Ok - where to start: first of all, it was a great show, even better than the two key notes together. The first big bang was a Breeze to Mobile phone app. Imagine that: they showed a Breeze application with some people in the attendee list. Then they asked a guy to come to the stage and to tell his mobile number. They added an account for him and he showed up on the list. THEN, they selected like 6 people from the list and clicked a button. Immediately, 6 mobile phones were ringing and all were connected to a conf call - I wonder if they built Skype in there. Now with that you'll never ever miss a conf call again - the conf call will RING YOU!!!

The next great thing was high-performance charts for Flex - of course we already have charts now with Flex 1.5 but they also showcased some really really fast animating charts. A very funny new chart that may be added to Flex was a kind of realtime threshold chart. Also, they showed a Gantt chart example, completely interactive with drag & drop. For Flex 2.0 we have to prepare with a completely new underlying data model, that abstracts data usage even more. This data model will be synchronized - fits pretty well into MM's overall vision about the mobile Flash platform.

The Coldfusion Sneak started with a Blue Screen - so no news here :(

At the very end of the session, it was all about Flash Player and Flash Authoring again. Dang, the authoring environment will have ink effects as in Director, realtime effects (Shadow, Glow etc.) and finally, strokes that are freely configurable in terms of their joins (rounded, sharp). Strokes may also be filled with gradients. Gradients may be animated.

The underlying Flash Player 8 was shown again - pretty fast bitmap blitting was shown and the realtime effects are fast, too.

Unfortunately, the auditorium was already getting more and more empty as sneaks for Central were shown. Basically it was more about how Central COULD look in the future (less chrome, no chrome, transparent windows etc.) - so no news here.

I gonna upload pictures from the Sneak right now so check back soon!

Pictures are available here, starting on page 4

Dirk.