I arrived in Chicago earlier this afternoon as I will be attending MAX North America from Sunday - Wednesday.

This is my first time visiting the “Windy City” and it is a really nice place; very clean and very quite for such a large city, or maybe that’s just because I am used to NYC?

I am staying at the Hilton Towers and the food and drink at Kitty O’Sheas is worth the trip alone. The hotel also has a very interesting historical background as well.

If you should happen to be attending MAX as well feel free to look me up.

I am planning on writing a post soon after I return regarding what I feel were some of the more significant highlights of MAX 2007.

So what exactly is Adobe Thermo? Or at least what is this new product from Adobe which has been codenamed “Thermo”? I don’t think anyone outside of Adobe really knows for sure just yet…

Based on what I have read so far “Thermo” appears to be a cool new tool which will allow creative professionals to leverage their existing skills to build RIAs utilizing tools they are comfortable with such as the Adobe Creative Suite product line.

Regardless of the specifics, one thing is for certain - any new tool which builds on the Adobe Flash Platform can only be a good thing for RIA developers specializing in Adobe technologies.

So I guess we will just have to wait for MAX 2007 / Chicago in 2 weeks to find out more.

For more information check out Mark Anders post on Thermo.

Adobe has released a new public beta of Flash Player 9 (codenamed “Moviestar”) which is available now on labs.

This update is a big one as there are some very impressive new features which have been added. Additionally, there are numerous bug fixes as well as various newly added features which make this update an important one.

Below is a list of what I feel are the most impressive new features:

1. Support for caching common platform components, such as the Flex framework, to reduce average application sizes which has significant benefits as this will allow for much smaller swf file sizes.
2. Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs
3. Multi-core support for vector rendering.
4. Runtime errors can now be thrown from JavaScript to ActionScript via External Interface API

To learn more check out some of the following resources:
Flash Player 9 update
Press Release

Ted Patrick has posted the latest Flash Player 9 install statistics - and the numbers are very, very impressive: 2,320,000,000.

Application deployment reach exceeding the 2 Billion+ range - This is HUGE!

For years I have paid close attention to current Flash Player version penetration statistics and it has been growing faster than ever, reaching 98% of all internet users worldwide as of March 2007. This proves that the true power of Flash Player is it’s ubiquity and legitimacy.

As always, it is a great time to be a Flash Platform Developer!