Being a completely unbiased and 100 per cent unofficial publication, we here at Web Designer pride ourselves on not compromising our agenda for anyone. There are limits to that journalistic integrity – especially when the delightful people at Adobe UK call out of the blue to whisk me off to California for a few days. "Erm, too right! I’d be up for some of that!" was probably something like the response I gratefully uttered with scant regard for the fact the timing was potentially awkward. Not only was my travel in jeopardy until a hasty trip to the post office could secure a new passport, but it seemed likely the inevitable jet lag on return to work would make meeting deadline on issue 136 even tougher. But in balancing the inherent value that such a jaunt would pass on to you the reader, it seemed unthinkable that any reason would prevent us from boarding that plane.

An 11-hour flight later and touchdown at San Francisco enabled the assembled group of invited journalists to get a better handle on the itinerary for what would turn out to be a packed couple of days. First stop was in fact down the freeway to San Jose and a welcomed break at the gorgeously posh Fairmont hotel before a full programme of briefings the following day. There’s something a bit bizarre about just strutting across a couple of blocks and standing in front of the home and focal point of a multinational organisation. In our industry at least, the Adobe ‘A’ logo has become as recognisable as the Macdonald’s golden arches or that Essex bloke who plays football (occasionally) in Los Angeles these days. Apt, therefore, that Adobe Towers, 345 Park Avenue, commands three buildings of 18 stories high to contain all the exciting developments we were to hear about during our stay.

With all the guests signed in, it was time to settle down inside the ‘Mediterranean’ conference room for an introductory Flex presentation from Technical Evangelist James Ward (www.jamesward.org).

The overall vibe here was more about where Flex development fits within the mashup of tools being leveraged in Adobe Integrated Runtime or ‘AIR’ for short. Formerly codenamed Apollo, Web Designer had already got acquainted with the cross-platform runtime in our issue 132 overview. It was benef icial, therefore, to have the author of that very article and editorial regular Simon Bisson piping up with plenty of questions from across the table as Ward got more technical.

On a fundamental level, however, it was underlined that AIR could quickly deploy the kind of Rich Internet Applications that Flex can build on the web, onto the desktop instead. We’d hear more about why developers would want to do such a thing on day two, but first was some consternation about what constitutes an RIA in the first place. With AIR anagrams purely coincidental, Ward acknowledged that a formal def inition of this kind of development would probably relate to the level of feedback and real-world fluidity within the end user experience. To illustrate this point, we walked through an impressive Flex interpretation of a next-generation car insurance website, where claim form dialogs loaded with seamless transitions and dynamic data controls performed autofills with ease.

Perhaps the best example here, however, was the Flash-built component that could graphically model a crash incident scenario using draggable components. In this instance, it was particularly easy to see the value in more sophisticated and intuitive ways to capture data that is hard to describe in more traditional forms – a real step forward for designers.

Among the later demos was a breathtaking look at the work of engineer Ely Greenfield and his showcase site at www.quietlyscheming.com. An employee of Macromedia and Adobe for over ten years, Greenfield has been directly involved in developing the Flex SDK, core compiler, framework and the MXML language that binds AIR applications together. On his site you can run and download the source code for some seriously clever interactive graphs and charts that extend the basic Flex components to dynamically pan, resize, and select elements with genuine ease.

More immediately impressive is his work on a pageturning book component called FlexBook, which he’s customised and extended over a number of dif ferent versions to cover containers, image browsers and even a biology textbook. The latter is a jaw-droppingly realistic simulation of those old human body books that strip back the layers of organs printed on transparent pages – the faithfulness and level of detail is just stunning here

In terms of more over tly commercial, typically ‘Web 2.0’ of ferings, we also caught a glimpse of incredible word-processing emulator Buzzword (www.jamesward.org) and the beautifully designed online image-editing application called Picnik (www.picnik.com). Both feature some incredible functionality and tool sets that you’d only ever expect from desktop equivalents, such as impeccable tex t rendering when zooming in and out of the page, tooltips, floating menus, and live previews of edits. All in all the session provided a valuable overview of how experimental online Flex development has really pushed Adobe’s hand to bring similar content out of the browser with AIR.

Before lunch on day one, we then had the pleasure of meeting Coldfusion Evangelist and author Ben Forta (www.forta.com), who did a great job of insisting that the product had much life left in it. With all the hype surrounding the launch of the CS3 product family, most people would be forgiven for thinking that the writing was on the wall for Coldfusion, but with a new version only just out, it remains a very important release for Adobe. The eighth in the series has been opened up much more than before and has deliberately become less ‘black box’ in its operation and administration than ever before. Still very much adopted by systems that aren’t seen by the public or Google, such as intranets and internal applications, the compiler continues to do a great job of abstracting huge quantities of code into merely a few embarrassingly simple lines.

Up next was Adobe’s Lea Hickman with something of an update on what the web side of CS3 had been doing since the products launched, while identif ying how they can now be integrated into the AIR runtime. Most significant here, certainly for Web Designer content in the immediate future, was the AIR packaging extension for Dreamweaver that can be downloaded now from the fantastic Adobe Labs site (http://labs.adobe.com). Within just a few clicks through a handy wizard we suddenly had a standalone desktop blog posting application forged from HTML, CSS and Javascript – wow! This was precisely the moment the penny dropped that parallels could be drawn with the widget culture surrounding Mac OS X, where lightweight web technologies are employed to rapidly build online or off line distributable applets. Just remember that AIR is completely platform independent however and, yes, that means mobile too! Other interesting areas included the role Fireworks has to play in prototyping web pages or applications and the possibility that future iterations of the suite may align it more specifically with ‘chrome’ design or application skinning.

Before getting an interesting tour of the surprisingly eco-conscious Adobe offices (turn those lights off!), we enjoyed a slightly more heated session from Jim Guerard, focusing on the Flash Media Server and the new Adobe Media Player. As vice president and general manager of the dynamic media organisation, he had to dodge some sharp questions over key decisions his team had taken for the project. With the first version set to ignore film classifications or parental controlling, regional regulations on things like TV licensing, and pretty much any codec that isn’t Flash, the mood was spikey. At least they were keen to point out the excellent support for inser ting adver tisements, eh?

The shorter day two of our conference agenda brought us to San Francisco and the former Macromedia office for more AIR-centred presentations. Particularly pleasing was a quick visit from Adobe luminary Kevin Lynch who is so important in his chief software architect capacity that he’s notoriously tough to catch. Despite some pretty technical questioning, he spoke candidly and in appreciatively simple terms about the keen work he and his teams had undertaken during the AIR project. The session was immediately followed by an incredibly insightful talk from Anthony Franco, the founder of a design agency called EffectiveUI. His team are responsible for the eBay San Dimas project, which is essentially a desktop version of the popular auction site. Adobe’s Flex and Flash technologies had been selected here to extend the user experience in exciting ways, such as packs of auction item photos that can be shuffled leisurely and more intuitive category lists. Those familiar with the available beta will know that the application works by caching item records for when operating off line, then syncing iPod-style when a connection is established again – or that’s the plan at least. Franco revealed some fascinating details about EffectiveUI’s user-centred work ethic, which would make a great feature in itself, but a visit to its fabulous site at effectiveui.com tells you some of the story at least.

And that was pretty much it, bar for the few extra days I had to appreciate one of the best cities our planet has to offer – but that’s another story altogether. Stop by the Web Designer office and I’ll bore you with the photos... or not.