MAX 2008: round up. The one with the hair & Catalyst

Sorry for this late update, but it's been busy since I got back from Milan but I have to say this year MAX was a very special one!

I lost my hair, for real.

With Boulevart we won a MAX award with our 'Rock Werchter' mobile guide and the Iphone port we did.

I made a bet with my colleagues and I lost.
You can see the result here.

It's been great and I had a lot of fun meeting up with all of the guys from The Netherlands and Belgium.

I went to a very inspiring 'agency summit meeting' we're I met up with Rick Williams from AKQA and I had a good chat with Branimir Angelov from Gugga. 

There was so much going on but what you need to remember is that Adobe is working on all different fronts (horizontal and vertical) for all web builders out there:

multi-service + multi-screen + multi-user
design + development + deployment

A new product Catalyst, previously known as Thermo, will become a key factor for developers and designers creating rich media.

Adobe is putting up a lot of effort in trying to figure out how to make everybody understand each other. The coming of Flex and Actionscript 2/3 created some confusion as in how to put up a good workflow from design over development to deployment.
Catalyst is Adobe's answer.

It is not yet fully in bloom and Adobe still has a lot of work to do before this product will be the robust tool everybody is looking for.

Production company's will have to start thinking of how the are going to organize the production process in terms of designing experience websites, rich internet applications or a combination.

Catalyst will bring developers and designers closer together but I won't work without the necessary effort of everybody involved.

For developers my guess is that within the coming years every swf out there will rely on the Flex framework. Flash CS4 is back in the game for motion designers and design in general, there is Catalyst now and Flexbuilder (Gumbo) will even be more mature than ever.

Now let's go and kick some!