Alcides Fonseca

Passei estes últimos três dias pela LXFactory, em Lisboa, a participar no Sapo Codebits 2008. Para uma visão geral, poderão ver a reportagem da sic.

Gostaria também de agradecer ao departamento onde estudo que patrocinou a minha ida e a de mais 4 colegas ao evento.¹

Apresentações/Workshops

A primeira tarde e a primeira manhã estavam cheias de apresentações interessantes, mas eu só consegui ver duas:

Serverside Javascript: Hope and Opportunity

O Mário Valente apresentou a sua ideia para uma framework de desenvolvimento web totalmente em javascript chamada Starbucks. Mas o mais importante foram os motivos que o levaram a optar por server-side javascript:

• linguagem de scripting mais deployed (todos os browsers desktop e mobile).
• quem desenvolve para a web, seja programador ou designer, já tem algumas bases por onde começar²
• é uma linguagem funcional, e parece que essas estão para ficar
• implementa o Universal Design Pattern
• Tem diversas máquinas virtuais (TraceMonkey, V8, SquirrelFish) que batem em diversas situações Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc…

Eu levantei dois problemas que vejo na solução apresentada por ele:

• Javascript puro pode não ser a solução mais mainstream, porque o corporate world pode facilmente adoptar Rhino (ou JScript) e usar todas as 1001 bibliotecas já desenvolvidas em java (ou C#).

*Eu valorizo a pluralidade de linguagens possíveis para o server-side. Perl tem as suas vantagens relativamente a Python, que em alguns casos é melhor que Ruby e que também tem situações onde ganha ao Perl. Ou podemos simplesmente falar de gostos. Penso que a solução poderá passar por ter mais máquinas virtuais no cliente, para álem da de JavaScript. Mas vou escrever mais sobre isto brevemente.

Mão na Coisa

O Pedro Melo deu uma excelente apresentação sobre XMPP, mas totalmente prática. Como nem todos podem ser perfeitos, o código estava em Perl, mas deu para perceber perfeitamente. Exemplos desde um Bot controlado por HTTP, como o uso de chatrooms para soluções de sincronização, quer seja controlar servidores remotos à lá vertebra, quer mesmo para transferir informação entre pcs (think Open LiveMesh/MobileMe XMPP based).

O uso disto é ilimitado (até porque o protocolo pode ser extensível) e deu ideias para vários projectos do codebits, do qual saliento o ComputerBot.

Os projectos

CloudStream

Video da Apresentação

Ao contrário do que tinha previsto, acabei por ficar com a malta que veio comigo de Coimbra, e dedicamo-nos a uma ideia que tinha nascido na viagem para a Shift: Criar um serviço que faça o streaming de música alojada em serviços AlojamentoInTheCloud. Nos próximos anos, vamos estar a mover a computação, storage e software para a nuvem³. Ora eu não vou querer estar a sacar a música uma a uma para a ouvir. Vou querer apenas um endereço de streaming, e de um controlo remoto do servidor. Especialmente no meu telemóvel. E poder sair de casa e continuar a ouvir no caminho a mesma música onde parou.

E este modelo é diferente do Last.fm. Aqui a música é vossa, simplesmente não está alojada na vossa máquina, mas num servidor vosso, ou em serviços como o box.net (usado na demo), s3, dropbox, ou outro. No Last.fm simplesmente alugam a música.

TechStuff: Java for streaming server, PHP for the web interface, VLC for transcoding (Obrigado Sérgio!), VLC ActiveX component for web-streaming ( the audio tag didn’t work) and TCP MP in Windows Mobile.

Onde está o Alcides?

Video da Apresentação

Sempre que era preciso trabalhar, parece que eu nunca estava disponível, e isto foi o mote para o resto do grupo desenvolver uma aplicação que dissesse onde andava eu escondido (Ou qualquer outra pessoa que não tenha escondido o RFID) sem ter de tocar no teclado ou olhar para o monitor, graças à apresentação do Pedro Santos do MLDC.

