Las Vegas!

I got into Vegas last night around 9pm. MAX officially starts today with preconference activities - I've got the User Group event this afternoon. Not sure what the plan is for the day, but I don't have to be anywhere until about 4 pm. I know there's fasion show mall about a block away, so I can do some shopping. I have to eat some good food while I'm here this week.

Last night Jeff & I tried to go out. No luck. We ended up the the Romainians (formerly Interakt, now Adobe) and a group of 10 guys has a really tough time getting into a club. Tonight we're eating at Tao and will probably just head up to the nightclub from the restaurant. I'm seriously wanting to do some dancing this week.

MAX 2005 - Anaheim

I've been getting ready to leave for a week of learning, networking, and fun at what will probably be the last Macromedia conference. I've been going to Macromedia conferences for years (several in San Francisco, New York, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, etc) -- actually the only one I've missed in a LONG time was the Orlando one after the Allaire merger.

I'm hoping that this will be a great conference. I'm especially excited about the Flash platform (mainly FlexBuilder 2 aka Zorn) and Flash Lite -- I've got a Flash enabled phone now.

I'm also hoping there will be some good Southern California food to be consumed. If you have SoCal eateries to suggest let me know. I'm mainly going to be in Anaheim and Orange County, but I may have a car so LA isn't out of the question. I'm pondering trying to find some good BBQ.

Acme Oyster House

Last night we went to Acme Oyster House for dinner. We started out as a group of about 12 MMUG managers, but ended up with about 19 of us. Acme is a New Orleans establishment. It's your classic oyster bar and cafe with reasonable prices and good food.

I started out with some raw oysters and then had the New Orleans Medley. The oysters were great. Not the best I've ever had, but close. The cocktail sauce served with the oysters was not quite as hot as I would have liked, but the quality of the oysters easily made up for it. The medley is a sampler that includes seafood gumbo, jambalaya, red beans and rice, and smoked sausage. All I really need to say is tasty. The only lackluster part of the meal was the french bread which was quite tough.

If you're looking for oysters Acme is a great place to get them.

Finally in New Orleans

Going to grab a quick bite to eat and then try to get some work done on the costume before tonight's festivities. Hoping tomorrow won't be too rough on me given the party tonight.

Rob has posted great commentary on Bayona. It's one of the places I'd like to try and eat while I'm here. Unfortunately there's not enough time to eat everywhere.

SGF Wifi & TSA Searches

I'm currently enjoying the free wifi network at the Springfield-Branson airport. I've got to say this is a much better experience that going flying out of a bigger airport (and a nicer airport than Columbia).

Most people seem to be sailing from check-in to the gate in about five minutes. I was unlucky enough to be one of the "randomly" selected people for full checks. Possibly because I'm not checking any bags?

So the TSA needs a bit of a wake up call when it comes to people with orthopedic implants. I've got four screws and two plates in my spine from breaking my back about 10 years ago. They don't set off the standard metal detectors, but the hand wands sure go crazy over my back. The search I was subjected to was one step shy of a strip search.

I'm glad this didn't happen in a major airport and I think I may check my bags on the way back.

All that aside I'm about 30 minutes from my flight to Dallas and then 4.5 hours from New Orleans. I've got several hours of television on the tibook and a bunch of candy to make the trip more enjoyable.

Next post, NEW ORLEANS!

Leaving for MAX

I'm leaving this morning for MAX. Should be to NOLA by about 2:30! A group of the MMUG managers are getting together this evening in costume for some Halloween festivities. If you feel like joining us post a comment here and I'll get you the details.

MAX 2004 Food

Rob Brooks-Bilson has posted a great list of places to eat in New Orleans. I've already started my list of food to consume during the week of MAX 2004.

Since so many people will be blogging the technology related portions of the conference, I'll be blogging about the food. I'm hoping to get in a couple of beer tasting trays like last year as well. Anybody care to join me?

I was planning on doing a tasting menu at Commander's Palace with some of the User Group managers on Sunday night, but it looks like there may not be a very big group (and it is a bit costly), so I'm still looking for other great sampling opportunities.

