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Adobe MAX 2007: Highlights, Shout-outs, Brags

I spent a good part of the last week in the Chicago area, attending and speaking at Adobe’s MAX conference along with my colleague Daniel Rinehart. It was a great show this year, with a lot of excitement surrounding the new technologies and concepts on display, particularly AIR, Adobe’s new desktop application technology that blends the capabilities of Flash, HTML and PDF.

A lot of great stuff was shown at the conference, and many folks have blogged the details well (Daniel for one) so I won’t bore with another repeat of it all. There were a number of highlights, including Thermo (code name for a forthcoming design tool aimed at Flex UIs that has some powerful capabilities for designers, allowing them to seamlessly move from comps to a “real” app in small, simple steps of refinement). I was also impressed by the move towards breaking out VOIP/collaboration capabilities (like those found in Adobe Connect) into separate Flex components that could be deployed in any application. I think Adobe is moving in a smart way to make their stuff more open and more invention-friendly so that developers can use their technologies as a springboard, not a black box.

Of course, I have to give big props to my friends and former colleagues at Virtual Ubiquity, the creators of the Flex-based word processor Buzzword. At MAX it was announced that their company was acquired by Adobe, and little wonder. Buzzword is going to rock Word, OpenOffice and Writely/Google Docs, and what better vehicle to propel Adobe into the online-productivity-app world?

This show was particularly exciting for me because Adobe Chief Architect Kevin Lynch demoed my company Allurent’s “Desktop Connection” for Anthropologie as part of the keynote on the first day. We think AIR is a really promising vehicle for platform-independent rich media applications on the desktop, and at Allurent we’ve been busily prototyping and working up ideas on how to exploit its best features. Desktop Connection is a kind of digital brochure, intended as a premium shopping experience for valued Anthropologie customers. It’s an AIR app that can be used either online or offline (since it comes with data for the whole catalog plus a bunch of preloaded media).

The feature that got the most audible reaction from the audience (and the most subsequent queries from developers and designers at the show) was the search-by-color feature:

The shopper can click on any point in a color wheel, or in a pixel of an image dragged in from the desktop or a browser, and the app displays a cluster of products with nearby colors, grouping similar hues together in the display. Although I don’t get much time to hack these days, this was a feature that I personally conceived and coded up myself, so that made it extra gratifying to see the reception from folks at the show!

Many developers and designers at the show came by the AIRPark (a set of barren white metal picnic benches on an Astroturf rectangle, in case you’re wondering what that might mean) to compliment us on the great-looking app and ask us how we implemented this feature. In case you’re one of them, well, the non-secret part of the sauce is this: apparel manufacturers typically create tiny “color swatch” image files that are used to convey color choices on their website. We take the average color values of these swatches, transform them into HSV (hue/saturation/value) triples and put them into our database. Then we build a special index based on a perceptual notion of “color distance” (check out color spaces on Wikipedia if you’re interested), and use that for a fuzzy match to the target color. The results are then sorted in a simple way to place similar hues near each other — for instance, in the example above, you see some orange items placed together although the target color was a shade of red.

Oh yeah, and my panel on Flex Best Practices went pretty well. I wanted there to be more blood, guts and arguing; in the end I think I was too polite and went easy on the contestants panelists. But at least the audience got to hear a bunch of contrasting, dissonant opinions on basic questions. I’m going to have to make Barcelona a real WWF-style smackdown. Hope to see you there!