After a week of working crazy hours on a new business pitch, Saturday finally arrived and i had that one whole day to prepare for AdobeMAX. I actually started realizing that i was finally going to make it to AdobeMAX even tough physically i was really tired. Many questions were going through my mind since i was attending this conference for the first time and with that curiosity i packed and was ready to fly.

That night my coworker and friend, Jerlyn, who was also going to MAX, stayed over at my place. We painted T-shirts and wore them the next day while traveling to LA. Mine said “I am an EventListener looking for function()” hers said “I am function() looking for an EventListener”. We got a lot of fellow travelers curious at the airport including the TSA agent at screening station who read the copy on our T-shirts out loud. I will certainly recommend Virgin America to any one flying to the west coast. Flying should be at least this comfortable if not better. 6 hours of flight and we arrived at LAX.

Brian, my good friend from college in Savannah, picked me up from the airport. It was really nice of him and then after the whole checking in to the hotel and stuff we were off to the In-and-out burger to have some double delicious burger and crazy animal fires. Yeah sound greasy and disgusting for those watching the calorie intake. But the burger was delicious and freshly prepared without frozen patties.

After walking around on Hollywood Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard for a few minutes and taking pictures of all the stars on the sidewalk we got back to the hotel. I met up with Rupali, my best friend friend from college in India. I had not seen her in 10 or 12 years. It was really nice hangout out with her. We instantly connected and remembered all the things we did in college. I wish i had more time to hang out with her. Next time!

Then I registered for the conference and got my id card, the cool USB key attached to it and all the documents. Soon after that it was time for the Soda party at Figueroa hotel. I loved the interior of the hotel. The pool side was just beautiful. We met a few Adobe People there. The day ended with all of us visiting the iHop and drinking some coffee and eating something/anything that had bacon in it.

This year I was fortunate to attend MAX for the first time. Quite an experience and well worth the trip. Adobe and Macromedia’s combined heritage lends to an imaginative and inspiring event but with a close knit community feel. Adobe’s staff blend in to the crowd and it is not unusual to end up chatting, lunching and drinking with senior evangelists, product managers and the like. Also it was amazing to meet the people behind such things as Mate, Swiz, Cairngorm and others.

During the conference I learned to tweet (thanks Radley) and tried my best to keep up with things and provide some useful snippets. For those not following Twitter (like me for the most part) I figured it would be worthwhile to review the tweets and provide a summary of the info and links that were generated during the conference.

Principle Sites

• MAX on Adobe TV
• Adobe TV recordings of MAX 

Flash Player 10.1

• 10 Minute Clip of Flash Player 10.1 on Mobiles, Netbooks,… - Kevin Lynch Keynote
• Flex for iPhone Devices – Ely Greenfield
• SOURCE to 4 Flash iPhone Apps - Ted Patrick
• Applications for the iPhone – AdobeLabs
• Whats Coming with CS5 (Beta download available by end-2009) - AdobeLabs
• Multitouch and the Flash Platform – Dan Dura

LiveCycle

• LiveCycle Developer Express - David Tompkins and Sven Claar
• LiveCycle on the Mobile (iPhone +)
• Adobe puts LiveCycle in the Cloud – NetworkWorld
• Latest Version of LiveCycle ES2 - Adobe
• LiveCycle ES2 is just around the corner - Anthony Rumsey
• LifeCycle Cafe - Adobe

ActionScript

• Practical ActionScript 3 - Excellent if you are new to ActionScript – R Blank

Flex3 and 4

• Eclipse pluggin for downloading Actionscript frameworks - Rozengain
• Whats New in Flex 4 - Ely Greenfield

Flash (Radley is going to cover this topic)

• The Flash Art Of War - Jesse Freeman

AIR 2.0

• Whats Coming with AIR 2.0 – Christian Cantrel
• AIR 2 Complete Enhancements Overview - Elad Elrom – insideRIA

http://max.adobe.com/

Adobe TVにてAdobe MAXのセッションが閲覧できます。
が、このwordpressブログ、埋め込めないんだよね。。
fladdict様ブログより失礼します。

