Adobe Unveils Barrage Of New Items At Max 2007

This week, Adobe opened the doors on the Max 2007 developer conference, and it’s various representatives, demonstrators, and evangelists have spent almost all of their time during the last few days touting the company’s plans for the future, showcasing its intent to retain its position as the leading supplier of content creation, media delivery, and Web development tools.

The company waxed poetic about its AIR solution, a superb, multi-platform-compatible piece of kit, given to the world only months ago and already gaining wide acceptance among a number of development houses, one of the more notable being eBay.

Adobe also took a moment to debut a new designer-specific application, Thermo, intended for use by those able to map concepts of Web applications and cutting edge websites on paper but lost when trying to translate those ideas to code. The company claims Thermo will construct in code what the handler of the mouse puts together in graphical form. Consider it a sort of Dreamweaver (a staple of the HMTL era) for present day creations.

Representatives at Max 2007 spoke about Flash as well, of course. It discussed its plans for Flash Player 10, which will be backed by a new programming language, dubbed Hydra. All in all, updates to Flash will presumably bring to the end user higher quality video with more efficient use of bandwidth, as well as offer more options for developers and content creators to beautify their various productions ever so much more.

Lastly, Adobe brought to view at the conference an in-depth taste of Photoshop Express, its Web-based Flash-backed photo editing solution, which it previously offered only as a momentary tease to a crowd at the Photoshop World convention held in September. Adobe proceeded to demonstrate the product for folks at this year’s Max conference, going through a series of actions and showing off its ability to maintain a history of edits that the user can quickly revert back to, much like one is able to do presently inside the company’s professional photo management solution, Lightroom. Manipulation of select portions of images is also possible with Photoshop Express. If a particular color of a particular segment of a JPEG, for instance, is unsatisfactory, it can be altered fairly easily.

Mind you, these sorts of action has been possible via Adobe’s desktop-based software for years, but only very recently have we heard of anything of this sort being done within the parameters of a Web browser. (Do please note that Adobe’s demonstration of Photoshop Express was performed inside Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. A discouraging sign, in this writer’s view.)

To wrap up, Adobe’s Max 2007 conference has been a newsworthy one, full of product announcements, all of which allude to a productive future in Web 2.0 development for years to come. Clearly the company has been working to ensure its position as leader in the markets to which it considers itself a part. Which is all good and well, because to see anything less from such an industry stalwart would likely lower the general benchmark for excellence. And that wouldn’t be good at all.

Screenshots:

Photoshop Express 

Adobe Thermo