As actividades

Outro dos pontos chave do evento foram as duas actividades durante a directa. O Mário Valente conduziu o concurso de RockBand, que eu adoraria se conseguisse tocar música, mas que deu para me divertir um bocadinho a desafinar e a meter a tocar Tokio Hotel no PalcoPrincipal.

Gostaria de dar também os parabéns ao João Pedro do Sapo pelo Quiz. Não só pela parte técnica, que envolveu luzes, controlos do buzz e quase fritar o portátil, mas também pela imaginação nas perguntas que realmente proporcionou um momento bastante divertido.

Os outros projectos

Pessoalmente não concordei com a classificação final. Só para dar como exemplo, o primeiro vencedor de usar o OpenMoko como rato, já tinha sido feito com o Wiimote, e sinceramente não é muito dificil, visto que fiz uma coisa parecida em meia hora. Não é mau perder, até porque nem acreditava que nenhum dos nossos projectos ganhasse, tendo em conta outros que vi.

O meu top seria:

1. Cena dos Recibos Verdes do Pedro Sousa
2. Cena do last.fm -> músicas interessantes -> trackers “legais” -> RSS do Pedro Freitas # JS de Elite (controlar o helicópetro por JS) do Cláudio Gamboa

Assim que os videos estiverem up, recomendo que vejam especialmente estas. Ficam também a sugestão para a organização de tentar criar algumas categorias. Eu percebo que não as tenham feito de propósito, para não impedir a criatividade, mas tendo em conta os tipos de projectos apresentados, poderiam fazer do género: Hardware, Jogos, Produtividade, Mashups, Multimédia, Libraries/Middleware, Categoria Especial 1, 2, 3 e 4. Assim haveria sempre uma folga para meter aqueles mesmo originais e bons, e também dar algum crédito a quem fizer coisas que não são produto final, mas possam facilitar o trabalho dos developers, ou à malta de design que não sabe programar.

Overview

O evento foi exceptional, parabéns ao Sapo, por fazer a malta corporate da PT confiar neles para lhes deixar investir tanto dinheiro na malta jovem e inovadora, com um óptimo formato.

Foi bom reencontrar a malta “Hoo-hoo”⁴ e conhecer pessoas que já seguia como a Paula Valença ou o Jack Moffitt.

Em 2009 estou lá coladinho! E agora nos tempos mortos até aos próximos eventos, não vejo a malta do Porto organizar nada ;-)

¹ O DEI paga a viagem ao Codebits, o Sapo paga a entrada na Shift, a Microsoft leva-me ao Techdays e Teched. Como sou concorrido, começo a aceitar propostas para mais eventos :)

² E os quarentões não têm de aprender uma nova linguagem

³ E depois vamos voltar a querer tudo no nosso equipamento e iremos estar sempre nesse ciclo, right?

⁴ Expressão do Alex, se a transcrição estiver errada, avisa ;)

E porque este espaço não é apenas composto por rants, fica aqui uma notícia daquelas que gostaríamos de ver mais vezes.

Cavaco Silva homenageia quatro especialistas em bioética (via Que Universidade?)

So Duncan Robertson, from BBC, made a XMPP bot as an interface for their API. I’d love to see this love for web stuff from the Portuguese TV Channels…

Some may accuse me of being a Microsoft guy, but using a mac in the past or so, I can’t really say that about me. Nevertheless, I keep an eye on Microsoft Conferences ( and I even got to attend one or two) because really cool stuff come from them. I’m not kidding about this. Let’s see PDC 2008:

Windows 7

I’ve been following Engineering Windows 7 blog, so I was pretty up to date with this stuff, but seeing real screenshots was pretty impressive. I have mixed feelings about the taskbar redesign. While I really liked the old one, I understand that this way it’s more usable in smaller resolutions (say notebooks or even mobile phones, think Shift or Advantage). But in bigger displays, that are cheaper and cheaper each day, the old style was pretty cool.