これ、Flash Media Live Encoderで、リアルタイムにビデオをエンコードしてＵＰしたんだとか。

講演内容はMedia Technology Labs様ブログより失礼します。

「コンテンツの活用によりビジネスの質が向上する」— Adobe MAX 2009基調講演

Flash実行環境の多様化で市場の盛り上がりに期待 — Adobe MAX 2009

Adobe MAX 2009では日本人開発者も活躍! – FLARToolKITとSpark project

YouTube AdobeMAXEvent

RIA×DNAセッションレポート

Adobe MAX 2009 イベントレポート
Adobe AIR 2.0
マルチスクリーンWebを考慮したデザイン、開発手法
新しいFlash Catalyst Beta 2 の紹介～Flash Catalystの登場で何が変わるのか？～

基調講演ムービー

Welcome from MAX 2009.
Thanks for any help and covering me back at the office. 2 days down, 1 to go. Below are takeaways from experiences so far. Alot of cool stuff coming during tomorrows agenda on games, CS4, and ripping apart 10 innovative flash projects to see the strategy used. First good news however is this: 3 out of 5 booth reps have 401k’s with us.

The company (Adobe) line:
 Adobe’s strategy is to integrate all products and make it easier for anyone to do more with less programming, and make it easier to switch between their many expensive products. I also think that Flex might be a great solution as well in place of a gold solution or something.  The other alphabet soup of AIR, LiveCycle, Connect, etc is still a little confusing, add that to crap like ‘clouds’ it is hard to keep track of some of the IT side of things. They have way too many products… ok, I said it. But apparently alot of these products are necessary for these advanced web 2.0 mashups, but I can’t see us building those solutions internally, way too much IT integration.

Actionscript 3 seminars.
OK, I admit to have been on the fence and scared, read 2 books in the last year, not even layed down a line of code yet but I am now finally convinced now that Actionscript 3 is a must. Although different, ultimately it is much less code, makes alot of what sucks about programming now more intuitive and consistent (such as only one way to click any object on stage). I am all in (personally that is, this doesn’t mean we are switching to actionscript 3, I am just ready to learn it and embrace it…anyone coming?) Learned some great tips to avoid changeover pitfalls and easy traps. I can help layout a roadmap for those who want to take the trip, there were some great presentations on benefits and ease of coding, and no presentation or developer seen here yet is using as2.
It will make programming easier, I am seeing that in front of my eyes, as people make wicked projects in little time, it is alot less intimidating now.  In helping us transition and addressing the real-life problems we encounter, I bought the Actionscript 3 Cookbook at a 20% discount here, it is a great compendium of solutions to most small component problems that make up a large project, this is going to make it really easy to have a specific problem reference like this. By putting together all the little things in this book, you can create most any solution you want.
– > Oh yeah, look up onine for: Pixel Bender Exchange this has cool free flash plugins that are like Photoshop filters but dynamic, it  is some crazy eye candy.

 Acrobat 9 can do that?
Yes Kristen, I got my ear chewed off by the booth rep, swagged up, saw a great presentation, and brought back a ton of Acrobat 9 capabilities infos and demos. It looks to be a great way to keep our hands in the fun stuff (eye-candy), and the designers and word-smiths busy changing their ems to ens and back again until their eyeballs explode without our involvement in that end at all.

Joshua Davis experimental works:
Incredibly detailed and varied iterative artwork through programming. Great presentation starting with very simple concept and programming and evolved to incredibly complicated pieces by combining simple programming concepts finally tweaking the program and exporting these flash movies to illustrator and making interface backgrounds, fine art, commercial projections, large print installations, interactive video walls.  He would make a program and run it a thousand times and get 40 cool ones he liked and used 1 of them, a great way to generate complicated stuff.. like this.. http://www.joshuadavis.com/wp-content/uploads/2001/07/ps2_4_praystation_01.jpg  imagine doing that in illustrator..

HP Booth rep:
Maybe some great news… As I was ogling the high-end HP product line, the rep told me how there was a team at Vanguard Malvern last week showing off the graphic and video workstations for IT and content creators, as they (Vanguard) are getting a lot of pushback from creatives stranded on Macs or underserved on out-of-the-box PC’s. Sound like anyone who works in your cube everyday? 

