MAX: post-mortem
Posted by Jesse Rodgers on November 09, 2004 at 10:58 PM
The day-to-day summary of MAX gives some detail plus MAX bloggers is a decent round up from a diverse group as to what went on. Here is what I got out of the conference beyond the day-to-day.
Birds of a Feather (BOF)
This was a unique opportunity to tug at the heart strings of the Macromedia development teams. It gives us product users a chance to talk to the people that make the software we use and hopefully influence them for the better.
The first one I attended was the Contribute group. For myself, I would like to see better documentation as to what goes on with C3 and CPS. I learned some stuff that I had forgotten in regards to SOAP communication and I got out of the discussion some good ideas.
With the Dreamweaver team the desire for web standards first, IE second design in CSS was expressed and it went from there. Dreamweaver has some issues – it is caught in that ‘how do I make a table’ user environment and often forgets the ‘I have a totally dynamic site’ type user that wants the latest and greatest and just wants a really cool code/text editor.
The message came across loud and clear – please stop designing your app for the lowest common denominator. Help us web folks to improve our skills and continue to love Dreamweaver for making that transition into advanced web development. The nature of the profession changing.
…and it would nice if CPS and Dreamweaver could work together.
Speakers and presentations
After three days no one presenter stood out. There was good topics covered and some exciting things discussed but I think the real advantage to MAX is meeting the people behind the emails and blogs. Discussing your problems with a diverse group of colleagues often leads to problems solving themselves.
Worth a mention is Mike Hazard from the University of Rochester. He did a great presentation on implementing Contribute in an academic environment. The discussion within that group was always good and I left the presentation with some ideas of my own.
Technology – good or bad it was cool
The keynote really opened my eyes to the world beyond HTML/CSS and simple page creation. The capabilities of Blackstone alone are just amazing. They set up a poll on which you would vote for and people sent a SMS to a number and the server displayed the results. Just think about how that could be used? I have some ideas ;)
The common technology in all of it is Flash, which I must admit I have never been a huge fan. But this skeptic has slowly been accepting the role of Flash but the potential of the next version of Flash (Maelstrom) mixed with the built-in features of Blackstone and a dab of Flex. There is so much that could be done.
Flash on cell phones? The second days general session spoke to the power of the cell phone and the eye candy Flash can add. Macromedia has a mobile site, check it out. This is such a huge market outside North America.
Mix in Breeze (more Flash like stuff) – PowerPoint on steroids. I would love to do all my presentations in it or at least some. That product has grown so much in a short period of time. Should be interesting to see where this technology goes.
The reason I went was due to my participation in the development of Contribute 3. Contribute and Contribute Publishing Server mixed with a little Dreamweaver and wow. The Publishing Server end is a really interesting technology. Built on Macromedia’s JRUN and ColdFusion, it is an application that someone would have created anyway – I think. It does tie a lot together and offer a platform to enhance Contribute.
Bottom line
The conference, I think, left people with a much better feel as to how this could all fit together.
Macromedia’s up and coming technologies open up lots of possibilities but while I was sitting through a lot of that I was thinking – what about accessibility? I have no idea. Macromedia could help a lot by creating and accessible port or player for screen readers and maybe allow from some tabbing and better information in the document itself.
I don’t think the web needs to be ugly to be accessible but the eye candy needs to keep the accessibility requirements in mind. It is really exciting to see what is possible with a little elbow grease and creativity.