Granted, the SF Museum was pretty amazing, but it was a disorganized event overall.

It’s great to be able to wander around and explore but since my foot was in an air cast for the duration of this trip, that was not an easy option for me personally. There were several other people with mobility issued (casts, and a few wheelchairs) and the site was not easily organized for any kind of (even temporary such as mine) disability. The mandatory walk between the different buildings was also very challanging, despite having 30 minutes between classes. The distance made it difficult to run back to your room and drop off things if you purchased a book or (if you were one of the rare lucky few) actually won something. I did actually win something. A 10+lb Adobe Acrobat 9 Bible!

I am working on a list of lessons learned (not from the classes but from the event itself) and comparing the recent conference to the previous ones we have attended. A couple of things I can highlight right now: Last year we got full versions of software from vendors, and people would come up to you, ask you what platform you work on, and hand you a box (this happened to several people I know of). This year, we got a trial version of Flash Catalyst, which is unfortunately ONLY available for Mac (and which they ran out of copies that same day). Guess what platform we use inhouse? Yup, you guessed it … PC …

Considering that our price for attending didn’t go down (in fact it went up as California is more expensive than, say, Chicago or most places in the Midwest!) WHY was there such a severe cutback on everything we have come to know, love, and expect from the Adobe conferences? Also why a repeat of the location from a few years ago? L.A. is still Adobe’s “home field advantage” but had they considered how (prohibitively) expensive it is for many of us to GET to the West coast? Perhaps, along with the miserable economy, that played a part in the lower than expected attendance this year.

Don’t get me wrong. I will try my best to attend next year. Its a great conference in general but there were a lot of very evident cut-backs and shortcuts taken in SF08. Let’s hope LA09 goes back to the amazing, almost legendary, ways of the (Adobe and it’s Max predecessors, Macromedia) Max of the past.