Organising the event was great fun. Approaching sponsors, finding a venue, inviting amazing speaker, ensuring awesome coffee supply, choosing a great conference bag, finding the best caterer, tweeting from @fpcodecampnz and buying lots of little goodies to make people happy during the day – all these tasks were a great team effort. Big thanks to Kai and Ross for being awesome organisers, and to all the helpers who lend a hand on Saturday!

Now that the event is over, I can say that most things went exactly as planned. Feedback is coming in via the survey we sent out the day after the camp, and most people really enjoyed being at the Flashcamp.

Unfortunately I missed most of the sessions myself. I did manage to see the keynote – Jack Yan on “The Evolution of Display Type” – and enjoyed Brenda Leeuwenberg and David Buck from NZOnScreen talking about Flash vs. HTML 5.

My own presentation was about embedding video with Acrobat, and I talked the audience through the process of adding a video to a PDF (including some potential pitfalls and how to make it a less out-of-the-box experience for the user). I had all of the Adobe and ex-Adobe people who came to the Flashcamp sitting in my session, which was great towards the end when a question was asked that I couldn’t answer, but overall it made me quite nervous – I’m sure that this was not my best performance ever. But anyway, I enjoyed sharing my knowledge, no one has complained so far, and overall we had a very awesome day. Have a look at my presentation (PDF, 50 MB – sorry for the file size, but it contains embedded videos), although it might not make much sense without context. But it’s worth having a look at the embedded videos – the are made by Wellingtonian Simon Burgin from CubicStudio and are pretty awesome.

Overall, all I can say: I hope we’ll do it again next year!

The Japanese have a different system for dealing with wet umbrellas. To keep the water outside when the weather is crappy, all shops have a plastic cover dispenser for umbrellas at their entrance. You put your umbrella in from the top and when you take it out towards the front it’s covered in a condom like wrapper. This is how the shop floors stay dry and people don’t slip. And you don’t need to fear that anyone will get you completely wet when they wave their umbrella around in order to get it dry before they enter the shop. Awesome idea!

It would be great to see a more reusable solution, using a plastic cover once and then throwing it into the rubbish bin doesn’t sound right to me. But it’s a start and certainly limits some risks associated with wet floors.

But when you want to go to a museum or a restaurant, you’re usually not keen to carry your umbrella around, regardless if it’s placed in a cover or not. That’s why such places often have a lockable umbrella holder at the entrance of the building. Put the head of the umbrella in, close the lock, remove the metal plate to lock and your umbrella will be waiting securely locked up until you return. That’s how Tokyo stays nice clean and tidy even in nasty weather conditions.

I can only talk for the Tokyo region, since I didn’t travel anywhere outside of the big city, but I assume it’s the same anywhere in Japan – whatever you do, wherever you go, whoever you encounter: people are always nice and go the extra mile to fulfil the wishes you didn’t even know you had. There was the shower head in our hotel for example, which had a little leak. Not a big problem and I certainly wouldn’t have complained about it, but when we used the shower again the next morning, it had been fixed. Without us saying a word. Not only had the cleaning staff seen the problem, they had even organised the repair. Great service!

There were lots of little things where I though “Wow, that’s great, I didn’t really expect this”, but one of the best things happened to us at Junkudo. Junkudo is a huge book store in Ikebukuro, one of the must-see parts of Tokyo. The store has nine stories, with level nine hosting foreign books. Since neither Kai nor I speak Japanese, we went straight up to the top floor to look for a book we had seen advertised in a newspaper. When we couldn’t find it, I approached the information desk and asked for it. Luckily I had the newspaper clipping with me, so it was easy for the person I asked to look it up in their computer and locate it within the shop. For some reason they had it one level below, and they sent me down to get it from there. Now, in both Germany and New Zealand “Go to level xyz” means that you have to find the item you’re looking for at that location for yourself. At Junkudo it meant, that someone on level eight was informed via phone that we were looking for the book, and while we took the escalator down, which probably took us less than two minutes, this person grabbed the book and placed it at the information desk for us. When we arrived to ask for it again, it was already waiting for us. Great service, again!

I got really excited about the high level of service, and when we met a friend for lunch at our last day in Tokyo I got an explanation as to why the Japanese are so service oriented. It has to do with the custom of “omotenashi”, the atmosphere of hospitality and welcome. It’s the thought of creating a nice, welcoming experience for guests – with an attention to details – that got transferred into the whole service industry. It’s a great custom and it certainly makes Japan a great experience for visitors.

That’s all I have to say after my experience with ShopCity, who seem to be the only ones selling filters for our Mitsubishi heat pump in New Zealand. At least they were the only ones who were easy enough to find when we needed to replace the filters. We tried to order online, but we were able to put only one filter into the shopping cart, we needed two. So we assumed they were out of stock and used the online form, asking to get notified as soon as new stock arrived.

