Macromedia MAX 2005

So here I am at Macromedia MAX 2005 in Anaheim, California. This is my first trip to California, and it has so far been a blast. This is officially day two, not counting Sunday when we got here for Community College and the Welcome Reception. Those were of course great--it's always good to rub shoulders with the other Macromedia User Group managers and members of Team Macromedia. I also ran into a former colleague of mine from Discover, which was a pleasant surprise. He is now working in San Antonio, Texas.

Yesterday and today's general sessions did not drop any huge bombshells about things to come from Macromedia. Much of Macromedia's concentration will be on Flash, Flex and mobile devices. They did, of course, pay attention to the new Dreamweaver 8 and Studio 8, and some notice was paid to ColdFusion 7.0.1 (code named "Merrimack") which was released 3 weeks ago. Work is currently underway on the new version of ColdFusion--code named "Scorpio".

We saw some demonstrations of Flash Lite 2.0 for mobile devices. This technology is currently available in parts of Europe and around in Asia, but is slow to be adopted in North America. There are a number of Nokia devices that will employ Flash as a phone-top interface.

I got to see some pretty great things that Dreamweaver 8 can do in the "Dreamweaver Killer Tips" session this morning with Angela Buraglia. I've got a trial version of version 8, but I don't have my DVD-ROM drive for my laptop with me--opting instead to use the extra lithium battery I have for that bay to extend my non-wall-warted laptop usage time.

Another thing I learned about was using Eclipse for ColdFusion. I've used Eclipse before for writing Java, but I didn't realize there was a real movement toward it by ColdFusion developers. Apparently there is a plug-in for Eclipse that provides a customized ColdFusion development environment. I'm anxious to check this out. I took Eclipse off this laptop because I wasn't using it anymore and I needed the disk space. I tried downloading it (106 MB) and the download stalls at 6 MB. Looks like I'll wait until I get home to try this out.

More later.