Rob Huddleston's Blog - Conferences

Speaking at BFlex in October

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 13:40:00 -0600

I have been invited to speak at BFlex at the end of October.

BFlex is a full-day of hands-on-training on all things Flex. I will be doing a session on Flash Catalyst. While there are a lot of tutorials out there on Catalyst, and conferences and user group meetings have been awash with hour-long overviews of it, this is going to be one of the first opportunities for people to really take time and go in-depth with this exciting new product.

BFlex will take place on Sunday, October 25. The day before, Saturday, is BFusion, a full day of hands-on ColdFusion sessions. Both are being sponsoring by the University of Indiana in Bloomington, and are being held on their campus. It only costs $10 per person per day - an incredible deal. If you plan to be in the Bloomington area at the end of October, come on out and join us!

Wow, I'm on Adobe TV

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 22:55:00 -0600

Adobe has posted most, or possibly all, of the sessions from MAX, including as it turns out mine! Pretty cool. So if you would like to watch it, you can do so on the Adobe TV site.

My MAX Schedule

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:34:00 -0600

Quite a few folks have been asking me where I'll be during MAX, so I thought I'd go ahead and post my schedule.

Saturday: I'll be arriving via Amtrak sometime Saturday evening. We have a friend's birthday party to go to that day, so I have no idea as to when I'll actually get into town.

Sunday: I'm taking one of the full-day training sessions on Sunday, and I'm really excited about it. I'll be in "Deliver Video Anywhere with Creative Suite 4 Production Premium".
I don't know if anything official is happening Sunday night, but if not, I'll most likely just track down some folks who will have arrived by then and hang out. If you're coming in sometime on Sunday, drop me a line and let me know.

Monday:

9:30 - 11 - Opening Session
11:30 - 12:30 - Ten After Effects CS4 Features for Designers Who Use Flash
2:00 - 3:00 - Forms Gone Wild
3:30 - 4:30 - Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex
5:00 - 6:00 - My session :)
8:30 - 10:30 - Birds of a Feather sessions. I always decide which of these to attend at the last minute, but they really are the highlight of the conference.

Tuesday:

8:30 - 10:00 - Getting Started with After Effects CS4
10:30 - 12 - General Session
1:30 - 2:30 - Introduction to Adobe AIR: Building Your First Application
3:00 - 4:00 - Accessibility Basics: Making Websites More Useful for More People
4:30 - 5:30 - Using Apache Derby, the Open Source Database Embedded in ColdFusion 8
Evening - Unfortunately, both the Community Reception and the Speaker's Reception are happening at the same time Tuesday night, so I'll probably go to one for a little while and then head to the other one.

Wednesday

9:00 - 10:30 - Fear No Audio: Intro to Audio Creating and Editing
11:00 - 12:30 - Creating Effects with Pixel Bender
2:00 - 3:00 - Be Seen and Heard: Sweetening Soundtracks for Video and Rich Media Projects
4:00 - 5:30 - Hands-on with Thermo: Creating Interactive Designs

So there it is. Hope to see everyone there!

Oh, one last thing: if you're traveling to San Francisco from out of town and you've never been there before, be sure to check out our MAX travel site.

Getting ready for MAX

Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:41:00 -0600

It's hard to believe, but MAX is only ten days away! In addition to all of the community members I haven't seen since May, this year is going to be especially fun since I have several other friends attending. It almost offsets the stress of speaking to close to 300 people ...

Dreamweaver CS4 Preview - Change of plans

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:56:00 -0600

I had planned on doing a series of posts here on detailing the new features you'll find in the Dreamweaver CS4 beta. The original goal was to do one main feature per week or so. But those of you reading along here may have noticed that that hasn't been happening. It didn't happen in large part because I have ended up needing to spend a lot of time over the last week preparing for my upcoming presentation at the Creative Transitions Conference in Milwaukee, where I will be speaking on ... Dreamweaver CS4. (I'll also be giving my "good form design" presentation that I did at TODCon and that I'll be doing again at MAX.)

So the best way to find out about what's new in CS4 would be to come to the conference. You can head over to the conference website to register. In addition to the 1 hour presentation, I'll also be doing a 3-hours hands-on demo of CS4 on the last day of the conference, so you'll not want to miss that.

If travelling to Milwaukee won't work for you, there are two other ways you can get the information. One is to sign up with my Adobe User Group and then attend our meeting on August 6, during which I'm going to be giving this presentation (sort of a dress rehearsal for the conference.) Don't worry if you're not local - you can attend the meeting online (details are on the site.)

You can also wait until just after the conference, when I'll be posting the presentation assets here on my site. I'll post here when those are online and provide a link to them.

It's official now...

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:50:00 -0600

I just signed and returned my speaker contract for MAX and registered for the conference, so it's now official. And a bit intimidating - the room in which I'll be speaking holds 292 people! Yikes! But I hope to see a lot of you there. If you are coming to SF, please be sure to look me up while you're here.

MAX Website & Session List, plus the MAX2008 Information Site are all live

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:13:00 -0600

The official MAX website went live this week at http://max.adobe.com/na/experience/. It has an annoying auto-play video, but otherwise is pretty cool. You can view the list of sessions, register for the conference, etc.

One thing that the official site doesn't provide is general information about San Francisco. For example, the site says that the conference hotels do not provide shuttles from the airport, but then leaves it up to attendees to figure out how then they are supposed to get from the airport to the conference. In response to this, myself along with several other local user group managers including Sean Corfield, Luke Kilpatrick, Mark Altenbernd, and Seth Duffey have been putting together the MAX information site. It's already got a lot of great information about how to get to San Francisco, what to do when you're there, where to eat, where to shop, etc.

The information site is a work-in-progress, and will be right up until MAX in November. There's a suggestion box on the site where you go put your own ideas if you're a local or just know of great places to eat or things to do, or you can leave comments here and I'll get them put up on the site.

I've been invited to speak at MAX!!!

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:21:00 -0600

It's not often that something happens during the day that is so distracting to me that I have problems focusing on my class, but today was one of those times: when I returned from lunch, I saw an email waiting for me, inviting me to speak at MAX this year.

For those that don't know, MAX is the Adobe conference each year. Attendance is usually in the range of 5000, all of the big-wigs in the Adobe world are there ... it's really such a fantastic honor to be asked to speak that I can hardly believe it.

MAX this year is being held in San Francisco (another bonus, since it will only be a $43 round trip ride on Amtrak to get there). Registration is already open at the conference web site. I always tell my students and user group members: if you have a conference/travel budget, this is the conference to attend.

Did I mention how excited I am about this?

TODCon presentation files uploaded

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 10:07:00 -0600

I've created a little subset of the site for presentation files, and uploaded the assets from my two presentations at TODCon. As I speak at more conferences and events, I'll continue to add to the page.

You can access the main presentations page, or jump right to the page for my Codeless ColdFusion talk or my Creating Attractive, Accessible, and Usable Forms presentation.

The Codeless ColdFusion includes a zip file of my PowerPoint slide deck, as well as a version of the slides converted to a Flash movie (thanks to Adobe Captivate.) For those who attended, you'll know that I had, uh, some technical difficulties, and was pretty much unable to show most of the slides or do the examples. Sorry about that.

The forms talk was a lot bigger, so while I do have the ZIP of the PowerPoint file, I don't have a Flash version. I also have a link to my previous blog post where I go through the details as to how to layout a form without CSS.

As usual, TODCon has been great. I'm really happy to have been able to get involved with this conference. I'll be using this space to really talk up next year's event. It's a not-to-be-missed event.