Adobe

MAX

Sunday, November 30th, 2008 | General | 1 Comment

It has been a week since I have returned from the Adobe MAX conference in San Fran. 20 minutes from the golden gate bridge, I stayed at the four star Marriott on fourth street. The main building for the convention was a block away. I arrived Sunday night around 7pm where I met up with some coworkers for dinner and some drinks. The next morning I went over and registered at badge booth 5 where they handed me my access badge that they scanned for every session and checked for durring every keynote. At 9:30 we entered the first keynote where 5000 geeks entered into a huge concert like room with 2000 square feet of projection screens and more light and lasers then a Justin Timberlake gig. Most of my coworkers sat towards the back, but I wanted to venture forward. So Erich and I grabbed a seat about 4 rows from the front.

The show was great. Lots of cheering and clapping for software and features. They ran through the new CS4 suite as well as displayed “project thermo” a.k.a. Flash Catalast. Pretty cool stuff. They gave us all a free beta version and I suggest you hit up google or YouTube to learn more. After that they had a bunch of famous people come on stage about charity work utilizing the new software/techniques. Everyone laughed as Maria Schriver made a comparison between us and a star track convention.

After the keynote we hit upthe free lunch (which was the best free meal of the whole event) and checked out the booths around sporting their new software/hardware. I hit up the intel booth where they a few mid’s and umpc’s to play with. Amazing stuff. Grabbed as much free stuff as possible, then headed off for my first session.

I’ve never been to a conference before so I didn’t really know what to expect. My first session was “Lazy Design: How to utilize lazy stragities”. After this session I realized that speakers either make or break a session. This session set the bar pretty low as the two Scottish men went over the history ofthe word Lazy for more then half the time. They finally moved on and made a solid connection with human tendencies and using them while designing an ideal user experiance.

From there on I went to some great sessions as well as a few that I left early. Overall I learned a TON and became very motivated to develop/design. It was a great experiance and I really enjoyed the trip!