We were all rooting for you. You were amazing! Holy #$(*&! Great job!"
20% -- "Hey... I'm sorry about the demo. It wasn't so bad. Don't be so hard on yourself."
Guess which kind of comment I prefer. :-)
Posted by sho at 02:02 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 17, 2005
What it's like when your demo goes South in front of 3000 people
Today at MAX, I was to give a quick demo of Flex Builder as part of the keynote address. This is essentially the same demo that Kevin gave at Web 2.0, and the same one that I explained in a bit more detail on the video on the Labs site. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a demo where you type in some code and show how quickly you can build a basic Flex app.
Well, I ran into some demo glitches. Would I have preferred that the demo go flawlessly? Of course. But things turned out ok in the end, which I'll explain in a minute.
Anyway, back to the demo story.
The first problem I ran into was a Flex Builder bug. It's alpha software, so there are bugs, right? I'd run into a few of them earlier, but I'd run through the demo ~50 times, and I thought I knew all the bugs.
Earlier in the day, I had done a run-through on the demo machine, and things had gone fine. Now, I was doing the demo on stage at the actual keynote, when I got to the part where I say "now, let me add a state called results", I noticed... hm... it looked like there was already a state called results in the states panel where there wasn't supposed to be.
It turns out that Flex Builder was confused and hadn't cleared out the states panel from the last time I'd run through the demo. Doh!
Well, I figured there was nothing to do but keep going and hope for the best. I deleted the fake state hoping no one would notice, and went back to script. I ran through a bit more of the demo and hit Run.
Compile error!
It turns out that because the states panel was confused, it had messed up my code. Again, this is alpha software, and it has bugs.
I scanned the code quickly and couldn't figure out what was wrong, so I made a quick joke, cleared my work and started over, moving as quickly as I could back to where I had been.
Ok. Now I was back to where I was supposed to be. But when I went to run the program, guess what happened? The compile error was gone (thankfully) but nothing showed up on the screen! Ack! I clicked the run button a couple more times and nothing happened. At this point, I started assuming that the program was just in a bad state.
What would you do in a situation like this? Things are seriously screwed. The application is *clearly* not happy, and what am I going to do? Go to a backup machine and start over? I'd already started over once. Am I going to ask the audience to sit through the beginning yet again?
Fortunately, someone shouts out from the audience: "Your browser is behind the other window!"
The application had come up after all. It was just hidden behind the window. *Whew*! People clapped. I find out later that it was James Polanco from our QA team who saved my bacon.
The funny thing is that (a) this happened because we were trying to be extra careful about the second portion of the demo, and we had pre-opened a browser window for the second part of the demo, and (b) I would normally have caught something like this, but I had assumed that the program was in a bad state.
I finished up the rest of the demo, the pictures came up, and people clapped some more. I felt like we'd pulled it out of the fire. Like I said before, the demo ended up fine in the end.
Throughout the rest of the day, people came up and congratulated me. "Man, that was really grace under pressure," etc. etc. People were really enthusiastic about it, too. They would smile and shake their heads and commiserate, while also talking about how good the demo was and how excited they were about Flex.
In the final analysis, I think the demo glitches meant that people were really engaged. It didn't feel fake and plastic, and it brought a certain tension to the whole thing. It's like watching a movie. You want the setup, you want the tension, and you want the climax.
Not that glitches are a good thing. Next time I do a demo, I want it to go flawlessly. :-)
Posted by sho at 08:16 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Flex Builder public alpha is here!
Hi folks.
I know I'm late to the party with this news, but I figured I had to write about it.
The bits are live. You can get them here:
http://labs.macromedia.com/
We are all incredibly excited about this alpha, and we're interested to see what you build with it.
Some of my favorite features:
Compiler in the tool -- obviously.
Strict type checking -- obviously.
States -- it's still a bit rough around the edges, but I think this has a lot of potential to change how we build Flex apps.
Simplified syntax -- certain tags are now optional, which makes for less verbose code.
Effects improvements -- allows data binding, multiple targets, and start delay
I'll leave it at that. I'm sure you will have your own lists of favorite features soon...
Posted by sho at 08:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
October 06, 2005
Zorn, Flex and Player public alphas coming soon...
Hi folks.
There have been a lot of exciting announcments this morning, but I've just been too busy to write anything about them. (...and truth be told, that's also the reason I've been too busy to write over the past few months. We've been heads down working on a public alpha release!)
Here's a my quick personal take on our announcements:
(1) Flash Player 8.5 with new VM -- This is a big deal in my book. Having a real VM that does JIT compilation, has a real notion of interfaces, classes, etc., with the option of strong typing makes the platform much nicer to program in.
(2) Framework and compiler in the tool -- We did this because we recognize that developers are key to successful platforms, and we want to allow as many people as possible to build RIAs with Flex. Meanwhile, we've developed great server data features that comprise Flex Enterprise Services, which we aren't ready to show quite yet...
(3) New framework -- The team has done a lot here to simplify the framework and make things more flexible. The team has also added some cool new functionality. Not much more I can say at this point, but I'll talk about it after the alpha bits are available.
(4) New tool -- Over the past year, we've been building a new tool from the ground up on top of Eclipse (which, in hindsight, was a great decision), and it's starting to take shape. There's still a lot to do, but it's at a point where we feel it's ready for people to start playing with, which is very exciting for all of us.
Finally, if you don't subscribe to the edge newsletter, you may not has seen the article by Dave Mendels which is worth checking out.
P.S. I'm writing from the Web 2.0 conference (where the wireless connectivity is great, naturally). Kevin Lynch presented on Flex, Flex Builder, and the new player just 30 minutes ago. I haven't yet had a chance to walk the halls to see what people thought, but generally, people here seem pretty interested in Flash, which is great.
Posted by sho at 03:34 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack