What was up at MAX

So I finally got back from MAX. There have been a number of posts already on the subject, so I won’t write a long post to repeat things already said. The big things at MAX were of course Flex 2, AS3 and the new VM, the announcement of Macromedia Labs, and Flash Lite 2.0 (to be available to developers in January).

Some minor things were a sneak preview of After Effects 7.0 (I’ll post a video of it later), cool new collaborative API’s to Breeze, and the fact that Director is really going nowhere (they showed two new things for the next release of Director, one being UI improvements and the other support for Flash 8. Dejavu anyone?)

One thing in particular got my attention: Stephen Elop used his keynote to throw mud at Microsoft by saying: "We’ve got two words for Microsoft: Try again". Now this of course made everyone laugh. But I had to ask myself later why Stephen tries to down-talk Microsoft’s Expression product line. If it were that bad and would in no way be able to compete with Flash, why would he even bother to talk about it? And in a number of sessions I also saw how many Macromedia employees pledged support for the Mac and Linux platforms. In my mind, support for margin operating systems (sorry, but Linux and MacOS are margin OS’s) is the most important aspect of the Flash Platform.

From what I’ve seen, Expression is a direct competitor to Flex. And from what I’ve seen it does things amazingly well, much better than even the new revamped Flex 2 framework with AS3. And Microsoft’s got muscle, that’s for sure. It seems that Macromedia is a little intimidated by Expression, and I believe they should. Should Microsoft decide to support multiple platforms with XAML (which I doubt), Flex and Flash would quickly find themeselves in a very competitive market.

1 Comment

• 
  JabbyPanda October 25, 2005 at 15:39

  I wonder, why Macromedia MXNA had classified this post as Flash Mobile
  Congratulations on having return to home and I hope your girlfriend (or should I call her a fiancee was very excited about it as well )
  I share your point of view on Expression. But Flex 2…. so many new useful features… very nice indeed..

  Reply