I haven’t quite found the time to write up my experience at the Adobe MAX designer/developer conference, but here’s a digest of my Twitter posts. As usual, photos are on Flickr.

Sunday

Adobe Max Entryway (Los Angeles Convention Center)

  • Watched a nearly-full moon set into the cloud layer behind the LA skyline on my way to Adobe MAX.
  • Obligatory pic of Adobe MAX entryway.

Monday

  • Made it to the keynote just as, I kid you not, Martha Stewart took the stage.
  • Nice demo of dynamically wrapping text around image content (not box), to be contributed to Webkit.
  • Content aware fill demo on a tablet – “performing witchcraft” on the progress bar label.
  • Multi device link: iPad as classic color palette mixer for desktop Photoshop.
  • Blackberry Playbook approach: don’t dumb down the Internet for mobile devices, bring up the performance of the devices.
  • Green Hornet game demo: same app running on desktop & touch screen phone, auto-detecting input methods.
  • The Green Hornet car. I wasn’t expecting overlap between a tech conference and Comic-Con
  • Something else Adobe MAX has in common with Comic-Con: Flash fans.

Tuesday

  • When I got here, the line for Starbucks was about 5 people. Now I can’t see the end.
  • Managed to scarf down a sandwich from Starbucks before the evening session. Interesting mix of tech crowd & Lakers fans.
  • Ok, I am officially a geek. I ranked 7th in a phone-powered Star Trek trivia contest with several hundred people at a tech conference.
  • And then tweeted about it.
  • Adobe MAX sneak peeks’ method of keeping people from going too long: A Klingon with a phaser creeping across the stage.
  • Very cool demo of auto-converting long video to a tapestry for better scene selection.
  • Nifty Photoshop demo: post process photo based on a model. “what if this photo had been taken by Ansel Adams?”
  • Nice! Automatically compensating for camera motion blur!

Wednesday

  • Gotta love LA traffic. I left for Adobe MAX 40 minutes earlier than yesterday and arrived at the same time – too late for my 8:30 lab.
  • Funny how you can get nostalgic for your first version of Photoshop. (Sadly, 2.5 is missing.About Photoshop 3.0
  • MAX is definitely less crowded today. No problems finding a table for lunch, and the cell & wifi networks are a lot less congested.

The heat wave has people freaking out again…

There is no such thing as an “earthquake watch.” Unlike tornadoes and hurricanes, they strike without warning and cannot be predicted (so far). There’s also no such thing as “earthquake weather”…and I say this as a lifelong Californian.