Garry likes to say I’m in it for the ladies.
By “I’m” he means him, by “it” he means software development and by “ladies” think early MTV hair band footage and the young groupies that threw panties onstage.
Such is the dream.
We arrived at Adobe Max last Sunday night not quite knowing what to expect save for some 4,000 plus attendees descending on Chicago to watch, listen and learn about all things Adobe.
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Garry was jazzed for Flex and AIR, since that’s what he’s been doing lately, and will be starting a show about, around and based on the technologies.
My divining rod pointed to various video solutions such as live streaming, the Flash Media Server, branding and protecting flash enabled video or setting that video free.
I also wanted to see how high-def video was being handled, and talk to some folk about how video encoders like H264 and VP6 were being used for full-screen display and resolution.
All very sex stuff… which is why the dream’s still alive. Drop sweet nothings about codecs and platforms in a late night lounge and the swoons are downright audible.
And to demonstrate geek as modern day rock-and-roller, you need look no further than the AIR Bus pictured above. It’s a Prevost Le Mirage, Entertainer, sleeps 12 and made a transcontinental tour leading up to the convention. It traveled from Vancouver to Las Angeles, from Atlanta to Boston with a bunch of stops in between all in order to spread the gospel on a newfangled way to create Web apps for the desktop.
If music’s your thing and you use sites like Finetune or Last.fm you’ve brushed up against the technology. AIR is what powers the desktop version of the apps so that you can synch what’s going on in iTunes with the listening recommendations these two sites provide. The more technically adventurous can read about how that’s done here.
Point being, enough people are brushing up against AIR that it warranted a full-blown transcontinental bus tour in a pimped out Prevost Le Mirage that had a global positioning system that was routed into an AIR app that received photos that were taken every minute (yes, minute) and then uploaded to Flickr.
No internet connection? No problem. The AIR app simply queued the images until the next time there was connectivity.
And then up they’d go, all sucked up into the universe that’s Flickr so that legions of fans could track the AIR tour’s point by point whereabouts like groupies everywhere and at all times hoped to do with, say, Zepplin, Hendrix, Sabbath… or Menudo.
All this we learned when we hopped on the Prevost to interview Mike Chambers, AIR’s senior product manager for developer relations. Which is to say, when we got on the bus, in which these rock stars arrived triumphant in Chicago. And got to see and hear all the rock star antics they’d participated in during their weeks on the road.
Like setting up global positioning systems. And AIR apps to track their travels. And playing Halo 3. Most definitely playing Halo 3. Because that’s what rock stars do.
And what we do, and what we’ll be doing over the next week or so, is releasing interviews with those we met. Rock stars included.
Because we’re giddy like that.
Michael Cervieri is Executive Producer of ScribeMedia.Org, except on Wednesday and Thursday nights when he heads up to Columbia to teach at the Graduate School of Journalism.