Augmented reality:
No vanguard application, in the next 10 years, but definitely look into it for some stupid computer tricks. In a nutshell, you need a webcam, go to an AR site (http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/) print out your ‘key card’, and then hold that paper up to the webcam and rotate it in your hands, and the 3d projection appears to be in your hands on the paper, hard to describe, but cool once you see it.

Kaplan online:
Huge online accredited university system. It started 20 minutes late, had some informal talks on problems in working across locations to develop content. Focus in this as solutions for synchronous learning where interacting with students is key. If an instructor talks for more than 7 minutes without opening it up to participation it is a failure. Drilled into customized interface using alot of other programs, my eyes glazed over as they described it in mind-numbing detail, they are now rebuilding with various flash products mostly using Flash Media Server, it started to veer from what I wanted to get into, so I trolled for ice cream sandwiches and more swag as it’s proscribed time ended and speaker was rolling.
I want to see some eye-candy. — > Cost of trip now justified with this e-learning component.

More on this whole thing later as I sort out the chaos in my head.

Jason

MAX started off today a bit bumpy for me. I had a talk about “Moving from Flex 3 to Flex 4″ at 11:30 which was directly after the first keynote of the conference. Unfortunately, the keynote started 20 mins. late and ended 45 mins. late, so, while my session was supposed to be at max capacity (about 175 people), only about 25 people were in the room at 11:40 when I decided to start. By about noon, they asked me stop my presentation and restart it at 12:25 so that people coming from the keynote could still attend. Ahhh! What a pain. Anyways, thanks to the people who showed up on time to my talk and apologies that you had to wait so long for the talk to complete.

Finally, at 1:30 or so, the session ended.

Here are the slides for the presentation for those who are interested:

Slides: FlexMigration_shorter.pptx

I’m hoping for a smoother session on Wednesday at 11!

Update (10/9/09) – I’ve updated the slides since my presentation on Wednesday. I added more details about using TLFTextfield with Beta 2 to avoid embedding fonts twice when using MX and Spark components. I also fixed a typo I had in the States slide excludeIn -> excludeFrom.

If you’re one of the fortunate ones attending Adobe MAX in L.A. next week, an upcoming Labs project codenamed “Gravity” (ActionScript OSGi plug-in framework inspired by OSGi) will be showcased in two sessions:

Vibes, Twitter, and Enterprise Microblogging

Join the Adobe@Adobe team to explore new features of ColdFusion 9 and LiveCycle Data Services used to power a nifty Adobe AIR application called Vibe. The team will dish on how you can leverage Hibernate ORM and RTMP to streamline the process of building a rock-solid enterprise microblogging platform. Add in a dash of Twitter and you have an app that enhances your work/life balance. This session will expose you to insanely great solutions you can leverage in your enterprise.

Speakers: Ron Nagy, Venkatesh Yadav

Products: AIR, ColdFusion, Flex, LiveCycle DS

When: Wednesday, October 7, 2009: 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm (Twitter: #adobemax397)

How Social Are Your Enterprise Networks?

Come learn how the Adobe@Adobe team is integrating social networking within an enterprise context leveraging industry standards. The team will explore trends around social networks at the office, microblogging, bridging the gap between internal and external content, and how to leverage various platforms to drive acceptance. Companies around the world have been trying to find ways to enhance global collaboration. This session will arm you with the knowledge to foster your own globally scalable workforce. You’ll walk away with example solutions you can put to work immediately.
Speakers: Chris Mayo, Venkatesh Yadav

Products: AIR, ColdFusion, Flex, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES

When: Tuesday, October 6, 2009: 9:00 am – 10:00 am (Twitter: #adobemax257)

Be sure to hit up Venkatesh with questions, he’s well versed in Gravity. Just tell him I sent ya.

Gravity is an ActionScript framework that offers a modularization strategy inspired by implementation of OSGi . In short, it’s a dynamic plug-in framework for ActionScript, Flex and AIR applications. While geared towards addressing challenges in the Enterprise RIA space, there’s nothing stopping developers from using this technology any time their project(s) call for modularization and loose coupling.

