Conference / Organization
What, no name tag?
I guess this is an area where stuff I had been taking for granted, from my experiences at MAX, and now 360 Flex, kind of stood out. We might tend to think of name tags as a bother, but part of the reason we attend conferences is to network. There seemed to have been no thought given to the networking aspect at all at Capital Flash Camp. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need fancy lanyards and stuff – a simple sticker you write your own name on would have been sufficient. Then again, I guess that forces folks to try and open their mouths and actually ask each others names…not such a bad thing, eh? So, was this an oversight or actually a clever, well designed ploy to encourage folks to get out of the closet and actually develop social skills? Either way, it did get my attention.

There was also no swag…not at the registration desk, anyway…kind of a disappointment. I don’t count Adobe pens and stickers left over from 360 Flex as swag, sorry…aren’t conference shirts a defacto standard?

Attendance wise, I was actually pretty disappointed. The conference was held in a relatively small area, with all the talks being held in a single, small auditorium with a huge curved screen. However, the number of attendees might have made the place look vast. There were maybe only fifty attendees in the beginning, and for some reason as the conference progressed that number continuously dwindled. I left early myself, with two sessions and the giveaways still pending, but at that time there might have only been twenty or so folks left.

Speakers / Presentations

I walked into the conference in the middle of @jefftapper ‘s presentation Flex 4 for Flex 3 Developers. Jeff’s presentation was excellent, and I definitely plan to go download his lecture notes since we are at the beginnings of a flex 3 -> flex 4 migration, ourselves. Of particular interest is the list of mx components that were not ported to the spark space at all, such as DataGrid and ViewStack. One of the first questions I posed on twitter as we started migrating our code to the spark space was, ‘are we supposed to mix mx and spark components by design?’ I got a bunch of tweets in response referring either to custom components folks had built in the spark space or on how to mix mx and spark components. Jeff’s response was that he felt that Adobe hadn’t done this themselves yet due to time constraints. Ah…

Next up was @queencodemonkey on Greenthreading in Flex. I already saw her presentation at 360 Flex, but as I told her, it was one of the best presentations I had attended, with regards to stuff I was able to take back to my team and say, ‘hey, this is something we should look into with regards to what we’re currently doing’. So it was enjoyable to see it again, and a good review of the concepts and applications. I also made a note to go and read an article she referred to by @ jesterxl on loading massive amounts of data in the Flash player, and they both were kind enough to tweet the link to the article.

Next was The Art of Storytelling by @christiansaylor. It was a nice change of pace from the technical presentations, and indeed, he is a great story teller himself. I kept thinking that his presentation style was highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs, and when one of his slides was a huge photo of The Evil One (as one audience member called out, lol) it pretty much cinched it in my mind that was a source of influence for him. In a good way…

Christian also convinced me to take a closer look at Audi…

Towards the middle to end of the presentation, I kind of felt like it was tending towards a sales plug for Universal mind, but then again, they sponsored and organized the event, half the speakers were from their company – so what could you expect? In the least, at least this presentation was pertinent and well done, unlike the eBay sponsor presentation at 360 Flex, which had me wondering if anyone, really, ANYONE in the entire audience cared an iota about what the speaker had to say or if what he spoke on had anything at all to do with real business problems faced by anyone in the audience.

next was lunch…

The Food
What can I say, without getting too insulting? Meh. Not a highlight of the conference. At 360 Flex, they had good food, but it would run out before you could actually get any. For some reason, I found that more appealing than food you got but didn’t find appetizing.

More Great Speakers
@carlsmith spoke on the importance of listening to your audience in It’s a Matter of Trust. Frankly this was by far the most entertaining session, hands down. The volume and amount of laughter in the audience was a clear indication of that. He brought up twitter a lot in examples of customers complaining about the service of companies, and the successes and failures of companies leveraging twitter to satisfy customers. The bottom line of his presentation: treat your audience as people, not as statistics.

The last session I attended before ditching was Introduction to Flash Catalyst by @adnaanahmad. Adnaan’s presentation was great, especially considering it was his first conference presentation, ever. I think the audience was hungry for more on his demo side; the background info etc. is all good and well, but that’s stuff folks can read about later or have already done so, the demo is what really engaged us. He also made a pretty good case considering there was only one designer left in the audience at that point and the rest were developers.

You can find a small slideshow of the photos I took at the conference here.

We arrived Friday night and our hotel is next door to Moscone West so we passed by and noticed that much of the signage and other preparations for MAX were already complete. I wanted to take some pics of it that night but we were exhausted from the flight. The next morning I came by, snapped some images on the outside and then noticed that the doors seemed not to be locked so wandered in and was about to start shooting away when the guy in charge asked me to leave, saying it was ‘private’ and no photos or anything could be taken. Hmm…so I came by again tonight and got plenty of pictures of the inside through the glass. For some reason the Moscone seems quite similar in architecture to me to the newer half of the McCormick place where MAX was held last year.

Here’s the Lightroom gallery of my MAX preview exposures.

Some things to note:

• there is a designated area for the free Unconferences. I have heard about them here and there on folks blogs but don’t really know anything about it. I suppose there will be more info available upon registration tomorrow or on Monday.
• There seems to be a booth that is a big multisided chalk board for folks to put share ideas on. Hmm…
• Level 2 of Moscone West has: Adobe Support Lab, MAX Playground, MAX Store, Sessions, Unconferences
• Level 3 of Moscone West has: General Session
• Ground level of Moscone West has: registration, Community Pavillion, and that showcase area they had last year, what’s it called???
• They had been working on hoisting up a huge MAX sign onto the side of the Moscone since early Saturday morning. I guess they finally got it up. I overheard some MAX staffers as they were exiting the building Saturday night and apparently its a big deal they are really proud of.

A few other observations I had so far:

• people seem really friendly around here. It’s kind of like, the further you get from New York, NY, the better the temperament of people are…and this is just about as far as you can get. Well, maybe that’s not always true – I found the temperament of folks in Kentucky to be amazing and that’s only half way across the country from NYC. But really, strangers in the elevator told me to have a nice day…how often does that happen on the East coast?
• There are a few homeless folks who seem to actually live along the Howard street side of Moscone West. If you’re feeling charitable maybe you can help one out by giving him some bottled water or buying him a meal.
• if you have time while you are here in SF, go visit Muir Woods. The redwood trees are awe inspiring and help you to realize your place in this vast universe by putting things in perspective. There is one tree there they dated at 1,021 years old.

They used Final Cut Pro for editing the footage and After Effects and Photoshop for post.