UCON 96
the macromedia users conference...
shocking your world?

/ front / Tues / Wed / Thur / Fri /

Best part has been meeting all the direct-lers here like Scott Flowers, Marvyn Hortmann, Dorian Dowse, Glenn Picher, Matt Craig, Kirk Keller, Gretchen MacDowell, Gary Rosenzwueg, Rhett Crocker, Darrel Plant, Ogie McGuire, Miles Lightwood, Eric Coker, Steve Bullock, Bruan Gray, and a slew of others I am forgetting. And Zav, in life, is more like himself than in e-mail.

Also, its rather impressive how many Macromedians tune in to direct-l; more than you know, and they taken in all the rants and raves.

Okay, the morning started (after a jolt of coffee) with the opening keynote by Bud C who summarized the past year via a Director presentation chock full of those Killer Transitions (Xtras by Sharkbyte) and a Lingo script error that BUd sailed sommothly through. Its been 9 million downloads of Shockwave and they expect (?) 60 million Shockwave-enabled browsers by December 1997. The first big announcement was that Netscape will be incorporating the Shockwave engine into future versions of their browsers which might be an end to those busted icon blues.

The "tools and culture being intertwined" which means I think that the tools are hip. Macromedia tools are becoming more and more integrated with lots of acronyms like MOA and MMX. Bud sees some of the biggest potential in Authorware Shockwave for corporate intranet training. And in the generour spirit, the price for Authorware Integrated Studio was plummetting from $4995 to $1995

New product coming this fall (Adobe watch your back?) is Macromedia "Key Grip", which in a later demo showed some interesting features, many aimed at reducing the clutter of too many windows for editing. Also announced was that Macromedia and Media 100 are cooperating to develop Quicktime for NT standards.

Also, we saw Freehand 7 that will include Java scripting- the quick demo showed using it to generate an animated rotated graphic. Like their other packages, they cite the Freehand Graphics Studio 7 (7+3+2=4.1=7... Freehand + Extreme 3D + Fontographer + xRes) as "web-optimized". Also impressive in Freehand was a search and replace for graphic elements (fi.e. ill color). Feehand can directly launch xRes for editing bitmap images. Also, we saw Shockwave imaging of multiple resolution graphics, streaming of data from a 28 MB source image.. and it ws FAST. They also showed antialiasing of embedded fonts in Shockwave graphics.

More announcements... Fireworks is the core runtime media display of shockwave will be available as an API, allowing Java to access the multimedia power of Shockwave.

And they are going into the book business with PeachPit Press to form "Macromedia Press"

Victoria Dawson, introduced as the macromedia.com "webmaster" (?) asked "how many of you have a website?" and there were a few responses... a few hundred... The macromedia mother web site has over 4000 pages and gets about 56 billion hits per hour (okay that was an exaggeration). They presented the web as "your secret weapon: cuiing the music and animation theme of "Mission Impossible" the same clever marketing concept that is saving Apple (right..).. The web site can "save you time" by providing things like TechNotes. They now have a new tutorial section geared for Backstage that is called "Web in a Week". And finally, the macromedia web site offers "mind share" which I think means that you can submit your site and if selected as a "Site of The Day" riches will fall your way. Macromedia is also making more efort for international support, announcing today that a full mirror of their web site was going live in Japan and soon in Europe.

"Your Mission..... Shock the World"

At the session on Director Directions, lead developers Lisa Lee and Jonathan Grayson highlighted new features of Director 5, and being vague about some of the goodies they will show at Thursday's Sneak Peeks.

Expect (someday) much more net integration- soon Net Lingo may be understood in Director (yeah!), more ties with ActiveX, and some net operations that will be possible from any Director project.

Glenn Ruehle (spelling?) gave a live demonstration of the debugger (and gave Director Web a nice plug! Thanks!). Mark Shepard demo'ed the use of multiple casts swapping English language castlibs for Japanese and Mayan (and we learned of a culturally significant icon that is language independent..)

More things to see in Director are more Drag and Drop editing, animated demos in the Help system as well as more example code, and maybe having the help system linked to the web for updates.

David _____ (oops bad notes) showed some nifty Xtras inluding Planet Color (LizardTech) for optimizing 8-bit images, a QuickDraw 3D importer with fun stuff like dyanmic texture applications, Alpha Mania for real time alpha channels.

Then the whole director engineering team filled the stage, probably 30 of them, sporting all the rainbow hair colors of Dennis Rodman. A guy from New Media let us know that 2/3 of this years InVision winners were created with Director.

Guy Kawasaki spoke his Apple spiel and regaled us with some jokes that were running around on the Internet 6 months ago (like the one about Microsoft delaring darkness a standard.. yuk yuk yuk).

We toured the People's Choice gallery, where you could explore the nominees on a bunch of kiosk setups. (Sadly, Director Web was not deemed worthy.. people speak up!) There was lots of activity in the Exhibitors hall, with the crowds really flocking tothe Macromedia demos and the g/matter booth. Our favorite Dirigio Glenn Picher demo-ed his Xtras and XObjects. Big news is that g/matter has acquired the NetXtra from humancode and offered a slick demo of having director apps communicate to each other over an inter or intra-net.

After snarfing the free food and beer, we wandered off to the Direct-L "gathering" organized by the conference. The room filled and several of the macromediates fielded questions and comments for 2 hours, and John Dowdell promised us the world. It was impressive how much influence it appears Direct-L has on this group. The DirWeb SpyCam caught this image of the team:

It was reported that the Peter Small Appreciation Society was rather under-attended.

After a full day of festing, we strolled down to the office of g/matter where we were treated to more free nourishment and beverages, plus free coasters of old CD-s glued together. Its a cool office, lots of... local style.

Burn out at 1:00 AM