Leaving St. Louis

I left St. Louis at 0900, got through security relatively quickly considering I had two laptops, iPad, iPhone, Droid 2, two external hard drives, and all their cables. What set the metal detector off was my jewelry to which I received the comment, “Damn that’s a lot of metal!”

I sat next to a woman named Marsha who was on her way for training. We talked a bit of tech and because she didn’t have Photoshop I introduced her to GIMP and outlined how she could deidentify confidential documents using GIMP. It would be nice if Acrobat Reader had the ability to black out areas then resave the document.

The flight was uneventful, we arrived around 20 minutes early then had to wait for 30 minutes until our gate was clear. My bag made it safely, so I grabbed it and headed off to get my car from Hertz.

The Chartreuse-mobile

This was amusing. I arrived at Hertz to a huge line. I tried to use the restroom but they were not made for a person and two suitcases – when will airports and car rental places get that people will inevitably have luggage? I finally got to the counter and got a Ford Fiesta. It definitely had the right name. I walked out to it and the car was chartreuse. Neon green.

Even the people in the car next to me started laughing seeing me in all black going to this car. I did all the normal checkout stuff and used the GPS Drive MotionX app on my iPhone to guide me to the hotel, which it did flawlessly.

The Hotel

I parked and checked in, was welcomed back by staff that remembered me from last year, was given a room just two doors down from the one I was in the previous year. I was supposed to have one queen bed but got two. Didn’t really matter to me. The room was much larger than my other one.

Dinner

I went right to the 8th floor snack bar and got an awesome fresh wrap with a spinach wrap, garbanzo beans, feta cheese, mushrooms, red onions, parmesan cheese, tofu, baby spinach, and honey mustard dressing.  And a half of a pickle.  Total cost: $6.50 seriously.

Headed back to my room to prep for Monday’s training. I got a really good night’s sleep. Fortunately I was a few blocks away from where they were filming Batman.

Monday

I was up bright and early at 0530 on Monday to get registered. I had a tasty breakfast of fresh squeezed orange juice and oatmeal with brown sugar for breakfast. While they had a full breakfast buffet, due to gallbladder removal I can’t eat much in the morning but the oatmeal was nice steel cut oats and were cooked perfectly.

I used my iPhone again to get me to my destination.

Paid the $12 parking fee and headed in to get registered.

Registration was quick and painless and resulted in a little goodie bag with a small flash drive, mints, a hoodie, and some flyers from sponsors.

I then had nearly 90 minutes to wait for the first keynote. I headed over to Starbucks near the Nokia Theatre and sat there until it was time to head in.

At the first keynote we learned that they would be split into designer talk on Monday and developer talk on Tuesday. You can see the keynotes online here.

During the keynote we found out all MAX attendees would receive a one year subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which included not only all of the new apps they created but also the entire Master Collection for a year. While I had already spent my $1,500 to upgrade both Mac and Windows versions it’s still nice for everyone else. this was between a $1,700-2,500 value.

We also received a free single edition Digital Publishing Package, worth $395. I’m most excited about that and have until February to do my first single edition.

After that everyone headed for lunch. What I found out after the event was that there were special tables for people who had dietary restrictions, because I didn’t know that (and I did mark that I had dietary restrictions) I couldn’t eat most meals. For example, they had empanadas one day, I scraped out the salsa (beans, corn, tomatoes) from inside one (about 2 Tbsp worth) and that as well as some potato salad (1/8 c) was my lunch.

However I did sit with some great people on Monday including someone from St. Louis, and was recognized by another St. Louisan while eating lunch.

I headed off for my first session Building Business Websites Faster with Dreamweaver and Business Catalyst. I was familiar with Business Catalyst when it was Good Barry, but never used it. After seeing what it could do I am definitely going to pursue it for one of my clients.

After that there was Building a Flex Application for Tablets, which was really a rehash of what I did the previous year. It was fine but I won’t take those courses again. They are very redundant and basically involve you typing exactly what’s written in a book. I can do that on my own time.

Then I had Creating Mobile Applications, which was probably the best session of my three days. I left with a working app that I am already going to use to create another app. Awesome!

After that I headed back to the hotel and didn’t participate in the meet the teams or sponsor meet and greet. They are mostly about drinking, eating, and talking. I don’t drink. I can’t eat most foods. And I didn’t know anyone to talk to.

I spent my night eating a delicious salad from the snack bar (those chunks that look like breaded chicken are tofu) and doing work for my day job and a few small client items then got to bed around 0100.

Tuesday

I was up at 0600, got ready, had breakfast again and headed off to training. After finding out that the Premiere class was super basic I switched to HTML 5 The 2012 of the Web, with Robert Nyman, which was definitely the most entertaining session of my entire tour. He had a hilarious presentation, absolutely geared toward geeks. I recommended it to many people and hope they bring him back — and he should teach how to make effective presentations (click the image to view his presentation slides).

Then the second keynote for developers, it was interesting but I definitely could have missed it.

I headed down for lunch, coleslaw (flavorless) and noodles. I asked if the noodle pack I grabbed was tofu and was told yes. I got to a table and it was all zucchini, which I don’t eat. So I didn’t eat lunch that day either. And I asked if I could join a group of people and they said yes then promptly ignored me the entire time. Very rude group.

