Macromedia CEO Rob Burgess opened up the second general session of this year's MAX conference with a big thank-you to the developer community. "It's your work that creates our industry," he said. "We're really inspired by it."

In the session, Burgess introduced some of the newer Macromedia business opportunities to this core developer audience, including new communication, publishing, and training products; and new mobile and devices for Macromedia Flash content. He rounded out the session by presenting the annual MAX Awards.

Rob Burgess at MAX 2004

The opening presentation featured kids talking about the technology used in their daily lives. "My mom doesn't know how to use the phone book on her cell phone," one girl said. "I have to teach her." Another boy talked about how the interviewer probably only had a calculator and a black-and-white TV when he was a kid, but now, all of his own friends have mobile phones, PDAs, and more.

Burgess focused on what he called the "business impact of platform change," and said that there were two big indicators of this wave: the high rates of usage in Asia and Europe, and mass adoption by a new market—younger people who are hooking up with technology. "It's impossible to overestimate the impact that devices will have on everything we do," he said. "Flash is going to be there in devices of all kinds—devices in your car, devices in your kitchen."

Macromedia president of Mobile & Devices, Juha Christensen, gave developers a reason for excitement: the massively exploding number of mobile phone users. He said that there are around 1.4 billion users of mobile phones, and that they are aching for the type of content that Flash developers can provide. "If anyone is able to light up mobile phones, I think it's the people in this room here," he said. "Our mission is to make it simple to create mobile content for people who live their lives on the go."

Macromedia president of mobile and devices, Juha Christensen

Christensen talked about some of the great applications that have Flash Lite, the Flash profile for mobile phones. He showed some i-mode applications running on DoCoMo handsets in Japan, including a news application, an interactive subway map, and a dating service. He also demonstrated News Express, a new service from T-Mobile, which provides information-rich content in a Flash interface. Finally, Christensen showed a sneak peek of FlashCast, which he said, "mirrors the metaphor of cable TV" on mobile phones. As he showed the FlashCast AccuWeather application, he noted, "Without latency, you can know the weather in New York, Los Angeles, any city. It executes really fast, and the experience is amazing. It's much more immersive, much more exciting—something that is much more suited to users of mobile phones."

Finally, Christensen talked about some of the new resources that the Macromedia mobile team has put out for developers. "Mobile is everywhere, and it's everywhere at MAX this year," he said, as he described the sessions and events at this year's MAX Mobile Day. He also introduced the new Macromedia mobile website, full of new mobile resources, at mobile.macromedia.com. Highlights of the site include a new Mobile Developer Program and a contest for mobile developers. (You can also access these at the Mobile & Devices Developer Center.)

Work Is Still Work, Just More Collaborative and Effective Than in the Past

"Business solutions have changed a lot over the past 20 years," said Tom Hale, general manager of Communications, Publishing, and Training at Macromedia,"but work is still work." Every worker communicates, publishes, collaborates, and makes that content accessible to other workers in the company. Publishing to the web is mired with the old business process problems: a backlog of requests for updates, out-of-date materials, or too-expensive CMS systems that require too much customization to manage the process. "Our job is to make your work experience as good as it can be through Macromedia products," said Hale.

Tom Hale explains the typical business process and how it has improved the user experience with products like Macromedia Breeze and Contribute

With that, the screen flickered, </hassle>, or "the end of hassle." With products like Macromedia Contribute, businesses processes are more streamlined, helping end users update their web pages without having to request the change through a web developer. This makes web developers especially happy. However, as the Contribute team worked on version 3, they realized that they had previously left the IT administrator out of the equation. The Macromedia team updated Contribute 3 to make it more scalable and extensible for server-side development. Among some of the most exciting new features:

• Being able to hook the login process up to an LDAP or user directory (something that makes IT administrators happy because they don't have to maintain another user database for another web application; they instead leverage existing user permissions)
• Each user action sends SOAP notification to the server via web services that server-side programmers can take advantage of for server-side applications. The team demoed a ColdFusion app built by Gruden Communications that showed how to use this feature to:
  • Create a page index of all changed pages
  • Generate automatic RSS feeds for updated pages
  • Update a blog-like view of recently published site content

Here's a problem the University of Rochester fixed by using Contribute—a problem that is all too common: The web team maintained approximately 25,000 static HTML pages. By using Contribute, however, they retained central control over the design while being able to let end users update their content on their own. The users loved being able to make their own changes and see them reflected in the live site, as well as the integration with Macromedia Dreamweaver to edit changes. Contribute doesn't require users or companies to pay for a service contract; they just run an installer and are ready to go. The University of Rochester team commented on the out-of-the-box usability; they immediately started using it and benefiting from it. One web developer said, "Now I can program instead of dragging and dropping files." Hale awarded a customer appreciation award to Make Hazard of the University of Rochester web team: a T-shirt with "I saved millions of dollars for my organization with Contribute and all I got was this WPS T-shirt!" emblazoned across the front.