The vista style of the windows was predictable, but I really hate it. I do! I hope they get a real theming engine, and not make us use some third party software to make them more macish.

One cool surprise was to see that they fixed the horrible wifi icon in the traybar. Linux and Mac did it right years ago, and in Windows up to Vista and even in Windows Mobile it’s a pain to connect to networks.

About the multi-touch? Well, they had it all along with Surface (and Surface SDK), so no big surprise. We’ll see MS release the iTablet before Apple does.

The Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Windows Azure

Well, startups are going the Cloud way. Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine are just a first step. Microsoft wants Entreprise costumers to join this trend, and be able to have their business in the cloud. I don’t know if this is going to be such as a success and they think. a) real small business don’t want their data on the clould. They want it in their small server in their intranet. b) Large companies that have the need for a cloud server probably can support having their own infrastructure and not relying on Microsoft. Maybe I’m mistaken, but we’ll see.

James Governor has written a really interesting post on this matter and even mentions OpenID in Azure Services.

More Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Live Mesh

Live Mesh is the Mobile Me for the rest of us. It syncs files P2P or through the cloud and for those, like me, with several computers rocks.

Since the Mac and Windows Mobile clients came out, I guess I’ll have to give it a try some day.

Dale Lane writes about the transition from USB syncing to Cloud syncing. It’s true Google doesn’t provide a offline sync out of the box in the Android, but I like to have the oldschool method available when needed.

Yet More Cloud Stuff

a.k.a. Live Services

Angus got extra points for the shirt and for spreading the social word among the entreprise developers there.

It’s true that Microsoft has a different view form Google and Yahoo that are embracing the OpenID+OAuth way, but this might change in the future. You can already see some little steps being made.

Dynamic Languages

Oddly, the first dynamic language I noticed in PDC was C#. Really! C# is now lightyears away from Java, and is evolving continuously. Version 4 brings a lot of new features and one of them is the ability to integrate dynamic languages directly in C# using the dynamic type. I believe C# is becoming more of a glue language (LINQ, Dynamic Languages, F#) that allows programmers to switch smoothly to other languages.

As usual, I love John Lam’s talk on IronRuby that besides the usual C#, Silverlight and Testing/Mocking stuff, demoed a Visual Studio Plugin in Ruby and Web Services using Sinatra. You should really take a look at it.

Oslo Modeling tools

DSLs are becoming popular in the several business software. and is something Microsoft was looking at a while ago. While I’d say IronRuby was the way to go (see RSpec examples), they took it further and made their own toolkit, Oslo, to develop both visually and textually Models The language they created to achieve that purpose is called M, and right now is supported through the IntelliPad editor.

In fact this editor was what got my interest in this area, since it’s codename was Emacs.NET, and since I’m in the quest for the perfect editor I wanted to take a look. Well, right now it supports the M language, but “you can extend it using IronPython”:hhttp://www.masteringbiztalk.com/blogs/jon/PermaLink,guid,92ec6f1f-45e5-4b7d-b675-548be5131a07.aspx. I’ll wait to see the first plugins to support different languages in the IntelliPad.

In the meanwhile, take a look at the different Oslo sessions at PDC

Mono

Yeah, Mono gets to be one of the main points of this post, as it should also be very important to Microsoft. The work Miguel and the team is doing gives much more value to .NET and Microsoft, than any other technology they presented in my opinion. Since the Mac and Linux worlds are raising their share, it’s important to let developers target those platforms too. And their doing interesting new stuff too, like the C# compiler service, the C# interpreter and even running .NET apps in the iPhone!

So take a look at his talk, one of the best in the whole PDC.

Of course this wasn’t everything PDC was about, but the stuff that I really care about. And I really liked some of this stuff!

Scala is a functional and OO hibrid language targeting the JVM. Performance is not far from Java’s since it is a statically typed language, but you have type inference that Java doesn’t.

