Day One MAXies

Every conference has its share of turds and gems. Trying to stay glass half full, here were the list of gems I witnessed from day one at MAX.

Ely Greenfield – As the Oracle might say, “he’s got the gift.” I’d love some time in an osmosis chamber with this cat–it’d be guaranteed to take some of the dumb off.

Ryan Taylor. Had a fantastic session on Pixel Bender. Spoke articulately in code (difficult). I’m no expert now, but he broke it down and made it approachable and desirable. I’d go back for more. Check out his blog.

Maria Shriver – keynote was ho hum. Huge production value, but the overall story seemed, well, less than ground breaking. Shriver stole the show–charismatic and raised to lead (I’m an anti-class American, but she was in a league of her own). Wave was undeserving of the spotlight and CoCoMo feels like something that didn’t sell but has been repackaged as a PaaS.

Loser Gets Shipped Off to Microsoft

Going out on a limb, but the best line from the MAX 08 Sneaks has to be:

“Adobe devs who get the most applause get an iPod. Loser gets shipped off to Microsoft.”

Good clean fun. ;-)

Oh Me, Oh My – YouTube Supports 720p

Caught this info via a Ryan Stewart tweet last week. Looks like YouTube supports up to 720p video if the source video is high enough quality.

Good to know. The real question is WTF Google? Why don’t we know what exactly all the requirements are? For instance, I work for a company that would be very interested in knowing how to achieve pass through upload (we encode video to YouTube’s specs and then upload and thereby skip the YouTube encoding step–saving time and YouTube CPU). If you, YouTube, insist on being the 800 lbs. gorilla, its high time you were WAY MORE TRANSPARENT. I want a legit service that’s not so opaque and has real features instead of hacks posted on blogs. Just my two cents. ;-)

Adobe MAX 2008 Keynote Pics

I’m a bit behind, but below the fold you’ll find some pics from the keynote.

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The XMP Revolution is Here

I was testing some MPEG4-AVC playback code the other day and ran into a Flash Player runtime exception I hadn’t ever seen before:

Hmph. An onXMPData callback–that piqued my interest. I’ve long been a fan of metadata and XMP in particular (it takes a special type of nerd to have the meta love), so when I saw this error the wheels began to turn immediately. I had been testing a lot of video files lately, but this particular piece of content was created with After Effects CS4. This made me think that the long and slow roll out of XMP into the Adobe suite was finally here and I wanted to know what exactly they were doing.

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