Adobe Live Amsterdam was awesome!

by Ruben

Honestly, it was. I had never been to a multimedia conference before, but it was worth all the trouble of getting there.
The day started off with a quick overview of the best new features in the various CS3 products. All this was pretty much the same as what I had already seen on the CS3 launch webcast back in March.
Nonetheless, things like the auto-align and median features in Photoshop (where you can use several photo's of the same object and automatically clear out, for instance, walkers-by) were fun to watch on the big screens..

Just before the end of the introduction presentation we had to leave as we were going to see Martijn de Visser and Owen van Dijk talk about workflow with Flex and Creative Suite 3.
Although it wasn't all bad, both Martijn and Owen seemed to be not quite properly prepared, but althemore nervous, which reflected in their presentation.

After the intro- and CS3 workflow talks we pretty much sat in the Developer Theater all throughout the day, as that was where all the presentations were given that were of most interest to us as Actionscript developers.
Especially Aral’s 'Memo to the CEO' was really inspiring, I think Aral gave the most enjoyable presentations during the whole day, but that probably also had something to do with the way he entertains his listeners as much as he teaches you about the subject in question..
Aral on XML in Actionscript1&2: "I don't wanna know about your firstChild, lastChild, ..bastardChild?".

Around 12am we attended Joey Lott's Actionscript3 session, in which he talked about (among other subjects) E4X, the ByteArray Class, and parent-child relationships.
Most of what he talked about was not new territory for me, but I did get to ask a few questions.

Around 1pm Mike Downey came on stage and started his talk on Apollo, which was pretty much everything that Adobe has been showing off with from the moment on that the Apollo public alpha was released.
He did seem to be less tall then he looked on the webcasts though..

Following up on Mike Downey his session was supposed to be a talk by Waldo Smeets on building Apollo applications, but somehow this was canceled..
Waldo did, however, give a very interesting talk about Flex 3 after the lunch-break, about which I made a seperate post:
Flex Builder 3 sneak preview

Halfway through the afternoon Aral Balkan gave his second presentation, which was about 'Rediscovering fun'. Again, this was a very inspiring session. During the talk he made some small samples of SWX, which was nice, and also really simple..

After Aral's talk we stood by Serge Jespers' session on Flash and mobile technology, which was nice, but not exactly mind-blowing.

Altogether I had an incredibly beautiful day and I am already looking forward to Adobe Live 2008, you should too.