I couldn’t get into the Flex session that I wanted to attend – it was booked solid right when it was first offered. C’mon Adobe – knowing it’s been booked solid for months couldn’t you have scrapped together another conference room or at least add some chairs and let us bring/use our own laptops?

Anyways, so I wound up registering for “Mastering Web Design with CS4″. The handout, when I walked in, was titled “Introduction to Adobe CS4 Web Design Premium” so my concerns about falling behind the other attendees due to my fairly limited use of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (I prefer using Notepad++ for most things) was quickly discarded as this is basically an intro crash course that dabbles in each of the different apps. So far I’m kinda wishing I’d signed up for the “Flash Lite” session instead, but hopefully as the session moves on it’ll get better as I’ll learn Soundbooth and hopefully a bit of Illustrator. I’ve never used either, so an intro would be helpful.

Anyways…notes so far:

Photoshop CS4 new feature that is way cool: “Content Aware Scaling”

Fireworks CS4 – can output to MXML. This is way cool as I hadn’t heard of this before (it’s possible it was in CS3 for all I know). One of the reasons I haven’t done much in Flex is I haven’t learned the MXML thing and prefer just using Actionscript, but now with FW having all of the common flex components I can just drag those onto the canvas, set the properties/label/etc, do the design stuff behind/around them, and then output to MXML. I did a quick test and sure enough, as hoped, when I imported into a new Flex Project using Flex Builder 3 the components are functional and not simply useless images of them. Excellent!

I’ll be adding quick notes/posts throughout my time here at MAX 2008 so that I can remember and have them searchable in the future. Plus, I want to review them all when I get back home, in chronological order.

One other note: don’t trust Adobe’s recommendations for hotels. I made the mistake of booking a room at the Marriott Courtyard because on the MAX site it said it was a close walk. Well, it was closer to a 15 – 20 minute walk it seemed. I don’t mind too much cus I need the exercise : ) But the 300lb+ lady at the breakfast table this morning was pretty ticked. She stayed at the St. Georges. I have no idea where that is.