Greetings WOW members and Web professionals everywhere. Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
I?’m podcasting live today from Adobe MAX 2008 San Francisco. The Max event description states that the “event is an experience unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community.” From a Web professional and a WOW exec director perspective, I couldn’t agree more!
Mark DuBois, Professor at ICC and WOW Education Director is here as well and we’ve been roaming the halls to absorb the great content and to cover the goings on for this podcast. Along the way, we’ve met with many of WOW members, advisors, supporters and Adobe executives within the product categories, education team and evangelist at all levels attending the event. Stay tuned for more summaries of this great event in future podcast.
For today?’s podcast, I had the pleasure to interview Ben Forta, Director of Platform Evangelism at Adobe. Ben’s an incredibly bright, talented and an easy going guy. I asked Ben to summarize his keynote address with a focus on the walk aways for Web professionals. Today’s podcast also includes a short clip the morning session as well The theme for the keynote focused on how companies are breaking through the status quo for designing, developing and deploying engaging web experiences through seamless workflow and its definitely worth checking out.
Check it out on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.
Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProtraining.org, offering a complete solution for all your Web professional training needs including WOW certification options. Check it out at Web Professional Training website.
Transcript of Adobe MAX 2008 Keynote with Ben Forta, Director of Platform Evangelism at Adobe
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute, with a gentleman that needs no introduction, but for those that are not familiar, this is Ben Forta from Adobe Systems. He?’s presenting today as the keynote speaker. I?’d like to ask you Ben, could you summarize that session for us today?
BEN FORTA: Summarize a 19-minute keynote?
BILL: Yeah, in a couple–
BEN: How much time do I have?
BILL: Take as long as you want.
BEN: This morning?’s keynote focused on products and technologies, both ones that we just announced, like the CS4 products, as well as some that we haven?’t announced yet which will be coming out next year or so. We covered a lot of areas. We started out talking about some of the productivity gains in Flash CS4, making animation and interaction a whole lot easier both for professional designers as well as those that aren?’t professional that want professional results. We showed some pretty phenomenal functionality of Photoshop, allowing designers to do some very impressive things that would have taken many hours before, cleaning up images and working with comps, making them a whole lot… getting them to do what you want them to do in minutes as opposed to hours.
Then we showed one of the highly anticipated products, Flash Catalyst [indecipherable], which lets you to pull in a comp from Photoshop or Illustrator and actually start building a real live application and put it into actions that generates underlying Flex code. So that?’s exciting. We demonstrated, back into that, how to take that comp and put it into Flex Builder, and actually build it back into Flex Builder 4 [indecipherable]. We showed them sneaks of ColdFusion ID, coming out next year. We showed how you can take CS+ Builder and run it from–
BILL: Yeah, that was exciting.
BEN: Very cool stuff. Got a kick out of that. We showed very important work that we?’re doing to make Flash content searchable, so that Google and others can find it.
BILL: Totally awesome.
BEN: Very important stuff there. We showed the new Flash media server, so lots of very exciting technologies we showed. And the response has been phenomenal.
BILL: Yeah, it has been. Excellent stuff. And tonight?’s the sneak peek.
BEN: Tonight?’s the sneak peek. This is an annual event and we?’ll have a dozen or so presentations of stuff. It?’s a little less baked, some futuristic, some might see the light of day, others not. But it?’s a chance to show the crowds what it?’s working on, some of the innovative ideas.
BILL: Excellent. Thank you so much.
BEN: Good. Pleasure.