Still in Denver

I'm still in the Denver airport. Luckily the wifi here is free (or at least I've not been prompted to pay for it). So far I've watched three more episodes of the Tick (I've got all three seasons on DVD) and continued to play with building a useful Central application. I've decided that whatever I build has to be something that I would realistically use. Any ideas?

Heading Home

After a night at Naked last night I'm feeling pretty tired. Slept in this morning and then ate lunch with Todd at CPK then headed to the airport.

Long story short right now I'm in Denver waiting to hopefully get on a flight to KC. Because of the weather I got to Denver after my original flight was scheduled to depart. I may or may not get home tonight. Now I feel bad for having given Ed such crap about changing his plans to leave last night.

Hope everybody else is having better luck getting home.

Flash Cast

Flash Cast is basically a reincarnation of a Point Cast type service for use on mobile devices. It's push to the phone over the wireless network. The app can be used to for traffic, weather, news, stocks, cartoons, games, etc. The accuweather channel looks a lot like the similar pod in Central.

I'm not sure how useful this will be, but it's damn cool.

Director

Full DVD video playback natively in Director. It will maintain aspect ratio, audio sample info, original size, and full event notification as DVD navigation occurs. The movie (.dcr) can be played in a browser and will still interact with local DVD content. This means you can display info on the web and use content from the DVD -- extremely rich content with no download.

Performance of Flash elements in Director. You can now group flash sprites so they all play under one common player. This fixes the huge performance issue for a lot of flash sprites on the stage at once.

Javascript syntax in addition to Lingo. You can mix javascript/lingo within an application, but not within a single script. This should lower the barrier for Flash/web developers to move to Director.

Flash

There is still a lot to do in data integration in Flash. About 80% of the Flash tool is now available via JavaScript (JSFL).

Data connection wizard to make it easier to work with data sources. The wizard will look at the data and try to interpret it as the appropriate Flash data type. It also lets you convert the format of the data for each type for each data instance. Finally the export puts it all together in a format that can be used natively. When data gets returned to the server though it will maintain the server format if it differs from the display format.

There is also a data grid wizard that allows you to format data grid display.

Breeze

In Breeze live a shared whiteboard space, polling application, and the ability include an index for a recorded meeting. The index is also searchable. Breeze live supports flash paper (driven by the presenter).

Macromedia is going to write an API for developers to build their own pods (the little component aspects of a Breeze preso -- chat, video, etc). They are opening the entire Breeze platform for developers.

Every function in Breeze is a web service and they will be documented for other developers. Breeze is a J2EE app built on JRUN. The Breeze Central cluster is made up of 24 servers and has been very solid. You can use the Breeze web services for other applications.

Peldi demoed a Central application that uses the web services from Breeze as a notification tool within a Pod.

Contribute

Flash paper can be imported into Flash with various levels of control. Flash paper on the Mac. Shared assets library -- a shared collection of images and other assets that can be used by all members of a contribute group. User/group settings can control publish rights to force review by an appropriate memebr of the team. The team list can be generated from LDAP or an open directory. There is also a contribute inbox for moving items through the review/publish cycle. Events are broadcast via web services and they've got a sample app as an event tracker.

ColdFusion

Ability to use Flash rather than cfgrid via Flex. Ability to generate Flash forms live from CF. CF dynamically generates the MXML and routes it through the Flex display engine. You can even rapidly build a tabbed interface via simple CF tags. It will even do an accordian by changing one attribute. It's even possible to bind the form fields to the grid and prepopulate a form. All this in 27 lines of code. Very cool.

cfdocument tag -- by flipping a switch it's possible to create a report defined in html to a pdf document. It even puts the column headers at the top of each page.

IBM Eclipse Demo

IBM has been working with the Flex team to allow the Eclipse environment to interact with Flex. Eclipse is an open source IDE development tool. Demo of a MXML component editor that lets you edit both the raw MXML or a visual editor for the data. The editor in Eclipse is a javascript editor, but has been extended for AS2 and will provide code hinting and debugging for Flex applications.

