cfguy

So, it was an exciting general session this morning.  Blue Man Group was the suprise opening act, they put on a great 15-minute condensed version of their stage show.

Some exciting stuff on the horizon!

• Photoshop and Fireworks will both continue to be developed, and it looks like Adobe will market Fireworks as the layout/interactivity tool for web designers, and will push Photoshop as the high-end graphic design and production tool.
• Adobe is releasing an audio editing tool.
• The next version of Acrobat will load faster and be less of a resource hog.  Yay!  It will also support loading and saving data from PDF forms using web services.  It will ALSO have a tool that can 'intelligently' convert a scanned-in paper form to a database-driven, fillable PDF!
• Flex 2 is FREE.  Nobody seems to know this.  Download it now.  How is it free, you ask?  Because Adobe will make money selling their FlexBuilder IDE (which is NOT required in order to develop Flex apps - you can use Dreamweaver, notepad, whatever.. Just like CF), and it's charting plugin.  Adobe will also sell 2 versions of a highly optimized Flex Data Services 2 add-on.   Flex Data Services 2 Express Edition is free however.
• ColdFusion MX8 (Scorpio) will support interfacing with .NET components NATIVELY.  This is freaking huge.  It basically means you will be able to leverage a vast majority of new code being written on EITHER MAJOR PLATFORM - Java and .NET! For those of us that have had the misfortune of leveraging .NET web services using CF in the past, this will be greatly eased as well!
• The new Jaguar (not sure which model) has a 'command console' (temperature, gps, all that good stuff) that runs Flash.  It was demoed live and in person at the General Session this morning.  Cool Stuff!
• A few Apollo apps were demoed.  I didn't really "get it" until this morning, but here's the bottom line: Apollo will allow you to develop flex apps that run on any platform (PC, MAC, Linux, Solaris) without any modification.  It will leverage each operating system's standard interface.  Awesome!  It will also allow you to build apps that run online as well as off-line.  An demo of an RSS reader that downloads videos for later off-line viewing drove the point home.  Keep your eyes on Apollo, it's going to be HUGE.

Stay Tuned!