After that I headed to The Flex Mobile Bootcamp, during which time I installed the Flash Builder update 4.5.1 (it wouldn’t install just the update) and corrupted my install of Flash Builder on my Mac and my Windows machine. Because the class was both (a) a repeat of a class I took the previous year (with a few minor updates), (b) was written in a way I could do it on my own, and (c) was useless for what I wanted to learn because I couldn’t do the update, I left.

Instead I booked Publishing to Digital Devices with InDesign CS5.5, which was a great session and walked me through doing just that and showed me that InDesign could be used for presentations, who knew?

Next up was Creating eBooks for Distribution onDigital Devices with inDesign CS5.5, this was a great class, though we had some minor technical issues it was really cool to see how InDesign can be used to very easily create eBooks and make everything low the way you want. And I’m so glad I now know a better way to anchor images!

That was it for courses, then it was time for the MAX Awards presented by Rainn Wilson of The Office fame.

He was hilarious and really appealed to the audience. After that was Sneaks. By far the most entertaining part of the Adobe presentations and I really hope they make the voice dubbing and blur reversal realities. They are so obvious now that I’ve seen them.

After the awards was the MAX Bash. I didn’t go last year but decided to go this year. I guessed, correctly on Monday, that IRIS of Cirque du Soleil would be the visual entertainment. They were incredible.  Click the thumbnails to view the full size.

I stuck around for about 45 minutes. Didn’t see anyone I knew, didn’t talk to anyone, couldn’t eat any of the food but there was a lot of it — a seriously excessive amount and I hope extras were donated to a food bank. They had catered food, food trucks, Candy Land the dessert area, a living room for people to sit, game systems projected on a building, various areas for sitting or standing, then Weezer played a small concert. I didn’t stay for that.

I headed back to my hotel, where they had honored my request from the morning to put a wrap in my room before the restaurant closed at 2000 because I knew I wouldn’t be back until at least 2100. Sure enough I got back at 2200. The Los Angeles Athletic Club was very accommodating.

Wednesday

I got a few hours of sleep before getting up, getting ready, breakfast, drive to the convention center for the last day.

Most people leave early or don’t attend early morning sessions, which is a real shame. If you go plan on leaving the day after the last day so you can take full advantage of what is offered.

I was supposed to start my day with building a Flex app for iPad but since my Flash Builder was corrupt I had to cancel and I switched to InDesign CS5.5 Power Shortcuts, I tried to make that schedule update Tuesday night but the Adobe site was down, however they had computers set up to allow people to make changes quickly and easily.

I am glad went to this class, even though I had to have the most annoying people around me. Very loud, constantly talking, laughing, and carrying on. But I learned the course was offered on Lynda.com so I’ll watch it there for the full selection of tips.

Then it was time for Explore Fireworks Tricks for Designers and Developers. I hadn’t used Fireworks up to this point and it’s like the red headed step child of the Adobe Suite. After this class I realized how powerful it was and decided then that I would use it instead of Photoshop or Illustrator. It’s a very powerful comp tool that is like a graphical interface with the ability to create Pages and Layers like in InDesign. And all of your graphics are vectors. It’s as if Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign had a baby. It isn’t a complete solution to replace any of those but is a great hybrid. I also won a 1GB Lynda.com flash drive at this session.

Then it was time for lunch and once again I couldn’t eat it, eggplant Stromboli. I can’t eat bread or eggplant. They also had chips and cookies. I went without.

I headed to my next class, Hands on with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, and this was a very valuable session. It taught me how I can use the single edition I’ll get in the new year. It was a great hands on course.

My second last session was Building Tablet Applications Using InDesign and Digital Publishing Suite, which was almost a repeat of a session from last year but with new info. The speaker reminded me of Zak (shaggy hair version) from Bones. He took a lot of questions, which was great, and brought up a good point — Adobe should seek out an Apple Developer to have a booth to answer developer questions and Help people sign up and understand requirements and restrictions.

My final session was CSS Takes Over the World, at the start of this session we found out that Steve Jobs had passed. The group was somber but we learned on.

It was a great class that taught me all sorts of incredible things in could do with HTML 5 and CSS 3, in particular really nice form validation. I’ll be using these techniques immediately.

The End of Adobe MAX 2011

That was the end of the sessions for me. I packed up and said goodbye to the conference customer service staff, who were really incredible, and headed to my hotel.

I had a salad, packed, wrapped up any work stuff, then got to bed about 0030. I was up at 0500 because my ex-husband sleep dialed me. That was fun. Then finally got up at 0800, showered, finished packing, had breakfast, checked out and was invited back for next year.

I left the hotel around 0945 and drove to return my car. Got there around 1040. Hopped on the shuttle and went to the airport, checked my bag, got through security without issue, despite two laptops, iPad, etc. — though my wallet did set the detectors off. Got to my gate, had a great conversation with an older gentleman who was coming to St. Louis for his 67th reunion. Then we boarded the plane and I wrote this entry.

Final Thoughts

Even though I only took a few courses, there were over 300 offered.  This board was huge and listed every session at the time of the event (sessions did change throughout with new sessions added and a few canceled).

And even though I only took a few courses, Adobe offers up all of the content and presentations, and videos of sessions on Adobe TV. So you still get everything – all the things you couldn’t attend and learn about, you still get that content.

Say you pay $25 per course, that’s a $7,500 value.  And if you attended this year, you can attend next year for $895 for the three day conference or $1,390 for the pre-conference (two intense days of training) and the three day normal training.  Figure in $1,500 for hotel, car, and flight and you have an amazing educational experience for less than $3,000.

If you go in 2012 let me know, I’ll definitely be there.