Brady (the flex editor)

Rendering of SVG data for inline preview within Brady. This means SVG rendering in the Flash player.

Actionscript components can be compiled/previewed in Brady via a roundtrip compile to the server (although the demo didn't work). The demo of the MXML components crashed the app, but the repeat worked nicely.

A network monitor is available to show http, trace statements, web services, with a detailed description. This is very slick.

Flex

SVG can be used to create vector images in Flex.

Components can be used in Flex. These components can be built in Flash and exported or you can even build them via MXML and Actionscript 2.0. This means that the Flash IDE isn't needed in order to build applications that use components within Flex.

Flex can also use stylesheets for formatting the content of the swf. This is very cool, it will allow for CSS style manipulation of dynamic swf content via Flex.

Dreamweaver

Inline code hinting for user defined classes/methods. This is pretty cool, it lets you have syntax hints for any code you write.

Sneeak Peaks

Writing this live from the MAX 2003 Sneak Peaks session. All of the items listed below are engineering demos, so they may or may not be included in any given future product. Each entry will be a different product team.

Get to your sessions early

So the keynote ran about 20 minutes long which delayed a lot of people in getting to the first session. As a User Group manager we were sitting in the first 5 rows, which made leaving early absolutely impossible. About 25 people who had preregistered for a CSS Navigation session got closed out because "the session is full and has to start on time." The advice of the conference employee was to see the session at another time.

Of course many of us have full schedules (through preregistration) which means that I'm sitting in the cybercafe now trying to revamp my entire conference schedule.

Which leaves me with three questions:
1. Why did I bother to preregister for sessions if I'm going to get closed out?
2. How much of my investment in MAX will be wasted due to closed sessions?
3. How much of my preregistered schedule will be worth anything? Right now I think the answer to this is the one hands-on session I'm scheduled for.

Salt Lake Brewing Company

I think I'm going to take a slightly different approach to blogging the conference the rest of the week. Everybody here is going to be writing about the Macromedia topics. So, unless something is just absolutely unbelievable I don't plan on writing about the technology much (okay, I probably won't be able to resist, but who knows). Instead, I'm going to write about the epicurean MAX experience.

Last night most of the Usergroup Managers met at Squatters/Salt Lake Brewing Company. If you're in town for the conference I highly recommend it. They brew six different beers year round, three seasonal beers, and serve three blends. To the shock of several people, I tried them all.

Most microbreweries have a tasting platter that can be a good deal. Especially if you're wanting to expand your taste in beer. Squatters is no different. For $6 you can try all 12 varieties currently being served.

Everything on tap at Squatters was good, although some of it is better than others. Something to keep in mind is that a lot of the beers seem to have a fairly high IBU (I couldn't get the numbers about Squatters beers, although that may be my own laziness). Just so everybody knows, a hoppy/bitter beer is not a in general bad thing, although it can be. At Squatters the bitterness is appropriately balanced with the other flavors.

So here's my rundown:
1. If I could only get one beer it would be the Emigration Amber Ale. It's surprisingly hoppy for an amber but a very good drink.
2. I usually like wheat beers, but the Hefeweizen didn't do anything for me. It was good, but not the level of on-tap goodness I've come to expect in a quality microbrew like Squatters.
3. Of the blends only the Shandy appealed to me. I like a black & tan and a black & blonde, but they are premixed which changes the flavor. I think that a properly prepared black & tan with Squatters beers would be great. That said the Shandy was quite good. After bad Cervesa con limon experiences in Spain I was a bit hesitant to try the Provo Girl Pils blended with Sprite, but I enjoyed it. Perhaps the Spain experience is because I've yet to taste a Spanish beer that I would drink by itself.
4. The Cask Conditioned Ale and the Full Suspension Pale Ale where quite good. I'm not much of a pale ale fan, but I'm starting to develop a taste for them. The Squatters varieties are quite good. I do think that being cask conditioned makes a huge difference in the taste of an ale. If you can get your pale ale from the hand pump, all the better.
5. All three stouts were good (oatmeal, cream, nitrogen draft). I'm a huge stout fan so having three on a tasting platter made me happy.
6. The seasonal currently being served is Hophead Red. I usually don't like red beers, but I think it may be psychological. Not knowing this was a red until after I'd tasted it I thought it was quite good. I'll have to try again with some others when I get home.