Mike Hazard of the University of Rochester receives a customer appreciation award

Bring Users into Your World with Macromedia Breeze

At a recent Macromedia quarterly meeting, Burgess explained how the experience for business users evolved. Instead of a recorded conference call, users were able to log into a Macromedia Breeze Live presentation and hear all about the direction of the company and its current financial status from Burgess and from CFO Betsy Nelson. Moreover, users were able to see profitability charts in the main content pod, and pause and fast-forward to areas of the meeting that interested them most through a table of contents in the left-side pod in the Breeze interface.

This is all about "bringing people into your world," said Burgess. Moreover, the experience is more available to you today than ever before. Macromedia Breeze Live is available on the Macromedia website. He explained how users like Philip Torrone use Breeze to collaborate with other innovators to create inventions like radiation detectors, virtual tuba pocket PCs, and much more. "Imagine what you could do if you could invite someone into your world," said Burgess.

Rapid E-Learning

There has been an evolution in e-learning. It used to be that the development of skills and increased competency were its main goals. The trend is moving towards two more goals, however:

• Critical knowledge transfer: embedded video in Breeze demonstrations (affectionately called "breezos" at Macromedia), assessment, feedback, and storing results in databases
• Information broadcast: interactive demos and simulations created through Macromedia Captivate, the next version of Macromedia RoboDemo

Next, Hale invited Silke Fleischer, product manager for Captivate, to "teach" him all about embedding FlashPaper in Breeze presentations. Of course, like many general managers, Hale got an important call from CEO Rob Burgess to attend some important matter. As Tom ran from the stage, he said, "Just go ahead, Silke, you start teaching and then I'll be back."

Silke Fleischer builds a simulation in Macromedia Captivate in three minutes

Fleischer looked around awkwardly and said, "Well, we have three minutes to create a simulation so Tom can learn how to do this task." With that, Fleischer created a demo with captions, a click box that stored results, audio instructions, and synched audio and object elements in the new Timeline feature in Captivate. Moreover, she explained, you could pull the content into Macromedia Flash for more design work. As Hale returned to the stage and used the simulation and followed its instructions, he said, "Wow, it's just like using the software."

Macromedia Experience: 99% Good

Don Norman, principal of Nielsen Norman Group, logged in over a Breeze Live connection to explain some concepts in his new book, Emotional Design. Great experiences on the web are just like great gustatory experiences; to enjoy them, all web experiences need to be:

• Visually attractive
• Behaviorally effective
• Reflectively pleasing

Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group explains the fundamentals of good user experience

He especially liked what he saw of web application evolution and the use of interface elements like HALO controls from Macromedia Flex. He showed how using the Flex Store (you can demo the Flex Store in the Flex Developer Center Application Examples page) he could move the price slider to select products in a price limit, drag items into his shopping cart, and use the accordion control checkout, all within one page—without any additional page loads. This is "interaction that wasn't possible before, but is possible today...so...hurrah!"

MAX Awards Winners

Burgess concluded today's general session by presenting this year's MAX awards. The winners for each category are as follows:

Advertising Experience: Yahoo! Messenger IMVironments

IMVironments are a viral Flash/HTML technology giving Yahoo! Messenger users a shared messaging environment with richer experiences through music and movie-themed environments, games, and Yahoo! services.

Branding Experience: Nikespeed.com

NikeSpeed.com is an event, an experience, and a celebration of speed in all of its forms. It takes users on a four-step "Journey to Speed"—a journey that will help visitors discover "you're faster than you think."

Business Experience: Ofoto NexPress Platform

Launched in early spring 2004, the goal of Ofoto's "NexPress Platform Project" is an entirely new, end-to-end proprietary technology platform that gives Ofoto customers the ability to create and publish personal products using Kodak's new digital offset printer, NexPress.

Customer-Facing Experience: News Express

News Express is the first European implementation of an offline news and infotainment service. The main objective of News Express is to provide customers with a truly superior and unique offline mobile multimedia news and entertainment service, available on both 2.5G and 3G devices.

Education Experience: SPIKE X Developed by The Wharton School – University of Pennsylvania

The SPIKE Student Intranet brings together every facet of a Wharton student's academic (and sometimes social) life into one convenient package, encompassing not only academic and advising resources but connections to physical resources.

E-Learning Experience: TeachIVUS

TeachIVUS is a medical image measurement simulator designed for cardiovascular professionals. The program allows users to measure intravascular ultrasound images interactively and then compare their results immediately against an expert measurement.

Government and Nonprofit Experience: NAVAIR Career Development Office Website

The NAVAIR Career Development website provides one central location for all computer-based training for the Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) community. Macromedia Breeze is used because of the excellent user experience it provides.

Media, Entertainment, and Gaming Experience: JK Rowling Official Site

The JK Rowling website is designed to give a true reflection of the writing life of JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series of books. The site gives her fans insight into her writing world and the home page interface itself is an exact replica of her desk, with the items on the desk designed to mix Muggle life with wizard life.

People's Choice Award: The Adventures of Seinfeld and Superman

In order to promote the benefits of the American Express card in a creative way, Digitas developed a highly interactive website that showcases exclusive "webisodes" developed by Ogilvy & Mather featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Superman.

About the authors