I just got back from MAX, and yeah I know it ended a week ago but hey if the company's paying to fly me out to California I may as well take advantage of the free airfare and take a few extra day to go "home" and visit with family and friends and even take a drive by my old High School.

MAX however was a blast, and by far the best conference I've been to yet. I've been to several Photoshop World, HOW, and Thunder Lizard conferences over the years and I have to say they all pale in comparison. I will say however, that the group over at NAPP do an awesome job of presentation materials. Every attendee to a Photoshop World conference gets a book of each and every presentation when the register, with a CD or 3 containing all of the source and presentation files. And while Macromedia does provide some presentations on the site, it has taken a bit more effort to track down any extras, or source files by requiring one to go to each presenters website and see if they have made any additional materials available. That's is all very trivial though compared to the event itself, which was phenomenal.

I must have changed my itinerary 100 times over the course of 3 days, which was made very easy to do since they had a large bank of computers right there inside the conference. There wasn't one session I felt was completely useless, although there were a few I felt were probably out of me realm of interest and knowledge. The "Next Generation" sessions by Gary Grossman were great but that guy is just waaaay to smart for me and a bit over my head when he gets into the nitty-gritty of why the next-gen player is going to be so fast and more efficient. I think my favorite sessions were the " XD: Design Techniques and Best Practices for Building World-Class RIAs" and the " Object-Oriented ActionScript" session by the genius Colin Moock (who had some moron carrying on a phone conversation during his presentation). The XD presentation was great, it was really nice to see how they break down a project and hear their process (I have a new dream job). Although they did mention that the demos would be posted (hint...hint...anyone??), but I haven't found them anywhere. The media Center demo was phenomenal, very smooth, very clean, and well thought out.... Source files anyone??

In the end, I have to say thank you to Macromedia for a great event, for all of the free goodies (backpack, sweater), and most of all THANK YOU for the hospitality and generosity of the presenters for taking their time to share their wealth of knowledge and time. I will definitely be there next year, and only hope that Adobe allows the same level of commitment that Macromedia has shown to the community!!

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 27th, 2005 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Misc.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.