Keynote day 3

Mark Eaman (Corp. Evangelist) is now on stage. Today's keynote is all demos/labs type stuff. (Woohoo!)

First set of guests are: Peter Ryce and Dean Chen. Going to talk about collaborative technologies. Showing Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional. Showing a Flash based plugin for Yahoo Messenger 8. It is launching Connect from Yahoo. Seems like just a shortcut to a quick meeting with Connect via IM. (I say "just" but it does seem pretty cool.) PDFs are rendered in Connect - NOT via Flash Paper, but it is directly supported in Connect.

Next set of people are the ColdFusion folks. Tim Buntel is on stage. Tim tries to hit Ben's blog but it doesn't load. Heh - Ben is coming on stage as "Scorpio Man." Wish I had a camera on me. They are showing the server monitoring feature. I won't go into a lot of detail as I talked about this here. They are also talking about image manipulation, discussed here.

Now showing Soundbooth. To be honest, I have no idea what he is doing, but it involves sound. :) As a reminder, this is available on the labs now.

Next up is the Fireworks demo. Again - I'm not quite sure what to say about this as I don't use the product. She is designing a Flex app with it. Showing Pages panel which lets you do multiple pages for your web site. She is going to create a click through mock up. Now she is going to export to MXML. That's sweet. Wow. So she exported the design from Fireworks, exported to MXML, opened in Flex Builder 2, and in design mode it looks the exact same, and it created all the MXML. Nice! Fireworks is in private beta but you can "bug" an Adobe employee to try to get in.

Next is a sneak from Flex and Flex Data Services folks. Specifically they are going to show integrating AJAX with Flex Data Services. They are showing Spry (woohoo!). He will show the "Ajax Client for Flex Data Services." Not sure if that is an official name but it sounded like it. He replaced the Spry dataset with a Flex dataset. He uses a Flex app to edit data and it gets reflected in Spry almost immediately. Next guy up is going to show something involving lots of data I think. Demos hows live stock feed with charting and news items. (What is cool is that news items are linked to times in the stock price chart.) Page is a mix of Spry, HTML, and Flex Charting.

Next up is a woman speaking of the improvements to ActionScript. Talking about how to handle errors and how it can be a bit difficult. Showing a Check Syntax command on an ActionScript file. Shows errors directly below without having to compile to SWF. I wonder if it would make sense to add this to Flex Builder 2? Now showing targeting ActionScript files to particular SWF entries. Now showing adding break points to an ActionScript file. Exports movie. Now the UI is back in Flash stopped at the break point. You can see (and change) values.

Next up is the Dreamweaver sneak. Sneak will focus on how to make CSS design better. Talking about how to handle cross-browser CSS issues. New feature, CSS Advisor and Cross-Platform Advisor. He runs this and it finds a bug with his CSS. You can double click on problem report to go right to the line and get text on the bug in question. It also offers solutions.

Unfortunately I have to head out for a conference call. The session I'm running out on is a SAP and Flex Integration.