Hey - I'm posting the first part of my keynote review now as the net access is a bit flakey. I will update this entry with an edit later in the keynote.

Greetings from Adobe MAX. I'm sitting in the first general session waiting for things to start up. So far the conference has been going very well. My only complaint is that the hotel is so large it is incredibly confusing finding your way around. I'm sure I'll figure it out (by Thursday I bet). As the keynote progresses I'll add my notes, so please forgive the haphazard nature of this entry.

Wow - they are opening with Blue Man Group. This was my first time seeing them - and wow - just amazing. (Although I kept thinking of Arrested Development.)

Kevin Lynch is now on stage. This is the largest MAX to date. Reader 8 and Acrobat 8 will be released soon.

Shantan Narayen(spelled wrong) is now on stage. Talking about merger between Adobe and Macromedia. Talking about Labs and how successful it has been. Mentioned the new Digital Editions product available on Labs.

Flash Lite is now running on over a hundred million devices.

Theme for this conference is Beyond Boundaries. One word: Engagement.

Kevin is back to show some demos. Talking about how fast Flash player updates across the web. (This is old news I think, but darn impressive.) Shows an AS2 Flash demo versus AS3 and the speed difference is incredible. 100,000 people have downloaded Flex.

Now showing workflow between various products. Greg Rewis is on stage to demonstrate this. Starting off with Fireworks. Oh oh - having tech issues. Been there before! He opens up a Photoshop file in Fireworks. It looks the same it did in Photoshop. (I don't use Photoshop or Fireworks so I don't know how cool that is.) He talks about how normally you would export to PDF to make something the client could see. But he is showing a better process now. Various pages in Fireworks can be linked, allowing you to make a change in one page that affects others. Can export the whole thing to HTML and it works very well from what I can see. Now in Dreamweaver. He shows how you can cut from Photoshop and paste it into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver converts it to a JPG for you and updates the HTML. Now showing AJAX example. Talking about the Spry framework. Showing how you can use Spry inside of Dreamweaver. Very nice - he uses dialogs for everything including the transition effects.

Now showing workflow around Flash. Flash can import (will be able to I should say) a Photoshop file.

Edited:

Showing AfterEffects. New "Puppet" tool. Lets you move a character like a puppet. Soundbooth is a new audio application from Adobe. Made for people who are not audio experts. Will be available on Labs.

Now showing RIA workflow - design comp to Flex and using data from ColdFusion. Presenter is running Flex Builder 2 on the Mac (whooyah!). He is building a new Flex theme in Illustrator - exporting from SWF. Back in Flex Builder he is going to start using the SWF. Wow - I didn't know if you attached a CSS file to a Flex project and did design view it would show up. Silly me. I used to just rebuild for every little CSS change.

Now showing how he uses ColdFusion to power the Flex app. Later this week the Mac version of Flex Builder will be available as a beta. Flex team members here are sharing the code if you can hunt them down.

Ben Forta is talking about ColdFusion. It has been selling very well. After CF7 shipped, work on CF 7.0.2 and Scorpio began at once. Showing the application generator with Flex Builder.

Now showing Scorpio. He only has time for one feature. But mentions new image processing - server monitoring. We will have full image manipulation processing in ColdFusion. 50 functions for image processing.

PDFs and SWF: Shows how Acrobat can find form fields in a non-form form. (If that makes sense.) Showing LiveCycle Designer and how he used it to design the form. Shows a Flex app that lets you go back and forth between Flex and PDF. As he enters data in one - the other side gets updated. Scorpio will also be able to work in this space very well.

Now showing Apollo. Ed Rowe showing it off. Apollo is a cross operating system runtime. Lets you build RIA for the desktop. Shows installing an application from the browser. He runs it from the desktop and it works just like a normal application. Apollo can read/write from the local disk. Now showing it run from the Mac. Application runs the exact same under the Mac. Apollo is not just Flash but Flash and HTML. He demonstrates HTML support by running Google Maps inside it.