Last week I attended Adobe MAX in Chicago. The theme of the conference was Connect - Discover – Inspire and the main focus was on Flex, Flash, AIR and Cold Fusion. There were some general sessions where all 4000 participants were attending, but more interestingly there were a large number of 1 hour workshops and 1½ hours hands-on sessions. Here I want to share some of the highlights of the conference. 

Jared Spool: Web 2.0 - The power behind the hype. Jared Spool is the founder of UIE a company who is researching, training and consulting about usability.  Jared Listed 4 things that, in his opinion, are the 4 cornerstones in web 2.0:

• API, application programming interface - the common language whereby websites and web services allow others to connect to each other. A good illustration is the way Google Maps lets other use their maps together with other data, e.g. Housingmaps.com that uses a mash up of Google Maps and Graigslist to show available houses on a map.
• Folksonomies, the way users collaboratively create and manage tags to annotate and categorize content
• RSS, Real Simple Syndication – Content subscription
• Social networks, where rating and reviews influence other users.

 Jared gave some examples where these cornerstones are used:

• www.flickr.com/groups/mappr/
• Www.persistent.info/overplot/
• www.twittervision.com

Jared Spool: What makes a design seem intuitive.I also attended another session with Jared Spool, this one was about intuitive design. Jared talked about the users “knowledge gap” - the gap between the users current knowledge about a topic and the target knowledge about that topic. The designers challenge is to make that gap as small as possible so the users easily can overcome that. He proposed different ways to identify that:

• Field studies - Help identify the user’s current knowledge
• Usability studies - Help identify target knowledge and gap

Matt Cutts: Optimizing search for RIA’s (Rich Internet Applications)In short Matt’s conclusion on search optimizing for RIA’s is that it can’t be done - if you want to have your RIA site, search engine indexed, you need to build an alternative version of the site in plain html. Matt’s guess was that this was the way to do it the next 5 years, until Google (and others) was able to properly index Flash etc. Besides that he had some general SEO advice:

• Find the relevant keywords that describe your business, and use them through out the website. Build specific entry pages (landing pages) to target keywords.
• Always have a link to a sitemap (Google has some advice on how to build and automated sitemap under Google > for webmasters)
• Link on keywords - use your keyword as active links.
• In a page’s copy/text - get as many relevant keyword incorporated on a single page.
• “Above the fold is for humans - below the fold is for robots.” With that he meant that, on the bottom of the pages you could incorporate sitemaps, secondary link etc. that is to the use of search engines - while keeping the information relevant for the users on top of the page.
• One of the best sites to utilize SEO is Wikipedia - they always show up high on all searches.

Adobe revealed a couple of the new programs and web services they are working on:  

• Adobe Share - a 1 GB online storage application / document sharing service, with an open API so other applications can easily access this. E.g. if we build an online photo site, the users could easily and safe store their files, pictures etc. on Adobe Share - we would just build the front interface for it. The users could then have all different files from all different websites and applications stored on Share
• Buzzword - Adobe announced that they had acquired Virtual Ubiquity, a company that has build a Flex-based online word processor. I have myself used Buzzword the last couple of days - and must say it’s really cool!
• Cocomo - Adobe have a screen share application called Adobe Connect / Adobe Breeze that is used for meeting where the users have a need to present things online. Cocomo is the next step for Connect, where the different components (chat, webcam, audio and screen share) are being build as single Flex-components, that lets developers build their own screen share applications using those components.
• Thermo - There was a lot of talk about Adobe Thermo at the conference. Thermo is a designer’s tool to bridge the gap between the designers and flex developer. The designer is able to take a design created in e.g. Photoshop and easily creates input fields, drop-downs etc. and Thermo then creates Flex files with mxml code that the developer easily can work with.
• xd.adobe.com - At the conference Adobe launched Experience Design, a new resource site for RIA developers and designers.

Besides that Adobe shoved sneak peaks of new versions of Flash, Adobe Media Player, an online consumer version of Photoshop and much more. 

I have posted a number of pictures from the event on Flickr, they can be found here: Adobe Max 2007 

All in all it was a great conference, where I got to meet a lot of interesting people and got a lot of inspiration, so I can’t wait until next year!