reMAX and D-Flex Roundup
This last month has passed like a blur yet I am not complaining at all!
Just over a week ago I was heading out to MAX and have been able to experience some of the coolest things that Adobe has to offer. I also had a wonderful D-Flex meeting this last Thursday where we covered MAX, Flash Catalyst, Flex 4, and Cairngorm.
First off, MAX.
MAX was amazing, I kept up to the minute posts with Twitter, go check those out if you want to see those posts as things were happening.
Sunday:
I had arrived Saturday night highly anticipating Sunday morning to see everything getting started. When Sunday morning came I ran down for breakfast and signed in for MAX, received my shirt and packets of information add wandered around a bit. Being that I wasn’t signed up for an preMAX events we (the group I was with) decided to skip out and head to Alcatraz. That night we had a User Group Managers meeting (a.k.a. PARTY OVER HERE) and went out to all hours.
Monday:
Monday is when everything started for me. The rest of the day was eclipsed by the amazing general session that happened right at the beginning of the day. Adobe put together one amazing general session highlighting the release of Flash Catalyst, Flex 4, new advancements in other technologies, the release of AIR 1.5, and many other goodies.
My sessions started with a lab – completely horrible. I will tell everyone now, if you are a MAX presenter, and your presentation consists 95% of showing where to copy and paste prewritten files and you give zero explaination of the theory behind the files or why/what you are doing, don’t be surprised when you get horrible marks from the whole room. By the end of the day everyone that had been in that class had passed the word around and people were changing their schedules to stay out of the class. This session was followed up by another bad presentation where the panel was more interested in talking amoungst themselves and not in a way that the audience could even hear. The audience even called out asking for them to speak in the microphones and/or louder. Nothing. So yet again bad marks. I was 0/2 at this point and starting to worry. My 3rd session was “Advanced Tips and Tricks to Flex Builder”, which mainly seemed to show off eclipse tricks, but was still a good session that I pulled a few good tricks out of. I am a fast typist, I just never stopped to memorize all of the shortcut keys. My 4th session though was amazing, Flash Catalyst and Flex 4. Here we went through all the new features in Flash Catalyst (all that they can share) and Heidi (I have a new boy crush on Heidi) went through the top 10 new Flex 4 features, all of them very cool. I especially loved the livedoc tooltip integration, generated getters/setters, and new navigator. My workday will be more action packed now.
Tuesday:
Tuesday I had a great set of sessions including: a papervision unconference, Flash Player security, how to script for photoshop/illustrator/aftereffects, and finally Flex 4 skinning. I highly recommend the Flash Player security session every year! Not because we all haven’t read the docs a million times (if you haven’t, you should), but because it confirmed those points that you may have thought you have known. The Flex 4 skinning was wonderful to see and now we can expect some amazingly designed Flex apps coming on the horizon. Until now people asked “how can you tell it is a Flex app?”, my response was always “look for the components, that’s the giveaway”. Now I forsee that to be much harder.
We then went to the sneaks were Adobe showed off the newest technology that they are developing or even just playing with. For one such example check out Durango.
The day ended with the Adobe Customer Appreciation party which was out of this world! Mindball, find it, play it. On top of that there were palm reader, handwriting analysis, food, food, food, drinks, games, sushi, everything. It was great.
Wednesday:
Sadly I was leaving on Wednesday, and early too. I was able to join in for the AIR security session (like the Flash Player security session you HAVE to take this), and a session mainly over the new Flex Marshall Plan. That was the end of my day, and I was off to packing, one last round of shwag getting, and to the airport.
Thursday:
Thursday was D-Flex and we had a great meeting and turnout. Lots of MAX talk, a demo of Flash Catalyst in action, continuing discussion on our Netflix application and finally a deep dive and coding example of Cairngorm.
