I came down to Adobe MAX 2006 this week. It’s being held in Las Vegas, and this is my first time attending this event. Last night at the welcome reception I met some great people, and saw a few interesting applications. One thing that hit me was the deep penetration that Adobe has into government. There were government employees – federal, state, and city – along with military employees and defense contractors everywhere!

I’m down here with part of my team from mediaForge as we are now committing This morning I’m at the keynote, and I’m impressed that Adobe has really spent some money on this event … and there are a *lot* of people here. Our first guess is that there are maybe 2000+ people attending. After an intro by Blue Man Group, Kevin Lynch – Chief Software Architect – came on stage and said that this is the largest Adobe MAX conference to date.

The CEO then reviewed the Adobe/Macromedia merger, and showed a video of the feedback from users. He talked about the adoption of the “labs” concept that Macromedia brought. His focus then turned to the technologies that they are going to focus on – video, mobile devices (FlashLite is running on over 100 million devices!), Flex, and Flash Player 9 (now 10 years old).

Kevin Lynch returned to the stage and fist addressed the adoption rates of Flash Players. He showed where the Flash Player 9 reached over 80% adoption within 9 months, and how Flash Player 9 is on track towards 40% adoption in close to three months. This again demonstrates that the ability to deploy updates globally, in a seamless and simple way, is key to software adoption.

There was then a series of demos of new features in Fireworks, Photoshop, After Effects, their new application Soundbooth.  Then came the demo of what I’m here for … Apollo.  Apollo is the new “cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web
development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA’s.”  I’m hoping that Adobe will release a beta to us here at the show …

More later!