Yesterday's user group meeting was a strange one - a simultaneous webcast to user group gatherings around the world. Using their own Breeze product, Macromedia managed to pull off a real-time presentation involving six of their product leads and an audience of hundreds at different locations around the world.

It was a bit strange to see a presentation with a laptop, projector, loadspeaker and no presenter in the room, but apart from a five-minute problem with audio track echo (which was actually reminiscent of Orbital at Glastonbury in '94) the Powerpoint slides, desktop sharing, multiple-choice polling and Q&A via text chat worked very well.

In the past, Macromedia "Sneak Peek" sessions have been the highlights of user conferences, but this one was pretty subdued by comparison. The announcement of releases of the Flash player v7 for Linux, Brady and Flex 1.5 in late 2004 caused barely a ripple - not many surprises there. The next release of Central comprises UI changes, a flexible try/buy licensing function for developers and autodetection of online/offline connectivity. Again, good stuff but hardly earth-shattering.

The line up for 2005 was a bit more engaging. Contribute will include better CSS support and an approval workflow. They were very guarded about the Flash Player v8, only saying that it was a "big" release. The next release of Coldfusion will include automatic generation of PDF/Flash Paper printable formats, which looks like it will be a handy feature. The integration of some of the basic rich form functionality of Flex into CFML will also help Macromedia assert their insistence that flash-based RIAs are the future of the web.

Again - this will be very useful, but I'm beginning to worry that they are pushing this RIA stuff too far. Macromedia predict that by 2008 they will be pulling in over $1 billion in RIA-based revenue. Good luck to them, but their implication that the only web-based applications worth using will have a flash-based interface is pretty galling when their Flex pricing structure starts at over ten grand.

In summary, the star of the show was the medium rather than the content - Breeze looks like a fantastic product, and whilst it is also a tens of thousands investment, any organisation with geographically dispersed locations should be able to put together a healthy-looking ROI based on saved travel and accommodation costs alone. I'm just hoping they don't deprecate HTML before we've had a chance to roll-out the Breeze-based Flex training...