Well Day 3 has come and gone, with only one more day left in this lollapalooza of web design we call Adobe MAX. Today I had attended some pretty great sessions, most of which were centered around Flash Pro CS4 and it's enhanced animation capabilities, as well as workflow with Illustrator, Photoshop and Flash.

Couple of things I learned today that I didn't know before. In one class, the instructor showed us how he opened up a .mov file in Photoshop CS4. No - that's not a misprint. He opened up a .mov file in Photoshop. The mov opened up on screen as a still image with a scrubbable timeline underneath. The video in question was one of the Golden Gate Bridge which had of course, plenty of traffic moving across it. He cloned one of the cars and then placed a duplicate elsewhere on the timeline. I had never seen that before. Then he showed us an easy way to remove all of the traffic off of the bridge in a few clicks and it left no artifacts behind of the cars in question. I'm saving that one for a future tip here in dfwaug.net or one of our meetings. :]

In another session we went into a great deal about the Flash Bone and 3D Rotation Tools, for example. Flash is able to create "2.5-D" graphics very convincingly. While not true 3-D graphics, it certainly does a heck of a job in the delivery.

I also sat in on a "hands-on" on the new Adobe Catalyst (formerly Thermo) tool. It allows enterprises with Flex applications to provide a tool to designers (without Flex coding experience) to create a functional mockup of a Flex application and then hand it over to the Flex coders in their group to finetune in Flex. While I was excited when I first heard about it - unless there are plans to add Flex functionality to your product, I didn't see anything in Catalyst in the demo that couldn't be done in Flash directly.

There was a "sneaks" presentation today which showed some products "in development" at Adobe which "may or may not" find themselves in market in the near future. Very intriguing stuff. 

Tomorrow I'm attending a Photoshop CS4 Deep-Dive as well as session on delivering mockups in Fireworks.

It's been a great convention. I'm looking forward to hearing the presentations tomorrow and heading home. Next year's MAX is October 4-7 in Los Angeles. So start making plans!

Kevin