Adobe Max Day Three. I’m exhausted… but today’s going to be awesome!

7: 18 PM
Wow. What a couple of days (three for me, including pre-conference sessions) and I’m starting to feel it. I don’t have a lot of time to write a lot this morning, today begins the day that I’ve been waiting for. Today I get to code in a couple of “Bring Your Own Laptop” lab sessions. These are hands-on coding sessions where you actually create software. This morning we’re going to create an Android App from scratch, and in the afternoon, I’ve got a four hour “Adobe AIR Code Camp”. This is going to be basically an Adobe AIR Boot Camp. You must have the software installed (In my case, the Android 2.2 SDK, Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder, and AIR) and you work on your own machine.

In between those two sessions is “Designing with Fireworks”. This also represents one that I’m really looking forward to, but for much different reasons. This session will be “me out of my comfort zone”. I’m a developer, not a designer. As a developer, I need to have what I call, “Designer Empathy”. So I’m going to put on my “designer hat” and do some learning “as a designer”. Should be fun, and I’m hopeful it’ll give me some great stuff to take back to my creative department that can facilitate the “design to development” workflow. Fingers crossed!

So I’m off. My sessions are long, so I might not blog as much today, but since it’s the last day, I’ll try to wind up this post with a Photo Gallery tonight. I’ve been taking a lot of pictures over the last three days, and it’d be fun to put them into a fun little gallery and blog ‘em. So I’ll make up for not blogging as much by posting some more visual, fun things.

9:23 AM
*groan*

Sometimes it’s great to be able to make an informed decision. For instance, I don’t think I’ll do any AIR for Android development. I’m going to stick with this, all the way through the end. I promise I’m not going to bail on this one. I just… well… I just don’t see it. My first thought was, “Do I really want a runtime layer on top of my cellphone or device?”. Superficially it seems cool, and I admit, if I had a client that needed a branded app for Android, this would certainly be a way to rapidly deliver something for a reasonable price… but it feels a little… I dunno… “dirty”? I mean, these little computers are pushing it to be able to deliver the experience they’re delivering. A lot of the most brilliant apps and experiences come at the cost of squeezing every bit of performance out of these tiny little processors, and adding a runtime layer to that just feels like it runs counter to everything you learn in college computer science classes. You remember those? Back when discussions were centered around clock cycles, memory management, and efficiency? Right. Those.

Let me be clear. This is just my initial reaction. I haven’t dug any deeper than an initial gut-reaction to what I’m sitting here doing. If I played with this a little more, I’m sure I’d become a little more comfortable… but that’s the problem. Do I want to become a little more comfortable using this as a mobile development process? I mean, if I’ve got a certain amount of time in a day to learn new things… why wouldn’t I just learn how to do all of this natively? Objective C for iOS? Java for Android?

I’m just saying. This is my sort of… initial reaction. My gut, so to speak. Like I said, I would love to give all of this the benefit of the doubt, and I certainly will… but for now, if I were to make a list of “skills I’d like to learn more about and become better at”, “making AIR Apps for Android Phones” isn’t really in my top 5 right now.

3:51 PM
The “Design with Fireworks” session was great. I mean, every time I do something or learn something new about that program, the more I’m convinced it’s just THE way to create and move graphics from the design process into the web/interactive production execution process.  I understand why Photoshop is still used. I just don’t necessarily agree with it. If I were working on CMYK, high resolution images going to print, it would be all over my workflow. But I’m not. If I were to start any interactive project right now from scratch, I’d basically only need Fireworks and Dreamweaver. I could prototype, design, create, and execute using just those two tools and I would need nothing else. However… old dogs are old, and new tricks are new… and well, a cliche becomes a cliche because it happens enough.

That being said, I’ll just end with, “I love Fireworks” and this last session I attended on designing with it, was preaching to the choir.

I think I’m gonna end the evening with a trip over to Hollywood and hunt for some authentic mexican. I’ll let you know how that works out, but first, I really gotta lay down. The last four days have completely wiped me out and I’m not even sure I’ve got the energy to walk downstairs… Way too much nerd-action over the last four days.