Started off with the Fireworks Business Website mockup session I blogged earlier about.

Best session of the day was, not surprisingly, Lee Brimelow’s session where he introduced the new features of Flash CS4. Let me just say this - if you haven’t looked at the new UI and features of CS4 then do so immediately. It is a *must* upgrade in my opinion, for guys like me who never really got into the timeline animation thing because it just seemed to take so long to create nice animations, with multiple keyframes, etc. The new Motion Editor, along with the 3D tools, are absolutely brilliant. There is a definite learning curve to the Motion Editor, but learning it will be well worth it. I’m actually excited to start working on and experimenting on doing motion/animation again in flash without using actionscript. I haven’t felt that way in years. The 3D tool and the easing settings are great, and there are a boatload of built-in effects of the common stuff that most people seem to use anyways. You can also create and share your own effects.

As Brimelow mentioned during the session, one negative to the CS4 release is that Adobe did nothing to improve the actionscript editor. I don’t really mind the editor as much as many folks do. It’s definitely limited, but I understand that Adobe wants people moving on to Flex Builder anyway.

The UI of CS4 is completely different too. Much cleaner and makes more sense. I always hated the timeline being on top, for example, versus underneath the stage. It just feels more organized working in it now. And little things, like simply dragging the end of the last frame to extend the number of frames on the timeline, instead of right-clicking on a later frame and ‘insert frames’, etc.

It’ll take some definite getting used to, and as I said the Motion Editor will take some time to learn, but it’s a definite quantum leap forward for designing motion in Flash.

I ended the day attending a session on Flash Lite. It was a horrible presentation and pretty much a waste of time. I won’t go into the details, but based on what I’ve seen and heard of Flash on mobile devices….it just isn’t there yet and not worth the trouble for those of us in the elearning space. I never really understood the allure of ‘learning on my phone’ anyways.

P.S. I’m bummed. I got a copy of the Thermo (now formally known as Adobe Flash Catalyst) prerelease yesterday but I can’t use it as they only gave out the Mac version (what’s up with that?!?). So, the first person to email me and pay the postage for it gets it. I have no use for it.

Anyways…back to the “Quickly Mockup a Business Website” session. It was advertised as an “Advanced” session, or else I would have skipped it. The presenter was really unprepared in terms of the actual presentation. We walked in and I was thrilled to see tables, so I was able to grab a seat and pop open the laptop and connect. The wireless signal here is pretty weak, either that or my new company-supplied Dell D630’s wireless card sucks. So the presenter starts at 9am and just sits there talking through while he designs an ugly website. It wasn’t any worse than the other designs I’ve seen here at MAX - makes me feel good about my own limited design skills. The session started to get interesting as time went on, as we all just sat there and watched him do his thing while he talked. Some hidden gems that I picked up, like giving a 3d perspective to tabs, using the shadow filter and then moving it with the subselection tool to give a different perspective, etc. Basically I learned one key thing: USE THE FEATURES THAT FIREWORKS GIVES YOU! Sounds dumb, but I’ve been stuck in a design rut for a while so this was, while overall not a very good session, it was worthwhile just for that gleaned observation.

Am I happy I attended that session? Hell yeah - they handed out 10th Anniversary Fireworks T-Shirts at the end for all attendees! Plenty to go around, and the XL size looks to be a little big so I’ll actually won’t feel like spandex wearing it!

Other…

I picked up a MAX baseball cap from the Adobe Store here onsite for $12. Nice hat. I’m bummed though that I didn’t buy one or two of the nice AIR and Flex shirts they were selling. The nice-looking ones sold out the first morning of the conference, so the time to get them was on Sunday after/before the preconference sessions. Good deals on books here too, but I’m kind of ‘booked out’ at the moment.

I’m seriously considering signing up and paying (out of my own pocket) for the Captivate certification exam they’re administering here onsite at 33% off. I’ve been meaning to take that exam for a while but haven’t studied for it. I know the tool at an expert level, so I should have no problem passing it, but I took (and passed!) the Flash designer exam a few years ago and although I did well on it it was a tough exam and I wouldn’t have passed had I not specifically studied for it. But I know Captivate much better than I did Flash back then, so I should be okay. It’s just a matter of timing - I don’t want to miss a decent session for the test. I’ll probably do it tomorrow morning.

Next up…the General Session. No idea what to expect out of this one.

Thermo is now officially titled Adobe Flash Catalyst. I’m one of the lucky few that got a prerelease build of that along with the latest prerelease of Flex Gumbo, but of course here at MAX it is ‘uncool’ to not be an Apple fanboy so Adobe only gave out the Mac version prerelease of Catalyst. So I guess I’ll have to ebay it….

