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November 24, 2005
Adobe Developer Days - Recap
Well, the first set of Adobe Developer Days are done... I'm back home in Ottawa after a 3 week tour across North America meeting developer who were building some very cool stuff with Adobe LiveCycle. The tour started out in Seattle 2 weeks ago Tuesday. I didn't get to Seattle, and we had a few problems with the event (the rollups got stranded at the border for one!), but overall I think the event went very well. While the event was going on, I was flying to San Jose, getting ready for event number 2 at our home office. A quick trip to Kinkos solved the roll up problem, and we had a great session in San Jose. (Images here, here and here). I flew home on Thursday, back to Ottawa and curled all weekend. Then, on Monday, off to Boston for Developer Day #3.
Boston had a great turn out, as you can see here. The Mariott put on a great show, and Lori DeFurio enlightened everyone with her vast knowledge of PDF... Did you know that if you can put get variables on the end of a URL for PDF files, like /file.pdf?zoom=100&page=3 Lori will be posting a blog about this, but I thought that was a pretty cool feature. Then, from Boston, off to New Jersey... Well, we flew to New York, then took a cab to New Jersey. I would have thought the cab driver would have asked us where we were going before getting to the exit on the highway, but he didn't seem to have any problem with stopping right there, asking us where to go next. Then, a few minutes later, there we were, going backwards back down another highway. My first NYC cab ride, and it didn't disappoint.
The show in NJ was great. It had one of the lowest turn outs, which surprised me since we had a ton of people register for it, but the intimate setting was great. It was the most interactive session we had on the whole trip. The questions were great, and we were able to have more of a dialog, than a series of Adobe presentations. That was fun. After NJ, the Ensemble team went on to Chicago, and I went home to curl, again.
This week, we've just finished up our two events, one in Ottawa and one in Toronto. The turnout at both was fantastic. We were overflowing the chairs at the event in Ottawa, as we had a nearly 85% conversion rate (from registration), which is apparently unheard of for live events. Toronto went just as well yesterday.
In the next few days we'll put the finishing touches on the slides and post them to my blog. We modified them for pretty much every city, reacting to the profile information that people provided in their registration forms, so we've got a big mix of slides from all the shows.
As well, we're starting to plan out Adobe Developer Days 2. If you want us to hit a city near you, comment in this blog or send me an email at mpotter@adobe.com. We're also hoping to expand the events to Europe, likely in March of 06, so send us cities outside North America as well!
You can view photos of our event here, using Adobe's Kodak Gallery software. Allow me a few minutes to rant about my frustrations at getting the photos off my camera, and online. I've got Windows XP on this work laptop, and a Canon S100. One would think that I just plug in the camera, go to Photoshop 4.0, get the photos and I'd be done. Nope, sorry, out of luck. I had to try to install drivers from canon.com. No luck there either. I downloaded two sets of drivers, and neither worked. I did a search on Google for "windows xp canon s100 not recognized" and came across a help article from Toshiba that told me to go to Control Panel, System, Hardware, right click and select Update Driver. Well, I did that, and then it worked. Now, is it really any surprise that people are switching to a Mac? I remember the first time I plugged in that camera into my Mac... iPhoto popped open right away, and asked to import the files. How inovative... Having something that just works. That's why I love my Mac.
Oh, and the Kodak online gallery? How frustrating is that website (though I do like some of the DHTML that you're using.)? For instance, when I say "Share a photo", why do you assume that I want to email it to someone? I can't even find a link for each photo to put in my blog. And I'm not a big fan of the default "Make people register to see my photos" option when I'm posting photos. I just want to upload some photos and have a nice URL to send to people. Anyone got a Flickr plugin for Photoshop?
Comments
> Having something that just works. That's why I love my Mac.
I have the same experience with Windows XP machines. Except the love bit. It's simply a machine that does work, and it does it quite well.
Surprisingly it isn't overwhelmingly difficult to get photos from a camera to a PC. I can't remember ever struggling with this, so I'm always a bit amused when Mac users tout this one out.
You wouldn't think it would be difficult, but the only way I could get it working was to do what I said... I tried installing 2 sets of drivers from Canon (after trying to just plug it in and seeing if that would work, it didn't).
I remember the frustration that I had getting a firewire video camera working a few years ago (which promted my purchase of my Mac cube), and again, I just plugged it in and it worked. I couldn't say the same about Windows.
Obviously by controlling the hardware and the software, you can provide a better user experience, but you have fewer network effects to help grow your business. Having said that, I think Apple has done a reasonable job of encouraging others to build accessories for the iPod, and obviously the user experience of that device is pretty amazing. Let's see if they can keep it up with whatever home media center they come up with next.
Mike
Thanks for a great show. Informative, though you guys missed out on a couple of useful topics (XPAAJ comes to mind)
I just use a CF card reader. The drivers suck and the reader has no trouble with drivers etc. U can get a reader almost for free.
kodakshare sucks, use smugmug in conjunction with Picasa. Easy to upload and has hell a lot of functionality (costs a lil though)
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