Scala compiles to .class files, so you can just replace your .java files with scala without greater problems because scala was designed to the JVM. This also means you can access everything in your Java code from Scala and vice-versa.

Resources

• Scala for Java programmers – A nice comparison approach between the two languages.
• Lift A RoR/Django-like framework for Scala.

Some Examples

During my programming life I have used a lot of different editors and IDEs just like everyone else. I’ve started with Notepad. 4 years programming in black and white, but it was the only editor I had in every computer I used¹. Then I was introduced to Visual Studio (VB6 at the time) and it was a really different world! Not as fancy as today’s VS, but pretty cool at the time, and the Winforms editor made me fall in love with Visual Studio.

My main work was web programming (yeah… PHP, sorry guys) and not desktop apps, so I start using Notepad++ that I still advocate as a wonderful editor for Windows. You can even make your own plugins in C++, just like João did.

After a while, I went back to using Visual Studio with the .NET platform, and it still rocked. I also gave a try to Eclipse for Java development, but Visual Studio was faster and more suitable for my taste. Still, the startup time and memory footprint could have been much better. And these IDEs only worked with staticly typed languages, with aren’t my favourite, so I sticked to notepad++ and other IDEs. Among those, I tried intype, a textmate clone for windows still in dev, editra which is my current editor for Python in windows, with project manager and svn/git support and obviously Textmate since I bought my mac. Oh, and yesterday I found out about Smultron.

So where I go next? Full-featured IDEs like Eclipse, Netbeans and Visual Studio have started to support dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, Javascript, etc… andplugins for editors are growing too.

So, there’s a new fashion today: headless IDEs as plugins for editors. Orestis Markou writes about this new trend and gives you some examples working right now.

As for me, I guess I’ll try emacs in a near future, just for the sake of having some experience with an hardcore editor. But I keep always in mind, that not everyone in the software industry should use one of those. IDEs exist for a reason. In a big software project, there are those who do the interface, others who only work with Databases, others who do the Network stuff, others who are Code Monkeys (sorry), and those who glue all of this together into a product. And they need to share information/code between then, and while one will see the UML view of the code, other would be viewing the GUI view instead. All of them using the same IDE.

¹ I couldn’t install stuff in those computers, and we hadn’t the concept of portable apps, only msdos executables in floppy disks.

Yesterday I found Smultron, an opensource editor in Cocoa that with a few tweaks could be at the level of Textmate. Those tweaks would be:

Theme system

I like to use a dark background, but in some presentations I need a white one, so I’d like to switch between a few color schemes with a click. And I know that’s something really simple to implement.

Plugin System

Well, you have Commands and Snippets, but I like the way textmate organizes it. And make them easy to download and install, and even remove.

VCS support.

You know, git, svn, bzr, hg those cool things people use to control their code. Oh, and what about some deployment stuff? Like some SFTP coda-style?

If I hadn’t bought Textmate, I would be using Smultron for sure in Mac OS!

Balsamiq Mockups is a nice application to easily design mockups for you applications. There’s on little difference to the majority of similar tools I’ve seen: it doesn’t try to come out with a realistic image. That always makes the client think that you’re almost done, when It’s not always true. So it sticks to a rather sketchy design while representing the same thing.

Take a look at the Web preview, and you’ll see how it works.

Erlang is a concurrent programming language, used a lot in distributed sistems.

Resources

• Installing Erlang through macports

Sempre achei que as bolsas eram muito fraquinhas, e que as empresas pagam mais por trabalhos que acabam por ser menos complexos. Fica assim pouco incentivo à investigação que não o gosto pessoal.

Fica um artigo bastante bom sobre as bolsas pagas aos cientistas.

Ligo a televisão hoje (já não a ligava à valentes semanas) e deparo-me com a Manuela Moura Guedes muito mais gorda e deforme a entrevistar o Presidente para a Autoridade Nacional da Regulação da Comunicação Social.

