Streaminmg Shockwave Futures... well a highlight was seeing the real Joe Sparks, who must have acquired his job at Macromedia by sheer willpower ;-) it was a shame they diod nto give him more time cause he was showing some nifty demos of using D6 + shockwave streaming, to get around the limitations of the utter slowness of the net. He did have MIDI music running via the 601 plug which can include QuickTime data, hence MIDI.

The latter half of the show was seeing RealPlayer 5.0 which now includes in its plug-in/player the ability to combine Flash animation and RealAudio sound. They call it "RealFlash", and its pretty darn confusing to sort out the plug-ins once more. Some of the demos were interesting (mostly movie trailers)...

Joe Sparks will always be my hero for all the lessons I learned from Spaceship Warlock (not just Lingo -- I learned quite a few new words from the world's longest if/then of "things you might say to the girl...")

But John Dowdell is really much better looking that I could ever have imagined.

As always, a fun UCON (and it's always worth it just to chat with JT at the Lingo gathering), but I have a question for those of you who've been to previous UCONs as well -- why do you think the show started out much more low key than the last two years? That post-keynote-opening-day Director/Shockwave presentation ALWAYS has Q&A questions from people lined up out the door for all three microphones, and this year there were like, what, three questions? Even the guy on stage (Grayson, I think) was really stunned and commented that this was usually the part where it gets crazy -- when they first bring up the Director team, etc.

The opening keynote and most of the other big sessions were much more subdued. Heck, in 95 there was a standing ovation for anti-aliased text! I don't think it was a lack of interesting stuff being shown this year (Dreamweaver and Aftershock rock), but it seemed like MM could have shown "OK, now here's a Lingo Xtra for teleportation..." and the audience would merely have nodded. Everytime Norm would yell, "Do you think we should ship this?" the response was WAY less enthusiastic than years past. Any theories? Are developers just too tired from the browser wars? Are we so busy writing the right tag that we just can't get excited? Is it because we measure time differently now? You used to see something at UCON, and you knew it might take a year before you could use it, but that was OK and it was worth the wait. But now, the only thing that seemed to matter was what you'd have in 30-60 days.

The biggest reponse by the whole audience in the keynote rooms seemed to be two things: Steve Jobs and Flash-in-Director. But the let down was when you learned that it would still require a runtime Xtra for now, and thus you won't be using it in Shockwave for a while -- which is where you most want it!!

Overall, I have a grand new appreciation for behaviors, and thought Java export was MUCH more than I dared dream (actual .class translation of Lingo!!!)

Great to see everyone again

COOL:
Flash Xtra - yes! It does truly totally rock!
DreamWeaver - This product will keep me from selling my MACR stock
Effector Set I - MediaLab's latest Xtra (yes, I can plug other companie's Xtras if I want) - I called it Effective Sex during my Xtras panels - whoops!
RealFlash - streaming audio and high powered animation for web UI is too cool but what happened to SWA in this deal?
LiveCD Xtra and GIFtrader Xtra - perhaps our best Xtras yet. (I'm biased.) Wet The Wick party - Macromedia and g/matter toss a great party with Guinness and free CDs. (I'm _completely_ opinionated too.)

PROBABLY COOL:
Flash to Java (AfterShock) - I want to see metrics about performance first but conceptually this is right on!
Racing the Zav in my wife's new Ford Explorer to the nearest beer with our trade show booth in the back (she sees this and I'm toast.) (Zav: fix your headlights...they gave you away)

PROBABLY LAME:
Director to Java - didn't see the demonstration, but was told:

• no initial support for Xtras (I'm opinionated [see above] but I think this does *not* rock in the least. sucks definitely.)
• each movie is converted into its own Java gloop. unclear what the long term performance tradeoffs are vs. plug-ins.
• anyone want to collaborate on a (Cookie) JAR Monster?

LAME:
People's Choice Awards: could anyone actually hear the winner's announced? the beer runs out almost two hours before the end of the party? (cool awards though - nice use of acrylic.)
Exhibits ended at the same time the Sneak Preview started forcing me to break down my booth instead of watching. Lame-O!
Exhibits were only 2 days instead of 3 leaving me no time to look at the other booths.

My impression from the conference rather echoed what I'm seeing here. I keep hoping that Macromedia will add the Flash support as an interrim release rather than waiting for the official D7 release (or at the very least push the D7 release closer into the end of this year than the release from D6). I think it will take time for people to assimilate the changes in D6, and a quiet release for D7 that fixes some of the major bugs, adds the basic functionality of Flash and roational sprites, and incorporates ODBC support may prove sufficient for the development community. With the changes that are taking place on the browser front, I think that planning much farther in advance than that could prove fatal.