I am spending the morning with about 120 of Adobe’s customers and developers at the company’s second Engage event at San Francisco’s DogPatch Studios.
Throughout the day, developers are showing the work they’re doing with Adobe’s tools, including the AIR platform which was officially launched from beta today. Here are a few of the demos I saw this morning.
ShifD was born of a Yahoo! hack event in London a while ago and was launched last night by The New York Times Company. The application lets you easily move content from Web sites to your desktop and/or mobile phone. We’ve seen this application before, but ShifD seems to be super simple. The app is fresh into beta and there are kinks to be worked out, but the developers expect to open up an API in the future.
DEMO fans got a first look at Sprout last month at DEMO 08. The Engage audience got a look today, as Carnet Williams walked the audience through building a sprout rich media player. Sprout lets you gather up media assets from any live Web site or upload them yourself. The beta is live now and open for public trail.
FedEx showed a desktop application that provides real-time status of package movement through the FedEx delivery system. The app brings better convenience and more information directly to the customer, and provides real-time alerts to improve customer experience. The application was built in-house in about 12 weeks on the Flex platform.
MFG.com is a marketplace that links the global manufacturing economy. The site has created a rich internet application to coordinate transactions among suppliers, manufacturers, and customers. This may not be the application you rush to, but it is a great example of a rich Web application.
I’m on next, in conversation with Adobe CIO Kevin Lynch. We’re due to talk about a range of things modestly summarized as “what’s next for the Web.”
I had to post before Mitch Free from MFG.com finished his pitch. Turns out they has a team of 18 engineers working a year on the application. But the very interesting comment was that they spent about 5 – 6 months doing UI testing and talking to customers before they began coding. This is a complex app with lots of moving parts. Very impressive.