MAX and Me: Day 2

MAX has gotten big — about 5,600 people big, That makes it harder, in some ways, to network and meet random new people in a sea of anonymity, but Adobe still works on the challenge. To what degree of success, I'm not sure. In any case, highlights from the day:

• The Keynote: Day 2: Ben Forta and Tim Buntel took the stage to show off a range of shipping and future projects which will make it easier, theoretically, to deliver rich experiences via Flex and in the browser. The high point for pretty much every ColdFusion developer in the room was the long-awaiting announcement of Adobe's ColdFusion plug-in for Eclipse, code-named "Bolt." Although we saw a disappointingly brief demo of Bolt, here's a few things that we did see:
  • Start and stop a CF server instance from within the IDE
  • Launch and run the server monitor from within the IDE
  • Introspection on components in a project so that when you create an object, you get a the "intellisense" drop-down list of methods in that object, as you would in Flex Builder
  • Introspection on queries on the current document, giving you a drop down of columns in each query
  • ORM management tools — which, intriguingly, Ben said would support "projects currently in the community." Does that mean Transfer?
  • Right-click on a table in the RDS dataview to generate a service CFC
  • Right-click on a generated component to generate an AJAX client for quick testing of that component
  That was all shown in about 3 minutes, but it was great to see. Bolt isn't even available in preview form, but you can sign up on Adobe Labs to get in on preview releases.
  
  In addition to Bolt, a good deal of time was spent on Flash Catalyst — the designer tool for Flex that used to be code-named "Thermo." Flash Catalyst has really moved towards being a designer's tool and seems to have left the middle ground of the designer/developer that it occupied in its initial premiere. It's a very impressive tool, importing full layers from Photoshop and Fireworks, and offering copy/paste between itself and Illustrator. Any piece of artwork can be turned in to a Flex component (button, list, slider, datagrid), and it offers 3D transitions thanks to Flash Player 10. Interestingly, the preview of Flash Catalyst that they made available to conference attendees was Intel Mac only. I guess they really do know their developer audience.
  
  While there were other projects and tools presented (including a look at what some of Flex Builder 4 will be able to do, including simpler services generation), one other highlight was Project Alchemy: the C/C++ to ActionScript3 translation library. This library allows developers to take any of the millions of C/C++ libraries and use them in ActionScript 3 projects. The demos were very impressive (including running the original Doom and a Super NES emulator inside of a Flash application), and it's great to see Adobe really reaching out to more developers who otherwise would never have considered Flash as a platform for application development or deployment because C/C++ is now "locked" to the desktop or server).
  
  
• The Error of Our Ways: Robert Hoekman, Jr., whose two books about usability and design I've written about before, gave this talk on why users, be they well-educated or not, old or young, thinkers or doers, suddenly become "idiots" when dealing with computer-based technology. Now I have my own theories on learned helplessness and computer-based technology, but Hoekman took a good part of his talk to discuss the psychology behind this evaporation of common sense when using computers. The points he made dovetail nicely in to his books, and while there wasn't a lot new presented here if you've read his books, his main point was this: humans make mistakes, change their minds, and are imprecise. Software doesn't allow for this, which causes impedence between what we expect to happen and what does happen. In the end, people aren't idiots. We make them idiots. We don't help them. We write bad error messages. We allow them to make simple errors in the first place. We aren't flexible and we don't allow them to fix their mistakes. Using the concept of poka-yoke, we can set up systems that prevent users from making mistakes in the first place and offer tools to let them get out of a place that they didn't want or mean to be in our application.
  
  

That's it for now. I did want to give a major shout out to Ted Patrick and his MAX organizing team who did an amazing job with the conference party on Tuesday night. The California Academy of Sciences is a phenomenal building, with an amazing and diverse amount of content under that beautiful, living roof. I'm telling all my friends and family in the area that they really have to go, and I know it's going to be a major stop on future trips to San Francisco. Coupled across the park with the beautifully renovated De Young Museum, the two locations made for probably the best party that Adobe has thrown for MAX attendees in years.