Podem ver aqui a entrevista bastante cómica. Eu não consigo porque eles teimam em usar o RealMedia plugin…

Não percebo nada de política é um excelente post de Luís Miguel Sequeira, enorme (verdadeiramente enorme) mas tem qualidade ao quadrado. Para quem não gosta de política, mas especialmente para aqueles que se queixam do Governo a torto e a direito.

Se virem que não têm tempo para o ler, substituam a secção de política do vosso jornal por este post. Mesmo que por 6 meses.

Vale mesmo a pena!

So SHiFT stands for Social and Human Ideas for Technology and it is a great event in the areas of Interaction, Social Design, Usability, Web, Mobile, etc…

I’d like to start this post by thanking SAPO who gently offered free tickets to Portuguese students, which includes me. Unfortunately I could only attend on the last day (damn you school!) and this is some ideas I got from the day.

Pedro Soares Neves – Social web and urban design

Although short, this presentation focused the need of bringing online experiences (like the prosumer) to urban design, in his case a project where we gathered graffiti writers from Bairro Alto in workshops and practicing in a way that benefits themselves and the community around them. Surely a project to follow!

I managed to get the end of Brian Suda’s presentation on microformats, and I noted down about the Long Now Foundation, that uses 5 digits in the year representation. 02008 has a different impression in people than 2008: the first makes our lifetime really small in scale than the second one.

h3. Delphine Ménard – Catching up with the cultural gap

In general, this talk mentioned the need for specific attention to the cultural gap between different cultures that interact with each others all the time. And even when you’re on the web, you have to be really careful with localization and, if you can, adapt the site to each cultural/linguistic community (pt-PT, pt-BR, en-UK, en-US, etc…) and not just in language, but sometimes in content or even in the business logic. Different users from different places may expect your service to work in different ways, so you should aim for the stereotype and then improve with the feedback you get.

Manuel Lima – A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

In 2030 the portable computer is expected to store 1 Petabyte (1.000.000 Gb), so that’s going to be a lot of data. In order for that data to make sense and be useful for us we must be able to visualize, navigate and manage that non-ending information. That’s the motto for his project VisualComplexity.com where he tries to gather different kinds of visualizations of data, and tries to match the ones that help us to understand each subject or relationship better. The presentation was full of examples you’ll be able to see in the powerpoint later.

Susana Vilaça – Usability vs. Software Development Process

Ending the morning sessions, Susana gave an interesting talk on how including usability in your development may not only improve the quality of your software, but also reduce your costs ( money and time included). This works pretty well if you are using an agile methodology since you can run usability tests whenever you have some valuable piece done. This way users can evaluate what you have already done, and give you information right from the start of things that you may not doing properly instead of only mentioning when the product is done, and you waste a lot of time going back, correcting and redoing the whole project. However, you should keep in mind that bringing the user into the developing process may be complicated since they don’t work the same way as developers do, and may make your life harder.

Henriette Weber –
Why every company should be a Rockband

Everyone wants to be a rockstar. Even if they don’t have a clue about how to play music (which is my case¹). And you don’t have to know how to play the guitar, you just have to work as a rock band would do. Each rock band has a manager, that handles the secondary stuff to allow each band member to do what they do best. And then there is the coolness factor, since you can get fans not only be playing very well in your field, but also by worrying about your users concerns (the example of Nokia being the greener of the telephone manufactures). One other thing your company can learn from rock bands is to have groupies, that elite group of fans that really worships your music, and works as a wonderful marketing machine (here, the obvious example of Apple).

I got to see the end of Fred’s presentation that fitted quite well in this theme, since we (developers) should not only aim for what our user needs right now, but what they might need, and achieve that coolness through the quality of service.

