Dead Ink Vinyl

Dear Instructor,

I regret that I will not be able to complete this week’s HCI assignment due to the fact that I will be attending Adobe MAX. During my time at MAX I will be attending five hours of sessions concerned with Experience Design (XD) and User Experience (UX) from luminaries such as Jared Spool and Robert Hoekman, Jr.

I feel that this dedication to the craft should excuse me from this week’s assignment. Besides, we both know that I’ll be getting more real-world knowledge from these MAX sessions than I would from preparing a usability study proposal for your class.

Regards,
David

I’m already signed up for AdobeMAX through my employer. Early last week I decided that I really wanted to attend one of the AdobeMAX all-day, pre-event, hands-on sessions—enough to drop $750 of my own money (not my employer’s) to attend. However, the AdobeMAX account page doesn’t seem to allow a person to add a pre-event session once a person has registered. I emailed Adobe about this last week and haven’t heard back. In the time since I emailed them, the magical boundary of September 22 has passed and now the event is $950. It was a stretch at $750, but $950 is out of my ballpark.

I could write this off as a simple “oops” on Adobe’s part. I understand that some emails get lost in the shuffle. But two weeks earlier I had emailed them a simple question (“Will presentations be recorded and available for free or purchase?”) and never got a response to that email, either.

To what email address was I sending my letters? Reasonable question. What email address should I be using? The email addresses are a bit buried on the site. I would have hoped to find one on the registration summary page—but, alas, they are all hiding under the Event Fees tab. I’ve emailed questions@adobemax2007.com and I’ve emailed maxops@adobemax2007.com. If you know another one to try… IT’S TOO LATE! I can no longer afford to attend the pre-event.

Adobe, whose XD sessions I was planning to attend, has managed to design a Web site hides the important contact information, won’t let me give them more money, and has irritated me enough to somewhat diminish my opinion of them as a company.

The Adobe MAX conference is in my backyard this year. The lack of travel expenses and the steep discount provided to attendees of 360|Flex made it possible for me to attend.

After registering, I chatted with other developers in my company to determine what sessions would be of greatest benefit to the teams using or investigating Flex. I shuffled those in with some sessions I really wanted to attend and the resulting schedule is below.

Data Visualization with Flex

Customizing the Flex Framework

Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant

Optimizing ActionScript 3.0 Performance

Inspire Session: The Dawning of the Age of Experience

What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?

Pixel Perfect Precision

XD: Prototyping Rich Internet Applications with Fireworks CS3

XD: Adobe’s Approach to Application Design

Optimizing Flex Applications

Designers and Developers CAN Love Each Other

Creating New Flex Components

Flex on Rails

I look forward to seeing some of you there!