Feed: Raymond Camden's ColdFusion Blog - MAX - AggScore: 67.4

I've been home for a few hours now from MAX09 and - let me just say - as much as I loved it, nothing beats being tackled by my little mini-army of children running to give me a hug. To be home with them, with my wife, and in my big ass comfy chair is just about as close to heaven as it gets. Before I talk more about my experience with MAX, I need to say thank you.

• Thank you Adobe for allowing me to run the Unconference again this year. It was an honor, and I truly hope I lived up to it and provided value to the conference. Thank you for allowing me to bring in additional help and support (without them having to buy their own tickets!)
• Thank you Ezra Parker and Charlie Griefer. Guys - together I think we pulled off the best Unconference yet.
• Thank you to my speakers: Dan Wilson, Scott Stroz, Mike Brunt, Terry Ryan, Kevin Schmidt, Laura Arguello, Kurt Wiersma, Josh Adams, Luis Majano. Also thank you to Adobe again. I asked if a "few" of them could show up and I got a small army. Nice
• Thank you to Ted Patrick. Because of him I got to meet Mark Hamill. I will never forget that.
• Thank you to Chris Hayes, Kevin Schmidt, Andy Allan (Fuzzy Orange), and Mark Phillips (Verabase) for sponsoring the Unconference and allowing us to feed the hungry geeks.
• And finally, thanks to everyone who came up to me and said they read my blog. It's nice to know people actually do that. ;)

And if I forgot anyone, I blame American Airlines for keeping me waiting in Dallas an extra hour or so. Ok, so what about the conference itself? I've blogged about MAX the last few days so I'll just keep this at a high level.

• Facility: The convention center was a good location. Huge - but the layout worked well. I could get from the Unconference to my session within a minute or two. I do wish the hotels had been closer, but Adobe had buses running very regularly.
• Keynotes: Probably the best yet. The Omniture portion was a bit... awkward at times, but I feel like I finally got a good idea about why bothered to buy them. Also, there was no "Hey everyone, Mobile is really huge and it's going to be huge here any day now" rah rah portion, and that made me very happy. Oh - and seeing Kevin Lynch look down on John Mayer in the AR demo was incredibly creepy... in a good way.
• Food: I'll probably be in the minority here, but I loved the box lunches. I much prefer simple food for lunch, and hot meals/fancy junk at night.
• Special Event: I hated it. Completely. Ok, I lie. I'm just ticked that my bowling score was so darn low. I think it was pretty cool that we had so many different venues to choose from.
• Speaker Support: Adobe does a great job supporting their speakers. They paid for the hotel, flight, and the ticket of course. They made the submission process (slides, notes, etc) nicely automated and efficient.

Ok - so didn't I forget one of the more important aspects - sessions? Well, I can't really comment on that. When I wasn't giving my session I spent as much of time in the Unconference as possible. I'd love to know what other attendees thought. That's it. I hope to see everyone again, back in LA, for MAX 2009.

As has been Twittered around this morning, the MAX sessions are now coming online. Even if you didn't actually buy a ticket for MAX, you can watch all the sessions (just sessions, no labs) online for free at Adobe TV. You can find my ORM session (not quite sure if they have both the Monday and Tuesday one - I think Monday went a bit better) here: http://tv.adobe.com/watch/max-2009-develop/introduction-to-coldfusion-orm/ You can download the code and slides themselves from the version I uploaded to SlideSix. I'd normally just embed that version below, but I'm having issues getting SlideSix to remember the recorded URL for my presentation. If anyone has any questions about the code, please let me know. I'm going to do a blog entry that looks over the deeper examples from the presentation that I didn't have time to cover. Also - and I'd like some feedback on this - I was considering updating my long Transfer series. I think it could be cool to a 'entry to entry' update with ColdFusion 9.