One exciting feature in the pipeline will be support for plug-ins compiled under different versions of the Flex SDK. This allows developers to roll out new functionality without having to refactor and re-compile existing code. (We are not using Flex modules under the hood) Another important goal was to avoid being prescriptive as to how you actually develop your application code. i.e. Gravity will “play nice” with the likes of Cairngorm and other frameworks/best-practices.

As for the history of this project, it’s been used internally @Adobe and in product dating back a couple of years now. (and yes, we deserve some lashings for not getting this out sooner) Throughout that time momentum of OSGi has continued onward and upward, particularly in the Java and mobile space. More recently, in the Flex realm with the release of Potomac. Potomac takes different approach than Gravity but is exciting to see and offers further validation of OSGi in the client space. (They’ve got a great IDE plug-in as well) The more the merrier!

The initial Gravity release will contain the framework, ASDocs and supporting documentation (not extensive at first, more of a quick start) as well as sample projects. Look for it on Adobe Labs in the coming 2-3 weeks! We’ll be following the open source model adopted by the Flex SDK team in due course.

Cheers,

Stacy

Since this is my first blog post, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about the challenges associated with coordinating a company’s blogging efforts. Is it better to have a small number of core bloggers promoting their own personal agendas, or is it better to lobby and promote wider company blogging efforts by a larger number of individuals?

Whichever way you decide to go, it is widely acknowledged that you need to facilitate independent thought and content so as not to diminish the value of the bloggers’ posts. There are plenty of other marketing channels out there to worry about.

At EffectiveUI, we have a small team of dedicated bloggers who have built up their own independent followings. Is it better to concentrate your efforts on a small group of experienced bloggers, helping clear their paths to facilitate more quality blogging activity, or are you better served in widening your marketing efforts to help shape a larger blogging task force, which may blog less often but will have a wider diversity of blog postings?

My suggestion would be do take a hybrid approach, dividing your focus across both groups. The small, experienced blogging group already has shown its natural ability and initiative to blog, and it simply needs the marketing team’s help to make its blogging efforts a priority internally (versus paid, billable client work). It is, however, equally important to focus on expanding the core blogging group, since in the modern work environment employee attrition is a regular occurrence. Adding more bloggers to your arsenal also provides a more thorough, accurate view of your company and fosters a sense of community. By continuing to promote blogging across your organization to new members, you’ll find a lot of hit-and-miss interest. Blogging on a regular basis takes discipline, dedication and a basic interest in writing down your thoughts. Unfortunately, early enthusiasm often quickly dissipates.

It is important to coach new contributors on blogging best practices so they maximize their chances for success. Here are the blogging tips I collated from one of our long-standing bloggers, Senior Developer RJ Owen (http://www.rjria.blogspot.com):

- Identify and compile a list of topics before you start blogging.

- Use a parallel structure when writing and editing blog posts.

- Long blog posts have a longer shelf life.

- Short blog posts are OK; they just have a short lifespan.

- Schedule a regular slot in your calendar to focus on blogging.

- To maximize your blog’s visibility, be sure to aggregate it.

-  Build links within your posts (to your own and other blog posts).

Your marketing team can educate new bloggers about how to follow these tips. For example marketing can facilitate group brainstorming sessions in which the blogging team can come together and discuss, refine and expand on its blog-post ideas.

Additionally, the marketing team regularly can feed the blogging team ideas relating to company projects, customer successes, industry trends and interesting tidbits captured by the outside-facing sales and marketing teams.

I think it is fair to say that bloggers within any company, new or experienced, are happy to write blogs about their thoughts and interests or company-related successes. What keeps them from doing so, however, is that they do not prioritize time to blog.

Initially, I held a torch for the idea of getting everyone within the company to post a blog. For me, this approach would lead to the maximum diversity of thought leadership while providing a great team-building exercise that allows all employees to voice their opinions on why user experience (UX) matters. However, over the past few months, I have realized this ambitious goal is unrealistic. First, not everyone likes writing, and secondly, not everyone likes broadcasting their thoughts and opinions.

