We’re back from Milan after 3 days at MAX 2008. During the first keynote, Mark Anders has demonstrated our Tour de Flex heatmap sample which shows earthquakes density over the world. Very nice to see our work on these two very large screens.

Then I attended to Introduction to Thermo and the next generation of Flex.
It was focused on Flash Catalyst (formerly known by its codename Thermo) and new Flex Builder features. Main topics were:

• The new workflow Designer - Developer using CS4 Suite, Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder
• Flex Builder 4 features:
  • Network monitor
  • Getters and Setters generator
  • Conditional break points
  • Run to cursor
  • Move refactoring
  • Improved code hinting

On the afternoon, Christophe demonstrated some ILOG Elixir tips and tricks and new components of version 2.0. Some photos are on the slide show below.

(First time I host photos on Photoshop.com. Very nice Flex application which use Flash 10 file system access to upload photos from the browser.)

The second day, I attended to:

• What’s new in Flash Player 10: nothing very new but always interesting to see demo on new features
• Flex Workflows with Flash CS4 Professional: Serge Jespers showed how to create custom components and containers using Flex Component Kit for Flash
• Designer Best Practices with Flex
• Illustrator CS4: Deep Dive: Very impressive demonstration of the power of Illustrator CS4. Have to improve my design skills

And the last day I attended to:

• Flash Internals:
  • How the JIT works
  • AS3 vectors: The new typed array which increases performance
  • The new graphics primitives and new text layout APIs
  • New sound APIs, allows to generate and alter sounds
  • Flash content indexed by search engines. It is based on a dedicated and optimised flash player shiped by Adobe. This player acts as a virtual user and grab all the text by simulating events on UI controls
• Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex: Matt Chotin described Spark architecture, FXG and Gumbo new features like ASDoc support in MXML documents, 2-way databinding, states management and Pixel Bender. Lots of things to consider for the next ILOG Elixir version.
  This document is a good overview of Gumbo features.

Finally, live from ILOG booth, a bonus video of Erwan found on this blog.

Tags: max 2008 milan

Posted by Damien Mandrioli in Conferences, Flex, ILOG Elixir. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.