1500 people, 4 days, 120 sessions, 60 skill labs. MAX is probably the biggest Adobe event, it’s an opportunity to connect with designers, developers, partners, executives and have a sneek peak on Adobe’s strategy and future products. This year for the first time it was in Milan, I couldn’t miss it.

First impression: they have money, lots of money. And the kick-off meeting was, hmmm, let’s say “typically american”… 3 giant screens with 3D animations, red lasers and loud pop rock music. It made me think about a kind of Macworld-of-the-poor .

Very shortly, Adobe’s strategy for the coming year is built around three main concepts, which are Client
and Cloud, Social Computing and Multi-screens. Nothing really new or groundbreaking for us here, well Adobe is not Apple  but the right basics at least.

Client and Cloud

Among others, Air and Flex represent Adobe’s strategic approach to combine desktop and online applications. In a few words: taking advantage of services across the cloud while being strategically present on the users’ desktops.

Social Computing

Adobe’s tools already allow us to create content, well they’re gonna help us to share it more and more. Share and create with your friends and the rest of the world. Less broadcast, more participation. Real time collaboration, leverage use of social services. Three examples? Cocomo, Wave and photoshop.com.

Multi screens

Think mobile first ! Target, design and share for multi-screen world. Adobe is working on solutions aiming at facilitating the creation of consistent and reliable experience across screens and devices. They’re initiators of the Open screen project and want to impose flash player 10 as the “industry standard” for delivering rich content across all our electronic toys. Well, even tough the intention is “good”, Adobe are probably not the right people when it comes to open and standards, so….

2 cool things I tried anyway are the Flash Catalyst (ex thermo project) and building Air application directly within Dreamweaver CS4, using relatively basic skills of xhtml, css and javascript.

Adobe Flash Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. I had the occasion to try it and have a special MAX 2008 early beta release on my mac  and I have to say that this is pretty smart.

First of all because it makes the entire process of designing software more flexible and more efficient. Because it allows to design interaction and motion very early in the design process, stop thinking fixed. And also because it gives a code output directly usable for developers, so that they don’t need to rebuild everything from scratch. It will not replace flash, because it’s mainly intended for rough design purposes, sketch and ideal for interactive wireframes… Adobe will release a public beta release early next year, so watch it ! I will try to post a more detail explanation, with screenshots in early january on this blog.

That’s it for now.
Best.

Take a chair (like the one I had in school ^^), attach it to one of these very expensive meteo balloon with a HF video camera, send everything in space and see what’s happening. The video is a 40 minutes sequence shot, from the ground up to the stratosphere — until the balloon explodes and everything breaks down. They didn’t find anything back.

Just a sneek peak:

escape_vehicle_web

I’ve seen this video the other day in an small event organized by the Arts Catalyst, it’s called Escape vehicle #6 and was made by Simon Faithfull. Simple yet powerful idea… and realized.

Since I joined frog design seven monthes ago, I’ve been travelling a lot. I’m very excited about that for many reasons. As we’re not talking about holidays’ trip, let’s say that it’s giving me the occasion to share uncommon moments with an entire kind of population I didn’t actually know before, the ‘professional business travellers’. People that go to the airport as you go to a supermarket. People that know the three-letters code for every single airport in the world. People that don’t watch through the window in the plane because they’ve seen that thousands of times.
Standing up in the cold, stinky bus that will drive me to an extra-small Lufthansa ‘CityLine’ plane in Malpensa, I still feel different from all these business men and executive women that wonder what a young guy like me is doing here at 7 in the morning. I’m sure they can’t even imagine that I work with people like them. It’s like being at the border of two different worlds and somehow such a pleasant feeling.

My strangest feeling was probably 3 monthes ago, I was coming back from Seoul after a really hard-working week (and a really long fun night out).

I felt asleep in the plane, waiting for take-off and suddenly woke up when we were about to leave. At this moment just before flying all over Eurasia, I really felt I had no “home”, I mean not linked to anywhere physical.

One thing I understood, feeling “home”, wherever that is, is something really pleasant sometimes.