Therefore, it would have been a little selfish of me to mandate everyone write a blog post. Blogging ultimately has to be a voluntary activity. As a marketing professional you also have to consider diminishing returns for chasing a 100 percent company-blogging initative. Chasing a universal goal could easily eat up valuable time that could be spent on other beneficial thought leadership initiatives.

Other EffectiveUI blogs include:

President Anthony Franco http://anthonyfranco.wordpress.com/

UX Designer Patrick Hansen http://www.patrickhansen.com/blog/

Software Developer Joshua Jamison http://www.workingfromhere.com/blog/

Experience Architect Andy McIntosh http://www.andymcintosh.com/

Senior Developer Greg Owen http://www.behindtheui.com/

Senior Developer Zachary Pinter http://zacharypinter.com/

UX Designer Michael Salamon http://www.michaelsalamon.com/

Experience Architect Juan Sanchez http://scalenine.com/blog/

Senior Developer Brad Umbaugh http://bradumbaugh.blogspot.com/

Cheers, Chris

I am head of marketing for EffectiveUI, a fast-growing, Denver-based Web- and mobile- services company that focuses on user experience (UX). This blog will provide regular updates on the issues my team and I face in marketing our services to large and small customers, across many verticals. My challenge is to make these blog posts both interesting and rewarding for the reader. I know there are many professional marketing managers out there who ponder how best to allocate available funds, how to prioritize multiple initiatives, be effective and keep internal stakeholders happy.  I hope this blog provides you with some valuable insight on these initiatives.

1. Durango: drag and drop live components between AIR apps
2. Nitro: flash widget platform
3. Cross Device Support
4. Flash RTFMP
5. Photoshop Seamless Image Composing
6. Face, Speech, Video Recognition
7. Meer Meer
8. Server side action script on CF
9. Adobe Premeire Collaboration Tools
10. Cloud Cloud Cloud

I attended Adobe MAX 2007 at the beginning of October and it was the best conference I’ve ever attended. That’s saying something, because I got to attend some extravagant events during the original dotcom boom. Two things contributed to the event being so good: excellent informational sessions and just plain fun evening events.

I spoke with other MAX attendees who expressed some disappointment with their sessions, so I initially thought that maybe I was just lucky. Then I asked the other attendees if they ever left a session that wasn’t going well and I was shocked to learn that none of them had left any sessions.

There were so many enticing sessions in every time slot that I wonder why people would sit through a session that wasn’t living up to expectations. Three or four times during the conference I found that my first choice wasn’t going to be worth my time, so I stood up and headed to my second choice (and, in one case, to my third choice — which ended up being excellent). No harm to anyone and a better conference experience for me.

I expect that most people stay in a session that is spiraling down the drain because they think it’s rude to leave. It’s not rude. The presenter has already been rude to you by wasting your time. Life is too short and your company has paid too much money for you to suffer through a sub-par, unpracticed presentation when an excellent alternative is two doors down.

I’ve grown less patient with poor presenters as I’ve learned more about how little it takes to deliver a good presentation. A one hour presentation takes 4-7 hours of preparation — not a lot — so I’m not asking too much for the materials and visual aids to be well thought-out and organized. Some presenters have no sense of time and spend a disproportionate amount of it on relatively unimportant parts of their topic. This leads them to rush through the later — and more valuable — content to fit it in the last 10 minutes. A single practice run through the presentation would have highlighted this problem, so there is no excuse to have such poor clock management.

Finally, some of the presenters on whom I walked out were simply afraid of public speaking. They mumbled, they never looked at the audience (preferring to look at the slides or the computer screen, which makes it harder to hear them), or they weren’t able to speak in complete sentences. If you know that you will be presenting at a conference and you have difficulty with public speaking, you owe it to yourself, your attendees, and your topic to gain confidence and composure by practicing public speaking. Join Toastmasters or find other opportunities to speak in front of audiences.

As a conference attendee, you are responsible for maximizing the conference’s value to you. Don’t be afraid to leave a session that isn’t going well. You will find more satisfaction in the conference and derive greater enjoyment from your experiences when you proactive about protecting your time.

Dear Instructor,

I regret that I will not be able to complete this week’s HCI assignment due to the fact that I will be attending Adobe MAX. During my time at MAX I will be attending five hours of sessions concerned with Experience Design (XD) and User Experience (UX) from luminaries such as Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr.

