Tonight was the Worldwide Macromedia Usergroup meeting. This was only the second Macromedia Usergrop meeting I’ve been to. My local group meets in Williamsburg, Virginia at The College of William and Mary. Overall it was pretty good. The format for our meeting was first, a presentation by a semi-local Flash Developer – David Vogeleer – I came in a little late on it but what I saw was very good.
The next half of the meeting was a demonstration by several members of Macromedia’s development team. The presentation was done online with Macromedia Breeze. I think Breeze was the most interesting part of the presentation even though none of it was actually on Breeze. Some of the cool things it can do are:
-Realtime Polls
-Chat
-Screen sharing (the entire desktop)
-Great quality live audio
-Powerpoint type presentations
-Shared Flash animations
Those were just the features I saw tonight. Very impressive.
As far a the actual content of the presentation, it seemed to be more of a marketing pitch than anything. They showcased the features of Central 1.5 and some of the new ColdFusion features. I could be wrong but I think Central is never going to take off and I don’t use ColdFusion (though it seems pretty cool). In addition, they showed features of the new version of Contribute and they mentioned some new featues of Flex–again, products I don’t use.
Afterwards David showed off some of the Making Things stuff he’s been working on. Pretty cool.