Whilst most of the rest of the world was (seemingly) Tweeting and writing and theorising about the new release of Adobe CS5, with Photoshop and all the other lovely goodies, I was in a meeting with people from Adobe being shown the programs first hand. This may well sound like I’m boasting, but it’s one of the perks of my job and I ended up in there accidentally. Since I can be pretty gobby when I want to be, I decided to take the opportunity to ask a few questions. Here’s what happened…
So, Monday was the big launch that we’d known about for a few weeks. I had trouble keeping my mouth shut about all the new features and the ‘new’ Flash Catalyst etc. etc., but I did a pretty damn good job. My role is to do a lot of stuff surrounding marketing, writing etc. for the company (which is partly an Adobe reseller). Me and Em put in a ton of work, seriously so much it was ridiculous, and so our manager invited us to come in after the sales training to grab some of the food from lunch. As we were helping ourselves to food along with the Adobe guys, the designers came in for training and we were encouraged to stick around for the ‘amazing horse thing’, which did turn out to be pretty cool (easy selection of a horse including mane and tail), moving it across the image and using content aware fill to fill in the background – it is really simple and incredibly accurate. The guy then went through some of the other new CS5 programs, but sadly spent rather a lot of time on InDesign, which is a program I doubt I’ll ever use. Then it was time to ask questions. I’d spent the last couple of weeks living and breathing Adobe CS5, and I was curious about some things, so instead of looking kind of vague or dumbstruck like most of the others, I immediately launched into questions before they decided to kick us out.
I asked them how Packager for iPhone worked, because they literally devoted only a line or two of marketing to it and in my mind it could be pretty massive. For those who don’t know, Packager is a feature in Flash Professional which allows you to create native iPhone apps – pretty impressive considering, in Adobe’s words, ‘Flash is not allowed on the iPhone’, and Apple hates Flash. One of the guys kindly went into the menu and showed some of the features of it – he said it’s very ActionScript based, which is to be expected, but it also has some really good options – in his words, ‘We do a lot of the work for you’. From the menu you can check a box to say whether the app should be sensitive to the iPhone being moved around and all sorts of other stuff, and has fields to enter your Apple iPhone developer number and such. The app is then saved as a .ipa file. I have to say that the guy was slightly boastful, slightly edgy about this, saying that ‘As far as we can tell, there’s no way Apple can figure out whether an app is made using Packager or not’. I think the reason they aren’t pushing it heavily as yet is because they’re worried about Apple ‘blocking it’ in some way or another, and to be honest I’m not surprised. If they can get away with it it will definitely prolong the use of Flash.
I was also curious about Flash Catalyst, which is a visual editor for Flash – no coding. I downloaded the beta for this a few weeks back and was anxious to see how different the final version was. With a lot more tools and features, it would also help to prolong the life of Flash. But sadly, I couldn’t spot any differences. I asked how different the beta was to the final version and the guy didn’t know, but said that the look and feel would be identical. Hmmm. I literally told him that ‘You need to make a visual editor for Flash that’s like Flash Catalyst but on crack’ and he looked half amused and half bemused and said ‘I’ll pass that on to the team’. Haha. They should hire me as a consultant or something.
The session was winding up then, but I decided to make a final comment. I said something along the lines of, ‘I’m pretty impressed that you guys are fighting back and not letting Flash die, I thought you’d just give up but you’re really pulling out all the stops.’ (In hindsight that was pretty damn cheeky considering my manager was in the room and Adobe is like our second biggest seller or something). The guy frowned and he had a closed off look, replying ‘Flash is not going to die because of HTML 5. It’s going to be a long time’ – presumably he meant a long time until HTML 5 becomes an issue. Somewhat optimistic I thought, but then if Adobe is going to all this effort, it’ll be interesting to see how it all unravels. Since I’ve been following Adobe since I first started using Photoshop 7, I’ve leant more towards the Flash/Adobe side of things, partially because Flash is just so impressive in a lot of ways (though yes, it does have its flaws). Sadly I didn’t get a chance to grill Adobe more, and it was a very off the cuff thing because I had no idea I’d have the chance to ask questions (it was the geek alternative to a celebrity book signing or something), but I’m glad I did. I trotted back off to launch work with a full stomach, a free CS5 tshirt (to wear in bed only I might add!), and the satisfaction of questions being answered. All in a day’s work.
Oh, and for the record, they don’t get free copies of CS5, but they do get a generous discount (and yes, I did ask!)
*waves* Hi, I'm 
