Adobe MAX was GREAT! Now that I’m home I’m having a chance to pour over all the information and things that I was fortunate enough to study and witness this week, so I’m going to go through each day for my posts.

Our first ACTUAL day in L.A. was all about getting our bearings and seeing some of the sights. I arrived sometime around 8pm or so and settled into our hotel shortly after. The next day we went out and saw some of the sights with our friends Dave and Kelly from Long Island (we met them at MAX last year). We went out to Santa Monica and walked out to the pier and spent some time on the beach, wandered along the shops off of Santa Monica Blvd. I LOVED Santa Monica! There was a flourishing art community, families, some pretty cool community things (including outdoor performances, etc. at the shopping center off of Santa Monica Blvd.) It was a great experience and one that I will not soon forget.

The first day of Adobe MAX kicked off the following day for those of us at 1080 Media with Pre-Conference Labs. These are all-day (8hrs.) classes that really dig deep into a specific field of design, or software. These classes are really cool because more often than not they are taught by the people who developed the software at Adobe. The one I took would kind of set the tone for the rest of the week, it was on a developmental emerging software called Flash Catalyst. This program is essentially being used to develop rich internet applications (i.e. Adobe Air Apps, Mobile Apps, Apps within a webpage, etc.) for browsers and devices. Previously these applications have been developed in programs like Flash, and coded out as applications. Flash Catalyst is part of a suite of programs (now being dubbed as the “Flash Platform) that will develop these applications and then be tied to a database structure (I’ll get to that later) creating very cool interactive content that can run independently of your internet browser. The really cool thing about Flash Catalyst is that you can directly import an Illustrator or Photoshop file into the program, and as long as you’ve managed your layers properly, can begin building applications immediately. If you’ve ever used Flash before you know that you would have to select elements, write in action script and it can be a bit of a process (especially if you’re not that into learning a scripting language; basically you’re a DESIGNER). With Flash Catalyst you select the layer group, tell it to be a button and it writes in the necessary code to be a button! The Same goes for making data lists, scrolling bars, and pretty much any other interactive element you would need in an application. As if that isn’t cool enough it has a timeline similar to the Flash timeline that allows you to create transitions between pages, fading in and out elements, etc. Flash Catalyst allows exports to another program in the Flash Platform called Flash Builder, where you can tie your application to .xml databases, and edit the action script, and much more. All in all a good day, it started my fascination with Catalyst.