Adobe MAX 2008

Monday, November 17th marks the official start to this year’s Adobe MAX conference. I wanted to give a quick update on where I’ll be and what I’ll be up to at MAX. So, here it is.

First of all, at MAX you can follow me on Twitter or BrightKite my handle is “adamflater” on both. By the way, the BrightKite guys were cool enough to setup a placemark for MAX. The placemark is “max2008“. That’s a valid placemark for checking in and posting your notes and photos while at MAX.

Aside from my scheduled events you’ll also find me at the Universal Mind booth throughout the conference. We’ll be demoing all of the apps we’ve been hard at work on in the past year, including our GIS / Data Visualization product: SpatialKey, and the MAX Award Finalist NASDAQ Market Replay. Market Replay is an application that I had the pleasure of working on with the NASDAQ team. Please vote:

The partner booths will be located at: Moscone West, Level 1.

My Schedule:


Speaker Dinner
When: Sunday, November 16th

I’ll be participating in several sessions at MAX and also attending the annual speaker dinner. I hope to see all the familiar faces as well as meet many of the other great folks in the Adobe community I have yet to become acquainted with.


Adobe AIR++
When: Monday, November 17th, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Where: Moscone West 2000

This is a session I’ll just be attending. Andrew Trice has been doing some cool stuff with Merapi and I definitely want to check it out. I’ll only be able to attend part of the session due to the Merapi session directly following this one. Andrew, we’ll save you the last demo spot at 360 | MAX.


Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Monday, November 17th, 12:30 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

John and Tom, the men behind 360 | Conferences, have always been extremely gracious about letting me speak at their events. This year they are hosting an unconference at MAX. The unconference will feature advanced Flex and AIR topics.

At the last 360 Flex conference in San Jose my friend Jordan and I presented on Merapi. We showed an AIR application controlling a Lego Mindstorm Robot in real time. At both of our 360 | MAX sessions we’re going to have a lot of people from the community present the Merapi applications they’ve been working on. You can count on seeing some pretty cool stuff from: Dave Meeker, Andrew Powell, Andrew Trice, Holly Schinsky, Joe Johnston, and me. We’ll be demoing AIR apps that integrate with GPS, RFID, Eclipse, Oracle, Outlook, Growl, MacBook sensors, and of course Legos.

You won’t want to miss these Merapi events and that’s why we have three of them.


MAX Birds-of-a-Feather (BOFs)
When: Monday, November 17th, 8:30 pm -10:20 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

I’ll be participating in two BOFs on Monday night: AIR Gone Wild and the Intuit Quickbase Platform.

AIR Gone Wild is a BOF hosted by Greg Wilson from Adobe. We’ll be showing more of our Merapi goodness at this BOF. If there’s a question you don’t have the chance to ask in a session this BOF is a great place to come and ask it.

Intuit has a new platform geared towards Flex. It’s called Quickbase and it’s an interesting take on cloud computing. I had the opportunity to work with the platform on one project and I highly recommend checking these guys out.


Merapi at 360 | MAX
When: Tuesday, November 18th, 12:00 pm – 2:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Level 2

In our second Merapi session at 360 | MAX we’ll cover anything we didn’t have time for in the previous day as well as demo all the cool stuff from the previous sessions. Conferences tend to be a place where a lot of people crank on cool ideas they have. So, you never know, a new app might pop up between Monday and Tuesday they we’ll demo during this session.


InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2009

Rich Tretola, community manager of InsideRIA.com is hosting this session. This will be a panel format where each of the presenters brings their ideas on the future of RIAs. I’m pretty excited for this one, panel discussion are some of the most valuable aspects of any great conference.


Introduction to Flex Builder 3
When: Wednesday, November 19th, 2:00pm – 3:00 pm
Where: Moscone West, Room 2005

This will be a great session for those of you just getting starting or thinking about jumping into Flex development. I’ll be covering all the basics of the Flex IDE as well as an overview of what Flex is as a whole. In my source code demos I’ll be integrating a Flex app with BrightKite, the site I mentioned earlier in the post, to show you how easy it is to consume data in Flex. I’m looking forward to great questions at this session. It’s always interesting to find out what people need to know about Flex.

All right, well I think that’s enough. Looking forward to seeing everyone at MAX!

-adam