I would happily order any of the Salt Lake Brewing Company beers again, that's not something I've been able to say at all microbreweries. Although if I have to pick a winner it would be the amber.

Finally in SLC

I'm finally settled into my room at the Wyndham and connected to the internet. I'm not sure how I'll kill the afternoon before the MMUG gathering at Squatters tonight.

I ate lunch at the Lion House Pantry and must say it was quite good (and a good deal). The entree/sides were good, but nothing slecial -- although for salmon and two sides it was quite affordable. The mincemeat pie on the other hand was the best I have ever had. Sweet and spicy at the same time. Mmmm. For $12 not a bad lunch indeed.

Ready to GO

So I think I've got everything I need packed. I'll be getting up at about 4am to drive to Kansas City for my flight. I regret not having written anything about the MAX Central application yet. Perhaps I'll do it while waiting in the Denver airport. I'm planning to attend the MMUG session at Squatters tomorrow night. Anybody else?

DS208W

Okay, I'm disappointed. I downloaded all of the files that are in the related information for this session and they didn't work.

Some more research showed that they didn't work because I'm using a Mac and the scripts are IE specific. I get JavaScript errors galore in the Mozilla js console. Even on Windows.

HELLO!?! The title of this session is "Practical CSS Examples for Navigation and Layout." In my mind being IE specific isn't very practical.

If you open the file in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and run a test against target browsers it tells you flat out that it only works on IE on Windows.

I know Macromedia doesn't really control the content of the presentations, especially the accessory files, but it seems like cross-browser/platform compatability is something MACR should set as a guideline.

If this is a standard practice for the presenters the CSS sessions I'm signed up for will be relatively useless.

MAX Materials

So I downloaded and printed the MAX materials today. Between the slow Flash Paper printing and the shoddy DSL line at my office it took over 2 hours to complete.

Having access to the materials before hand is great, although it would be nice if Macromedia were able to make sure all the presentations had materials. I hope all of the Macromedia staff doing presentations that don't have materials available in the preso library are presenting topics that are under NDA until the conference. It seems that a lot of the sessions I've scheduled are being handled by Macromedia and lacking in printable resources. I also hope that those presentations have printed materials available at the door. I know that I'm not going to have access to a printer once I get on the plane Monday morning, anybody else?

So Flash Paper . . . Am I the only person who hates it? It's horribly slow on my PowerBook, involving two dialog boxes (print setup then print), excruciating "printing page x" output, then a slow cycle through the print center and again at the printer. I'm not using a slouch of a printer (or a computer for that matter). I know it performs much better on my Windows system, but that is not an excuse. Anyway do we really need another "universal" printing solution? Hasn't that been locked up by PDF for years?

All of this said, I'm still incredibly excited about the conference this year. For the first time in years somebody I've worked with will be attending which should be fun. I'm also looking forward to meeting some new people. The number of tools available for conference attendees is great -- the preso library, the central app (which I'll post more about later), intro. All are helping to make this one of my better preconference experiences.

I leave in 36 hours.

MAX

Next week should be fairly exciting. I'll be attending the MAX the 2003 Macromedia Conference. This thing has been through so many names I still want to call it UCON or DEVCON. Last year was the first year in a long time that I skipped the conference (Disney World was too blasted expensive). This year I'm glad to be attending again.

I'll be at the Community College for User Group managers all day on Tuesday and then normal conference activities all week (I fly out Monday and back home Saturday).

I'm hoping to get some food commentary written as well. I've never been to SLC. Anybody know of some good restaurants to suggest?