Stephanie Booth
Online Culture: what parents, teenagers, and teachers need to know

This slot gave me an hard choice, and I ended up not seeing Tara Hunt even if a few meters away, but I related more to the problems of the Online Culture in the education of teenagers. Being a teenager myself² and having given a few classes to younger students, I really understood the problems that exist between the parents and teachers that don’t get this computer stuff, and teenagers avid for exploring this new world. Neglecting an important part of their children’s life is not the best approach, since communicating online brings the same dangers (and maybe some more) than communicating in the real world. Parents and Teachers should be aware of the culture that exists online (not necessarily to be a part of it) in order to educate teenagers to interact and socialize safely in the Internet.

Final notes

I got to ride a Segway for the first time, and even though it’s amazing how that thing works so well, the ratio price/what you can use it for is not that good.

I’d like to thank the organization for the great event that happened, bringing world-class speakers (and even attendees) to our country that resulted in this wonderful gathering of ideas and people.

Oh, you were looking for pictures, right? There you go!

See you next year!

¹ In fact, apart from school, I had piano lessons for 4 years, and if I get in front of my keyboards, I don’t know what key should I play.

² Even if only for a month or so now.

Internet is not totally free since you have to follow the rules of the country you’re in. So here’s a question raised when writing this:

In a hypothetical situation, if I’m in Spain accessing my VPN in Portugal and publishing a post in my blog that is hosted in the USA, but the database where the content is stored is in Canada. Which laws should my post follow, since they vary from country to country? Spanish (where I’m writing the post), USA (where the content is distributed to others, or all of them?

So my wrist is hurting again, so I’ve been restraining myself from firing up Textmate and being productive.

In the list of things to do that didn’t include using the keyboard/mouse there was trying a new stand for my macbook. The current solution (using the macbook box) was not perfect, since the macbook was getting too hot.

Across my feeds, I found out that NYC Resistor are selling a cardbox stand cut with their laser machine in etsy. Since they don’t export to Portugal, I decided to copycat them and make my own.

The materials: a few foldable cardboxes I had in my bedroom for storing books

The tools: Two scissors (the regular one sucked, so I used a larger one)

The manual: This is not some IKEA product, so I had to try to replicate the original. The first prototype wasn’t that good. I had to give it another horizontal support so it could support my macbook. I found two other major flaws in the stand: the thingies on the edge were too small, and the support was too high (it balanced a lot).

In my second try, i opted for resistance instead of beauty. The result was quite impressive. I doubt it will last more than a month, but it was cool to do nevertheless.

Looks like I’ve got back to using the keyboard now, damn it!

XMPP is the standard for real-time communication. There is also xmpp-im implemented on top, that is used in Jabber and GoogleTalk, but you can also use XMPP for other ends, such as PubSub.

Clients:

• Adium X (MacOS)
• Pidgin (Cross-platform)
• Psi (Cross-platorm) – My favorite for dev purposes
• Slick (Symbian and Windows Mobile)
• Octro-Talk (Symbian and Windows Mobile)
• Google Talk (Windows and GTalk only)

Servers:

• OpenFire (Java)
• eJabberd (Erlang)

Resources:

• My personal motivation for Portuguese people to change to XMPP
• My notes on implementing a XMPP server and client
• Binary XMPP – Useful when in Mobile Phones

I’ve finally got to watch the IronMan movie yesterday. Everybody at the time said the picture really rocked and it was a great movie, but I must disagree. Why?

Because I may have been one of the few that watched last year’s (2007) The Invincible Iron Man which tells the same story, but with Mandarin (his archenemy) instead of the terrorists. And from then on it’s a total different story. Knowing IronMan like I did, the movie was not according to what I knew before and for any Marvel fan, it was disappointing.¹

And in the end, Tony admitting that he is IronMan? C’mon guys!

I’m giving up on Marvel’s movie adaptations and stick to old school cartoons. I just don’t read the comics anymore because they’re fucking expensive here!

¹ Ok, it had the great special effects, but missed a few hot chicks

Mário wrote a post that could be written by me (except I haven’t met him live), and I’d like to quote a couple of things:

Secondly, please respect the freedom of choice. The freedom to use whatever we want to use.

