Adobe keynote at FITC Amsterdam

(I live-blogged this during the keynote; there may be typos, inaccuracies, etc. It has not been proof-read.)

Mike Downey takes the stage.

Mike's going to show us some sneak peeks today that haven't been shown before.

Adobe released Flex 3 and AIR a few hours ago and Mike's kicking off the keynote with a history of AIR.

AIR allows web developers to use existing technologies (HTML, AJAX, Flash, and Flex) to build desktop applications.

(Mike's showing us examples of AIR applications - you can find AIR showcase applications on Adobe.com.)

One of the examples is Analytics Reporting Suite for Google Analytics. It uses Flex and the charting components to display data from Google Analytics and output PDFs, etc.

There's going to a be a dot release of AIR later this year. And they want to frequently update the AIR runtime.

(Serge Jespers has taken the stage and is showing us Flex Builder 3, which also just shipped.)

Serge shows us how you can easily skin Flex components using Photoshop. He creates the various states of a button component in Photoshop (he could also have used Flash, Illustrator, or Fireworks) on different layers using a naming convention and then uses the Import Art feature in Flex Builder 3 to import the PSD and automatically skin the button component.

Next, using the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3, he is making a Flex component from a Flash movie clip. After creating the Flex component (SWC), he adds it to his project's Library in Flex Builder and he can now use the component just like any other Flex component.

(You can download the The Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 from the Adobe Exchange.)

Finally, he's showing the Create Application from Database example (basically, scaffolding for Flex) using a simple MySQL database and PHP.

(This is very cool and is the sort of generic server-side support that was previously lacking in Flex Builder.)

And finally, finally ("do we have time for one more?") he is showing us the Export Release Build feature for reducing the size of your Flex applications (Flex Builder now creates a debug version by default). This reduces the size of the SWF from 370K to 270K when the debug code is removed.

Next, he creates a new Module of one of the panels and then loading it in at runtime. He uses the new ModuleLoader tag to load in the new module. The original file is now reduced to 163K.

And finally, he is demonstrating the Flex framework caching feature. You can create a runtime shared library for the Flex Framework. The framework is then not included in your application's SWF but loading in dynamically at runtime. This brings down the size of the SWF to 50K. (And the Flex framework is cached so if a user has been to any Flex application before, it won't be loaded again.)

(Mike's back on stage.)

Flash Player 9 penetration is now on 98% of all machines (and it got there faster than any other piece of software ever; it was released in December 2007).

Mike's giving us an overview of the latest Flash 9 Player update (Movie Star) and the new FMS 3 and FMIS3 servers.

Richard Galvan takes the stage. He's the Flash Product Manager. He's going to show sneak peeks for Astro and Diesel.

(OK, I recorded the sneaks using Seesmic. I'm going to embed the video in the next blog post.)

I'm running off to present my own session in a few minutes.

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