(late) MAX Europe review
ThursdayJan 22,2009
First of all I want to wish you a “Happy New Year”. May 2009 be a year full of love, friendship, laughter and “happy coding” 
Yeah I know that it’s a bit late to review MAX Europe, but just after the last day of the conference Peter, Pablo and me heard that Adobe was laying off 600 people so I wasn’t very motivated in blogging anything. Then came the holiday season, the New Year and now we are already the 22th… Time is flying by and I can’t keep up ! Should I mention that we were out of water for an entire week at home ? Then I should also tell you that I finally received my brand new MacBookPro (my first Mac!) W00t! Thanks again Nokia :-)
Back to MAX Europe 2008: I won’t do a detailed review - really useless – instead I will share some personal thoughts. I must start by saying that It was my first MAX conference and I had mixed feelings about it : lots of information was available on the web after MAX U.S. (It was already the major complain in 2007) and there was some negative talks on twitter (pricing, topics…).
General sessions and Sneak Peeks
Really great, especially the “Men in Black” parody. It’s really a nice way of presenting new products or features – they were doing the show ! It was mainly focused on CS4, so after the CS4 launch event that we had few weeks ago at our User Group, I didn’t learn a lot of new things – luckely there were some other impressive things shown that I really enjoyed.
Sessions
As a AIR/Flex/ColdFusion developer it was really hard for me to choose which session to attend. Some were a bit disappointing – skill level is hard to determinate sometimes – while others were great. It’s the same for all conferences in fact
Labs
Definitively the most disappointing thing for me : it’s not due to the teacher, of course, but why the content is based on the examples shipped with the product ? Normally you already try them at work/home and you expect the labs to go further, don’t you ?
Networking
The best part in any conference I was happy to see some familiar faces (I really wished some others could have been there) , people that I only knew from twitter, some others that I didn’t knew at all. Also seeing all those enthusiastic evangelists in one place was so cool!
Location, arrangements and events
Everything was perfect and very well organized : rooms were quite comfortable, there was enough food for everyone, everyone was nice., lots of free stuff and goodies. I was a bit surprised to see that half of the attendees left the party very early and that evangelists were hiding…
In conclusion I would say that I really enjoyed MAX Europe 2008 but, as suggested by someone else I think, it would be nice to postpone MAX Europe for 6 months after MAX U.S. – in that way, there will be new things to present, new reasons to attend
my Pictures of MAX Europe 2008.
Posted in AIR, ColdFusion, Conferences, Flex, Learning, Mobile
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Same opinion regarding everything. I would like to add that I was a bit disappointed that the “advanced” full day workshop (and expensive), was virtually the same as the lab on the 1st day. And as you say, it was basically the same tutorial that comes with the product itself (in this case LiveCycle DataServices demo). Something everyone alreasy has done before. It was a common complain in the lab. Considering the use of terms as “advanced topics” in the workshop/lab descriptions, this is a bit of bad avertising, specially when you pay (that’s time and money) to be in a full-day workshop which is the same as the 2x2hour labs you already had on the 1st day, just at a different (slower actually) pace.
Also agree with your 6 month offset suggestion between US and Europe, at least to have some fresh content and announcements even if I am sure a few things will be the same (I still saw a few presentations that felt recycled from Adobe Live London, which was more design oriented and almost 3 years ago)
January 22nd, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Better late than never..
Nice post and nice pic!