Sorry for the silence on the blog and Twitter front today. There were a few hiccups today at the Unconference that left me a bit scrambled, but big thanks to Charlie and Ezra for keeping things running. Thanks to Chris Hayes for the sponsorship today. So how is MAX so far? The keynote was interesting. The big news was the ability to publish to the iPhone from Flash. To be clear, this is not the flash player running in Safari, but support for Flash apps as native applications. I've also got to hand it to Adobe for an amazing job on the Mythbusters show. (View it here) Oddly I wasn't able to find any news coverage of this - neither on Slashdot, Digg, or TUAW.com. Did anyone else see it mentioned? ColdFusion got quite a few mentions, and, of course, I hope everyone knows that ColdFusion 9 was released last night. Along with ColdFusion 9, a new version of ColdFusion Builder released on Labs. (And it looks like a lot more was released on Labs as well.) Well, I thought I had a lot more to say, but frankly, I'm brain dead, so I'll just end it here. Go get ColdFusion 9 and CFB now.

OK, so technically I'm not leaving for MAX till 7AM tomorrow morning, but please consider this my "I'm outa here, see ya later" notice. As always, the rule is that you will not find any bugs in my open source software while I'm gone (old school or not). On a serious note, any emails sent to me over the next week may take a while to respond to, so give me a bit of time to catch up in the next few weeks. I'll also remind folks about my Twitter account (cfjedimaster) as I'll probably be writing a lot more tweets than blog entries. Los Angeles, here I come! p.s. Freaky, a few seconds before I hit Save on this blog entry, Google sent me a SMS to remind me of MAX. ;)

This has been passed around Twitter quite a bit but I wanted to make sure knew the latest news about MAX. The biggest news is that if you can't make MAX, you can still participate online at http://max.adobe.com/online/. The keynotes will be streamed live as well as the "top 3" sessions from the day. (Top by what measure? Who knows. I say we Thunderdome it.) Also, when MAX ends, you will be able to watch any of the sessions (but not the labs). Secondly, Liz Frederick of Adobe is running a cool giveaway for MAX attendees. If you contribute to the new Adobe Cookbook while attending MAX, you can enter your name to win one of several Think Geek Star Wars prizes. Then you can win it and give it to me. Yeah. That's the ticket! Also - depending on the room in my suitcase I may be able to bring a CFWACK8 or two. First dibs on it to any geek who dresses up in Leia Slave gear.

Ok, so this is just a bit too cool to pass up. Visit this site: http://max.adobe.com/MAXar/ Download and print the PDF, and then click Launch. It only works if you have a web camera, but it's darn neat.

MAX is still a few months away (and I've yet to finish my presentations for CFUNITED), but it's time to begin early planning for the ColdFusion Unconference. Last year I think things went well, but there are some changes I'd like to make. First - I booked every single possible hour (except for 2-3) with sessions. While I think this was good, it didn't leave much time for ad hoc sessions or just general bull sessions. What I'd like to do this year is leave something like 30% of the time open. This will be for any possible topic, and could be a good way to hash out ColdFusion 9 stuff that I assume will be fresh on people's minds. I'm also a big fan of show and tell. I'd like to offer some opportunities for folks to just plug in a laptop and show what they have been working on. Again, if ColdFusion 9 is out by then, or in public beta, this could be a great way to show the new shiny stuff off. Thoughts on this? Should I leave even more time open? Less? Second - last year I was mistaken about lunch. I had thought lunch would be served at the Unconferences. This year there is no question about it - it won't be happening. So the lunch slot will always be open. Personally I plan on just bringing some food over and hanging out with the CF peeps, since we are, of course, the coolest kids on the block. Speaking of food - some of the other Unconferences offered their own coffee and snacks. I'd like to open the Unconference to corporate sponsorship. I'm not 100% sold on this, but if a company would like to buy coffee and donuts, and maybe pizzas, I'd definitely be willing to let you speak for a few minutes at the start of each day (and to put up a small sign, whatever, something tasteful ;). I don't think the presence, or lack thereof, of food and drink will be a huge thing, but I thought it might be nice to have. Third (or fourth? Lost count) - last year I included topics that were not 100% ColdFusion. I think this was a good idea as I think we need exposure to other technologies/subjects/etc. Any opinions on that? So... thoughts? Comments? If you would like to speak, please go ahead and post a comment with a) your topic idea and b) your 'bad' times. Bad times being times when you are presenting at MAX or want to attend a session. I'll just pick a time outside of that to slot you in and we can hash it out later. p.s. Also note this year I'll have not one but two helpers. Scott Stroz has offered to give me a hand again, and Charlie Griefer is my official Grunt Brute (my term, not his). CJ has offered to do anything and everything I demand of him, so I fully expect to take advantage of that and make him regret the day he met me. Just kidding. (Mostly. ;)

