I got to New Orleans for the MAX conference yesterday. I’m expecting a great conference. Only problem so far is the wireless connection. I had to go down the street to a local resturant to get internet access. It’s amazing how dependant I am on the web. :) I feel much better now.

During the keynote on Tuesday Mike Downey from Macromedia showed off the alpha channel functionality in the next version of Flash Player code named Maelstrom.

I know most people saw the video Moock put on his blog, but the keynote showed an additional feature. The alpha channel supports levels of opacity. He demonstrated by showing smoke, water and fire over the top of static Flash content. WOW! This stuff rocks.

I’m also really excited after talking about a lot of the performance enhancements and…dare I say ActionScript 3.0!

It hasn’t been officially confirmed by anyone at Macromedia, but with all the activity going on at ECMA and the hints being dropped everywhere, its fairly obvious that it is in the works.

The Birds-of-a-Feather sessions last night were great too. The Flash Engineering team should really be commended for all of their advancements in both the Player and the IDE. Looks like they may have even added the most requested feature into the next version of Flash Player…file upload capability.