This is the fucking more important thing you should learn form that post. This is why I don’t believe in the Free Software as in “All software should be opensourced and free to change, distribute and so.”. This is one of the things I’m not happy with GPL. They claim it’s totally free, but it isn’t. If you want to make any change to it, you have to make those changes available to everybody. That’s why in my personal opensource projects, I use the WTFPL.

Free software doesn’t need proprietary software to fail so it can thrive. Both can coexist.

I’ve been saying this shit right from the start, actually I’ve said it: “I believe both OpenSource and Proprietary Software should co-exist.” And they called me nuts. A friend of mine, who really supports OpenSource model, justifies that he doesn’t contribute because that doesn’t pay the bills at the end of the day, and he doesn’t want to do any more development outside of his working day. And I’m understanding that.

Oh, just as a final note: this post was written on the same day I wrote an memo for a school assignment trying to convince the Justice Ministry to change to Free Software. (With started to happen a while ago)

After some steps to embrace the OpenSource model, specially thanks to IronRuby and IronPython projects, the day has come.

Microsoft is shipping OpenSource tools as part of one of their products: jQuery will be part in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio, with Intellisense support!

This is great news not because of jQuery itself (nevertheless, my congratulations to John Resig’s team), but because Microsoft is selling a product together with OpenSource code. This has been battled with a lot of effort by the IronPython and Ruby teams. For instance, IronPython is OpenSource, but cannot accept contributions from the community (in source code, bug reports are welcome). And until today, I thought they were doing the same approach with the JS toolkit for ASP.NET.

There’s this project Gimme ECMAScript (or Javascript if you prefer) library designed to make working with “everyone’s favorite scripting language” fun again!_ It is OpenSource, but since it was made by Microsoft:

Due to some licensing restrictions, code contributions from the community will not be accepted, however the Gimme source code is completely free and open to all who wish to view it and learn from it.

I’m glad Scottgu decided not to go with Gimme but with jQuery. (nothing against Gimme, but the community around jQuery is so much wider) This is the real step that tell us that Microsoft is really changing!

3D modelling accross CS

The other thing is we’ve integrated 3-D effects in Flash Player 10, so you can now do 3-D transformations and you can have a lot of great 3-D control, and across CS4 3-D is a pervasive element of the tooling. Even within Photoshop you can bring in a 3-D model now and you can actually paint in 3-D on the model. And that is amazing to see that work.

Hosted cross-browser preview

So if you are using Creative Suite and using Dreamweaver and you want to understand how your Web page is going to actually look across browsers, you used to have to have all the different browsers on your computer and run Linux, Macintosh and Windows to test your pages. It was a pretty laborious process. So what we’re doing now is we’re hosting a browser testing solution or a way to simulate what the browsers look like. That’s an example of how we’re providing services with the tools and that’s a big shift in how we’re actually building our software now. We’re really embracing hosted services.

ECMAScript

I think the amount of innovation that we were trying to do with ECMAScript 4 perhaps was too big of a leap for some and they wanted to see a more collaborative approach on that. So the standards process is a collaborative one where there are lots of points of view. And we’re happy to continue working in the process to advance ECMAScript. But we’re hoping that innovation can happen faster and that we can raise the level of scripting on the Web.

Thermo

So with Thermo we’re enabling you to take your visual assets that you’ve drawn in a creative tool like Photoshop and you can actually select the items that you drew in Photoshop and you can turn them into interactive items just by clicking on an item and saying “make this a button” or “make this a scroll bar.” (…) And you’re able to connect those components through drag-and-drop. So without writing any code, you’re able to create the interactivity of your application.

Adobe Labs

There’s something called scene carving that is now incorporated into our tools. (…) And that allows you to re-size an image. And that not just to make an image smaller, it will remove parts of the image that aren’t as important as other parts. So you can re-size something and it will drop out some background scenery and keep the people in the picture.

Also in terms of the Web runtime there’s research going on in performance and virtual machines, just-in-time compilers, etc.

Source: eWeek