Not much more to add to the title, but the MAX 2009 site has been updated. Once again Adobe goes for auto-play, loud video. Don't get me wrong, I think the video is cool, but seriously - who doesn't get that auto-play is normally a really bad idea? Am I the only one? (Maybe) So bitching aside, I am happy to say that the Unconference were announced and ColdFusion will once again be featured. I don't have any details yet (we have a meeting with the MAX folks tomorrow), but I'll be posting details to the same URL I used for last year: http://www.coldfusionjedi.com/page.cfm/ColdFusion-Unconference

Time just goes to fast. The MAX 2009 Call for Speakers is now open. I hope I get the chance to run another Unconference!

I mentioned this back in November, but do not forget that the MAX 08 sessions are being posted, over time, for free at AdobeTV: AdobeTV - MAX This is free for everyone, whether or not you attended MAX. I remembered this when a reader asked me this weekend about learning BlazeDS. Turns out a presentation from MAX is available already: Building Real-Time and Collaborative Apps w/ Flex and BlazeDS

Wow, just read this over on Ted Patrick's blog: MAX 2008 NA Session Recording

We will be releasing this content FOR FREE, WITHOUT GEO-RESTRICTION ON ADOBETV starting the first week of December. We plan to release 20 sessions per week well into 2009. Additionally we will be posting all videos immediately to the MAX NA Group on Adobe Groups for the exclusive benefit of paid attendees.

So if you missed MAX, looks like you will get a chance to see it anyway. (And this will let me see the ORM preso I mixed and write up a blog entry on it!)

Yes, I think it is. I finally got back home Saturday night after a very long, and very exciting, week at MAX. I spent the latter half of the week at Broadchoice in some pretty intense meetings and am happy to be back in my office slinging code. In no particular order, here are my thoughts on MAX 2008. [More]

I missed the sneak peaks last night at MAX, but I found an excellent review: Live blogging MAX 2008 sneak peak session. This blog entry puts my live blogging of the keynote to shame! I'll have to look into the tool he used before the next conference. Anyway, pay particular attention to the reveal at the end - server side actionscript.

So once again, my summary post is late due to a very full day at MAX, oh and that 20 pounds of meat last night at Espetus didn't help either. Yesterdays keynote was definitely the high point of the conference. Not only did we get to see ColdFusion proudly displayed, we also learned about the new IDE (Bolt FTW) and frankly I thought the other developer and designer demos were impressive as well. I did an interview w/ O'Reilly and one of the points I made is that if Adobe can get me excited about Photoshop, they must be doing something right. The ColdFusion Unconference continues to be a hit I think. Yesterday we had Douglas Knudsen, Jason Delmore, Kristen Schoefield, Nathan Mische (who fixed an old issue with ColdFire that troubled me for quite some time!), Charlie Arehart, Terrance Ryan (ask him about the dinosaur picture) and Mark Phillips as speakers. I want to thank them again for taking time to speak here and they all did a great job. (Maybe I'm biased, but I think all the cool kids are hanging out here. ;) Today we have another great lineup of speakers and I finally have my first "real" MAX presentation at 9:30. The special event last night was... interesting. The museums were pretty cool, but I didn't stay too long as I was exhausted from the day (and again, the 20 pounds of meat I had eaten).

Woot, any presentation that begins with Tim Buntel is going to kick butt. They re doing a 'spy spoof' thing now with Lynch as the chief. Way to start a keynote Adobe! [More]