Max 2008

So I got the chance to go to the Adobe MAX conference this year in San Francisco. It was a Monday-Wednesday (November 17-19) affair in the downtown area of the city. I've been to a number of different conferences at this point in my career but this one definitely stands out as unique. The location was nice and it had all of the standard elements of a conference: general sessions, labs, lectures, swag, etc.

The atmosphere however was a surprise to me. Instead of your normal business conference atmosphere (think lots of stuffy old guys shuffling around a large room) it was more like Lollapalooza. There were gaming stations (both console and computer) spread throughout the conference, lots of give-aways like PS3s and notebook computers, and the average age of attendees had to be about 27. There was also an interesting mix of Designers and Developers, two groups who don't traditionally walk in the same circles but it seemed to work just fine at MAX.

The general session Monday started at 9:30 a.m. Free breakfast started at 7 a.m. so naturally I got there at about 7:01 After I filled myself to capacity I went up to the third floor where the general session was going to be and figured I would get a good seat since I was almost an hour early. I was told that the session didn't start until 9:30 however and so I couldn't come in.

Thus began the wait. At about 9:32 a.m. they finally let the stampede of five thousand of us through the doors. I'm not sure what happened then, I don't know how many died, all I know is that I made it to a seat somehow. I ended up just to the right of the stage on the third row. As I walked down the isle the booming sound system pounded out recent rock hits so loudly that I could feel the bass in my chest. Up top were three giant wide screen displays placed next to each other with a panorama of Adobe images and video interviews. Once things got started the first person to come out went up to a turntable (that's right) and started a video/audio slide-show. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen a serious geek do. When he scratched the turntables not only did it scratch the music but also the video. It basically went through a rundown of what Adobe was about, what was coming out, and how people were using the products etc. Like I said, it was pretty cool.

After that Kevin Lynch (CTO Adobe) came out and led most of the session, bringing on people from Disney, The NY Times, Google, and Maria Shriver (y'know the governator's wife) among others. They also breezed over all of things coming soon from Adobe including that next year will see the Flash Player 10 come to mobile devices as a full Flash Player! For those of you interested For those of you interested you can go to http://adobe.com/go/keynote to see a little more information about what went on. They are also supposed to have audio/video of actual sessions up at some point. I'll go over all of the sessions I attended along with my thoughts about them as I have time.