Earlier this week, my company and I went down to Chicago to attend Adobe Max, adobe's premiere conference discussing all things Adobe. I've been to plenty of conventions before, but this would be my second work-related one.
This conference was huge. Attended by 4300 people, across 60 or 70 sessions 4 or 5 times a day. They packed so much information into this 3 day event, there's no way even a couple people could experience it all. On the third my brain was so fired from constantly spinning and collecting information, I really needed a day to collect my thoughts and get everything down on 'paper'.
It was a fantastic time, though. We stayed at the Chicago Hilton at night. In the morning, they rented out big busses to shuttle people back and forth between their hotel and the convention center that held Max.
Breakfast was the first event of the day and was massively attended.
One thing Adobe did expertly well was provide a very vegetarian based meal. It was great, nearly all their entrees and food was 100% vegetarian, so us non-meat eaters had plenty to eat.
After breakfast, was the first general session of the conference. Some of us waited in line, but I went around to the Max Store to see if they had anything good.
Not really... they only thing of interest were these Adobe Mugs with all the new icons. Only $15!
The AIR bus was also parked over near the Max Store.. That whole area was designated the AIR Park, and had some developers giving demos of their AIR apps, and a survey counter for free stuff. They also had a few improptu sessions pop up over there.
Another general hang-out location was the community pavilion which housed around 100 vendors pushing their products and information about how Adobe worked great for them.
Very playful atmosphere, in the midst of work ^_^
Sessions I attended on Day One were:
General Session Keynote by Kevin Lynch
Hands on: Deploying Flex and HTML/JavaScript Applications to Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) by Jeff Tapper
Online Ads that Attract by Eric Natzke
Effective Website Redesign by Neil Straghalis
BLITZ Case Study: Creativity Conducted by BLITZ Team