The best part of this keynote was the waiting for the speakers. No knock on the speakers, they were fine. But Adobe does a kick-ass job of putting together a multiscreen multimedia extravaganza. They had some guy in an uncomfortable-looking suit doing some sort of turntable scratching/dj’ing and it controlled the video onscreen. It was cool for a minute or two and then got old. The speeches were lackluster.

Kevin Lynch had a big box of mobile devices. He was demoing some new stuff on them. I was waiting for him to put the box away and then say….”Oh. There’s one more thing…” and then pull out the iPhone. He did pull out the iPhone and say they were working on Flash 10 for the iPhone, but he didn’t exactly seize the moment with any drama, it almost seemed kind of unplanned actually. That leads me to believe that Steve Jobs hasn’t really given any indication that it’s *really* coming. Adobe can build it. But if Stevie doesn’t allow it, it ain’t happening. Just my hunch. I’m probably wrong though and it’s just a simple matter of Kevin Lynch not seizing an easy ‘wow’ moment in the keynote.

Air -

Adobe is *really* pushing AIR this year. Every session, it seems like the speaker was tied up and told he had to incorporate AIR into the presentation or else. Even in the Fireworks session I attended, guess what we exported to? AIR and interactive PDF.

More to come…

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.

Well….since applying the firmware update a couple of months ago now, my IP has not changed. At all. I looked at the router settings and nothing changed that I can tell. And I seriously doubt that Comcast helped out T-Mobile by secretly switching me to a static IP service.

Has anyone else noticed their IP remaining unchanged since the firmware update? This can’t be a coincidence. During the last two months I have tried forcing the IP change (which I learned later that you can’t) by unplugging/rebooting the cable modem numerous times, and although unrelated to the T-Mobile@Home service I also switched operating systems, going from Vista to a dual-boot of Ubuntu and XP. My IP address has remained the same.

Is this odd?

Anyways - if you happen to be attending too and want to catch a drink or chat shoot me an email. Otherwise, I’ll be the guy at the Marriott Courtyard bar every night (if they even have a bar : )!

As much as I hate to say it, for me, at least for now, the right choice is Windows XP. I never *hated* Windows XP. I just never liked it. What’s to like? It’s ugly, and like every other operating system from Microsoft, it just seems to suffer from ‘Windows Rot’ - where it just gets slower and slower with each passing bootup. That said, XP is light years ahead of Windows 98. And sorry fellow geeks, but Windows 2000 was never a real contender for a desktop user. Not when 70% of the 3rd-party device manufacturers won’t even write drivers for it.

So, what brought me back to XP? Well…here’s the story:

About 6 years or so ago I was running Windows XP and caught wind of this linux thing. So I looked around, didn’t like the goofy “Redhat Network”/subscription thing, and eventually settled on trying SuSe linux. SuSe was really polished and there was a lot to like about it, but I struggled with constant software dependency problems. After a few months of it I gave up and went back to Windows XP.

A few years later and my XP box is getting slower and slower. One night, even though I have always loathed the thought of paying the Apple tax, I went out and picked up a Mac Mini. For less than $500, I figured I couldn’t go wrong. And in some ways, it was a very cool little machine. But, contrary to what Apple said at the time, it didn’t work with my monitor (way dim and fuzzy), and of course right after I buy my Mini I find out that Steve Jobs is going to announce a new Mini line in a couple of months. I pimped out the Mini - upgraded RAM (OS X is a major memory hog - without 2gb it’s on the slow side), and a firewire external boot drive to speed the thing up. In the end I wound up having to spend $900 just to have a machine that was tolerable, speed-wise. I loved OS X, even though it still had some quirks. It is the best OS out there, bar none. Warts and all. But Apple the company sucks. Everything is expensive. Everything is obsolete the day you walk out of the store with it. Etc.

After having the Mini for a few months and deciding I really liked it and could live without a Windows PC, I planned on buying a new iMac which was set to be unveiled by Steve Jobs at one of Apple’s conferences. So the week before that I put the Mini on ebay. I wound up selling it for almost as much as I paid for it, and planned on putting the money towards an iMac.

But a funny thing happened. I had put what I considered a slightly high ‘Buy It Now’ price on the auction or the Mini, because I didn’t really care to sell it too quickly since I’d be out of a computer until the new iMacs were available. Sure enough, it sold within an hour or two of putting it on Ebay.

So, I pulled out the old PC and decided to give a new linux distro named Ubuntu a try. It was really gaining popularity at the time. And for good reason - it just felt *right* and was/is a great distribution. I wound up sticking with that OS for close to a year, though I had to keep a partition/dual-boot situation with Win XP in order to have access to Microsoft Money (there is to this day no decent personal finance software for the Mac OR linux….Quicken on the Mac? garbage. GnuCash? please.).

