Ray Camden beat me to showing off the ColdFusion Sneak Peak at MAX 2007. I'm here trying to learn Flex and AIR, so the demo of the CFAirAccess tag was very intriguing! I've wanted to post more about MAX, but my wireless has been so flaky and is usually not working. So I'll be posting when I'm back on a wired connection or perhaps at the airport on the way home.
I'm at the airport ready head out to Adobe MAX in Chicago. First of all, let me thank the Port Columbus International Airport for providing free Wi-Fi.
I'm excited about MAX for two main reasons: (1) time away from the normal busyness of life that allow me to think more outside the box for solutions to current problems and (2) three days of intensive instruction/interaction/networking. I'm sure by Wednesday afternoon my brain will be fried, but for now I'm excited. I feel that I have a good mix of hands on and non-interactive sessions over the course of the conference.
I'm going to try to make several posting of the next few days about the sessions I'm attending and the announcements made. On a lighter note, I have to admit it will be tough for Adobe to top the keynote entertainment from 2006 - Blue Man Group - so we'll have to see what they have up their sleeve.
More to come!
This afternoon at MAX, I had the fun privilege of taking part in a MAXUP session run by Ray Camden. It was an hour session where Ray gave the coders in the "audience" a particular ColdFusion application to create in a half-hour. We did not know anything about the app before he got up to speak. It ended up that there were only three of us coding, so we had a great chance to win one of the cool prizes.
The time went VERY quickly. I had never coded under the "pressure" of a short timeline to create an app that I just found out about. It was quite fun. When the time was up, my app didn't totally run, but many of the pieces were in place. No one totally finished their app, so it ended not being so bad. When the time was up, we each shared what we did and why we did it. It was interesting to see the different perspective each of us brought to the same problem. After we each presented, the audience voted on who "won"--and it was me! I won a 512 MB iRiver U10 player. It's a pretty cool device--it can play songs (mp3, wma, ogg), play videos (mpg4), show photos (jpg), and play Flash Lite 1.1 games. It also has an FM radio and microphone built-in. The 2.2" screen is quite impressive!
Kudos to Ray for leading this MAXUP session and getting his hands on the cool prizes.
Today is the first day of MAX. The keynote this morning was awesome, especially with the Blue Man Group starting the session off with some entertainment. I had only seen them on commericals (Intel?)--they were quite cool in person.
Adobe made lots of announcements. Here is my raw rundown of what happened:
So I am super busy and aven't published the RSS component yet. Don't worry--it'll happen. I'm close, just need to finish cleaning it up for distribution. I also need to create at least a simple project page... Anywho, if you are interested, just keep checking my blog feed--I hope to have it out this week, but for sure next week while I'm at Adobe MAX!
At work we are trying to plan out our conference schedule this year since the early bird special for CFUnited, The Premier ColdFusion Technical Conference, ends on January 31. Three of us from work went last year and thoroughly enjoyed it. I probably won't be able to go (because of summer scheduling conflicts), but am looking to send at least one of my co-workers. We have also thought about going to MAX (never been) and have been wondering what 2006 holds for the conference. I can find ZERO information about what annual conference Adobe may have to take the place of MAX, or even if they are planning on keeping MAX around for another year or more. Even my trusty friend Google hasn't helped me in this situation. Is no one talking about this? Does no one plan ahead? What are your thoughts? Anyone from the company formerly known as Macromedia want to comment (even anonymously :-)?
