Some Max Thoughts, a work in progress

Well, I got back from Max on Thursday. It’s the following Monday morning, and I think I have had ample time to distill the important things out of the experience. Let’s see if I can successfully now turn those thoughts into prose.

Much of the message from Macromedia this year was about Flex, their next iteration of leveraging the company's crown jewel. Flex is oriented towards application developers, and its appeal is certainly that it acts as a fairly RAD UI tool. Flex builder is based on Eclipse. That sounds great, until you look a little closer and realize that, at least in its Alpha iteration, it only runs on Windows. What? Isn't that sort of the point of Java? To run on any runtime? That's clearly a BigCo "we don't get it" decision. I would be running the IDE on my machine right now if it would run here. By the way, I am your target audience, and make platform decisions.

They didn't talk that much about "Scorpio", the codename for ColdFusion 8. They did, however, demo some cool Macromedia developed additions to CFEclipse. I was all excited about this at first. After thinking about it more in light of the above paragraph, I wonder if things like RDS support will be Windows only features when released. The file browsing that they had built, with it's cool two tabbed interface like Homesite, made me drool. That, honestly, is probably the one thing that has kept me using Homesite all this time.

There's more to talk about, obviously, like Flash 8.5, and Actionscript 3 and whatnot. I hope to get in here and add more comments as time allows today and tomorrow.