I feel that this dedication to the craft should excuse me from this week’s assignment. Besides, we both know that I’ll be getting more real-world knowledge from these MAX sessions than I would from preparing a usability study proposal for your class.

Regards,
David

Dear Adobe,

All is forgiven. The CS3 Master Collection I won Saturday night at the Chicago onAIR bus tour event is adequate compensation for the hassles I had with the Adobe MAX site.

And yes, you have bought my eternal love and devotion.

XXXOOXOXOOX,
David

Dear AT&T Wireless,

You suck. I switched from you to TMobile six years ago because you didn’t provide reception in my condo. I was happy with TMobile. They had exceptional coverage in my condo—and everywhere else I went, too¹! They had good prices and excellent customer service every time I called them. (Their in-store service left something to be desired, but sadly that’s parity for the industry.)

I had to switch back to you, AT&T, because you are the exclusive carrier of the iPhone. I had hoped that your network coverage would have improved in the last six years, but as soon as I powered on my iPhone in my condo I saw that it hadn’t changed at all. I love my iPhone, but your disgraceful coverage limits it’s utility and hampers my ability to recommend it to non-enthusiasts.

I was reminded of this again on Sunday while attending a pre-event for Adobe MAX in the McCormick Center west building. As soon as I stepped inside, I was down to one bar, and a half dozen paces further I had no service at all. I saw other iPhone users struggling with the same problem. People with other carriers, however, had no problems at all.

So, I simply have this to tell you: I completely empathize with those who are unlocking their iPhones to use them on other networks. The moment I’m out from under my contract with you, I’m unlocking my phone and returning to TMobile.

Good luck,
David

¹ TMobile’s data services in Chicago are pathetic, but I use Sprint for mobile broadband and couldn’t be happier with their coverage and speed.

Adobe sent me a very nice email yesterday and set things right. Additionally, they blogged that—due to unprecedented attendance to MAX this year—many of the sessions will be recorded.

I’m already signed up for AdobeMAX through my employer. Early last week I decided that I really wanted to attend one of the AdobeMAX all-day, pre-event, hands-on sessions—enough to drop $750 of my own money (not my employer’s) to attend. However, the AdobeMAX account page doesn’t seem to allow a person to add a pre-event session once a person has registered. I emailed Adobe about this last week and haven’t heard back. In the time since I emailed them, the magical boundary of September 22 has passed and now the event is $950. It was a stretch at $750, but $950 is out of my ballpark.

I could write this off as a simple “oops” on Adobe’s part. I understand that some emails get lost in the shuffle. But two weeks earlier I had emailed them a simple question (“Will presentations be recorded and available for free or purchase?”) and never got a response to that email, either.

To what email address was I sending my letters? Reasonable question. What email address should I be using? The email addresses are a bit buried on the site. I would have hoped to find one on the registration summary page—but, alas, they are all hiding under the Event Fees tab. I’ve emailed questions@adobemax2007.com and I’ve emailed maxops@adobemax2007.com. If you know another one to try… IT’S TOO LATE! I can no longer afford to attend the pre-event.

Adobe, whose XD sessions I was planning to attend, has managed to design a Web site hides the important contact information, won’t let me give them more money, and has irritated me enough to somewhat diminish my opinion of them as a company.

The Adobe MAX conference is in my backyard this year. The lack of travel expenses and the steep discount provided to attendees of 360|Flex made it possible for me to attend.

After registering, I chatted with other developers in my company to determine what sessions would be of greatest benefit to the teams using or investigating Flex. I shuffled those in with some sessions I really wanted to attend and the resulting schedule is below.

Data Visualization with Flex

Customizing the Flex Framework

Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant

Optimizing ActionScript 3.0 Performance

Inspire Session: The Dawning of the Age of Experience

What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?

Pixel Perfect Precision

XD: Prototyping Rich Internet Applications with Fireworks CS3

XD: Adobe’s Approach to Application Design

Optimizing Flex Applications

Designers and Developers CAN Love Each Other

Creating New Flex Components

Flex on Rails

I look forward to seeing some of you there!