But eventually my freelance business started picking up, and my interest in the Flash platform grew and, at that time, before the Flex SDK hit the market, there was no way around it - either you needed a Mac or a Windows PC to create Flash apps. Apple was still too pricey, and I needed a new faster machine as my then 6 year old PC was getting awfully long in the tooth, so I bought a new machine that, you guessed it, came with Windows XP and also the promise of a free upgrade to Vista when it came out.

I stuck with XP for a number of months until I got daring and tried the Vista upgrade. Much to my shock, the upgrade went fine (I actually did a clean install), all my hardware was recognized, and everything worked fine. Unfortunately though, over time the thing got slower and slower. And the file explorer in Vista is utter trash. Why they took away the button to navigate UP one level in a directory tree is unexplicable. Not to mention the mixer/sound management in Vista is horrible.

So, I gave it up and tried the latest edition of Ubuntu, named Ibex/8.10. Unfortunately it doesn’t like my hardware, which is:

• AMD x64 5600+
• 4GB DDR2 RAM
• BioStar A770 A2+ board
• Nvidia GeForce 8600GT 512m

I get constant errors and it is overall kind of slow, given the hardware.

So, after not using it at home for more than a year, I’m back on XP. It works. It’s quick (for now). I’ll give it a few months and see how it work.

Of course, in addition to the $9.99, there are high taxes with any telecommunications service in America.

As I tell everyone who emails me asking, “How much is the bill going to be, EXACTLY, with taxes? I don’t want any surprises and I don’t need the haSsLe of having to revert back to my old carrier!!”

After I respond first with something like, “Dude…put the attitude in check and go easy with the demands for info…I don’t work for and never have worked for T-Mobile (and probably never will, but if they need my part-time freelance services I’m happy to provide for fee!). This blog is not an official @Home info center and is not condoned or authorized by T-Mobile. I *do* know they read it, because I somehow got added to their @Home press release page. And I am on their ‘press release’ spam list (but none of it has to do with the @Home service so far). So I’m doing a favor by responding to the info requests.

That said….I pay exactly $12.44 per month for the T-Mobile@Home service. That’s of course in addition to my mobile “Family Plan 1000″, which I pay $39.99 per month plus an extra $10 for a second phone.

I live in Pennsylvania, so the taxes are guaranteed to be different for you unless you live in Pennsylvania too.

But, for details, here is the breakdown:

Monthly Recurring Charges

- Additional Line*          $9.99
- Enhanced Voicemail    $0.00
- Home Calling FT Unl   $0.00

Taxes, Fees and Surcharges

-Government Fees and Taxes
- State Gross Receipts Tax    $0.54
- State Sales Tax                   $0.05
- State 911                            $1.00
- Regulatory Programs Fee    $0.86

TOTAL: $12.44

* it says “Additional Line” on my bill, but I only have one @Home line. The other line(s) are my mobile numbers I guess.

So there you have it. As you can see, my state government is the one charging me most of the taxes. Your mileage WILL vary.

Last week my T-Mobile@Home service dropped 3 times in a matter of 4 days. Each day that it happened it happened sometime in the morning. As previously discussed, to fix it I had to cycle power to the router.

Well, last week after the last time it happened I was convinced that the problem was the router not being able to handle my ISP (Comcast Cable) changing my IP address periodically (like most home users with cable or DSL, the IP address is dynamically assigned and often changed by the ISP to ensure we won’t run a home server or P2P service from our basements/bedrooms : ).

So I recorded my IP address after the last service drop and have been monitoring it since. Also, the other day, as you probably know, Linksys released a firmware upgrade for the @Home router.

Well….it seems to have worked for me so far. I checked my IP address today and it has been changed by my ISP. And my service has not gone down. So, either my theory about the IP address being the problem was wrong, or I just got lucky this one time, or the firmware update fixed the problem.

How about you? Have you had any issues/service drops since upgrading the firmware?

I advise everyone to install the firmware update.

Special thanks goes out to Alex for letting me know it was available. I had just checked LinkSys’s site this past Monday hoping for an update, so I’m happy to see LinkSys/T-Mobile (I assume they were involved in this update?) are working to enhance the router so that we can avoid the blue light special : )

From Alex:

Hey there, just wanted to point out to you and your commenters that Linksys released a new version of the firmware for the WRTU54G-TM today: v1.00.09. It is available here: http://tinyurl.com/5×8o48 Perhaps the aforementioned T-mobile CSR was referring to this update as a “new model”.

I did download and install it; everything seems to work fine. One big feature they added is the ability to assign static IP addresses by MAC address, which was previously lacking

Once you install the firmware update, PLEASE leave a comment here about your experience!