Two-and-a-half working days later we got a response, telling us that the filters had to be ordered by contacting customer support via phone. No further explanation if they were really out of stock or why else it would only be possible to order a single filter instead of two. Since I had no other choice, I called the phone number they had provided. First of all I was given various options on how to get to the person I needed to talk to, luckily customer service/ sales was the second option. I pressed 2 and got into a waiting line where I was told my call was important to them. They told me 5 times before I finally had someone on the phone. When I said I wanted to place an order, I was put on hold again. This time with radio running in the background; some kind of quiz show where the host had two callers on the line and there were competing in whatever discipline. Then my call was answered and I was asked if I held an account with them. No? Then I would have to use the website to order. Grrrrr.

Luckily the lady on the phone picked up my mood and was happy to let me order via phone after I had told her my story. She took my details and put me on hold while my credit card details were being processed. This time I had to listen to radio advertisement, ironically advertisement for a heat pump. Apparently my payment got through and I was promised the filters will be delivered tomorrow. We will see…

It would have been so easy to make this a more pleasant experience:

• If your customers can only order a limited amount your product, tell them the reason why. In this case a simple message that they’ve been out of stock and what the options in this case were, would have been great.
• If you expect customers to call you, please give them a positive experience. Telling them how important their call is doesn’t do the trick, if they have to listen to this multiple times while being transferred again and again. Also forcing them to listen to radio is not a good choice, at least not if the radio station isn’t playing music.
• If you have a sales department never ever let them start a conversations with “you should order from our website”. There will always be a reason why your customer is calling instead of using the online shop. They might have tried the online shop without success, or they might feel more comfortable ordering on the phone. Whatever the reason is, please don’t question their choice.

I guess in this case it’s really a matter of holding the monopoly. If I didn’t have to order with them, I wouldn’t even have called. I would have tried the next online shop. But knowing that owners of Mitsubishi heat pumps have no other choice, apparently makes ShopCity a bit careless about the customer experience. They will buy anyway, because no one else has what they need.

Update: The new filters really arrived the next day – at least one thing they were good at.

And still I wanted to go. I had missed the first barcamp, but I think it’s important to get involved in the topic. I know that within some Government departments there is no awareness of the need to open up to the public. Neither when it comes to making collected data available for reuse, nor when it comes to changing the way Government communicates from broadcasting messages to getting into real conversations with members of the public. And since this promised to be different from what I know and from how I would run such an event, I was keen to go. My “application” for registration was accepted and there I was.

Funny enough one of the big confusions of the day was which hashtag to use for Twitter. This should have been a no-brainer, since the event’s website displayed a Twitter feed hashtagged with #opengovnz, from my point of view this would have determined which one to use. But since this was pretty close to the previous barcamp’s #opengovtnz it led to some confusion and in the end we had a vote. Strangely enough the choice was between #opengov2010 and #opengovt2010 – I have no idea where these eventually came from, but others were happy to raise their hands in favour of one or the other and finally #opengovt2010 was used.

I don’t want to get too much into detail for the main parts of the conference, others (including Brenda Wallace and Colin Jackson) have done that already. But I’m keen to share some of my observations/things I’ve learnt. They are in no particular order, just a random collections of thoughts:

• FYI.org.nz can be used to make Official Information Act requests
• IRD has built an online consultation forum that can be reused by other Government agencies (I hope they are all aware of this, and not individually building their own online consultation tools)
• Sometimes people are being asked in job interviews to provide their potential employer with access to their personal Facebook account (WTF???)
• Over time, silly things we said online won’t matter anymore, because either everyone else will have sent some drunk Facebook status updates as well, or because they won’t be found in the flood of personal information
• Politicians receive a lot of useless comments on Facebook
• Blocking staff access to social online networks isn’t a good idea
• Government agencies should trust their employees and reward positive online interaction with the public
• It’s time to replace “If you build it they will come” with “If you open it, they will build it”
• Useful + Usable = Used

My personal conclusion: it was actually a good event, if you let go of the idea that this was an un-conference. Those who were there are interested in change and improvement. Not sure if those working for Government agencies will go back and discuss, and if they do, I hope they’ll get listened to. But a seed is planted and over time we might see more openness in Government. If those who attended yesterday could ally with those already working on it, both sides could probably benefit.

The Adobe CS5 Roadshow visited Wellington yesterday, and Mike McHugh, Andrew Spaulding and Paul Burnett from Adobe Australia spent a whole day on stage – entertaining the crowd with all the new and amazing features in CS5. Apparently reaction from the people was not what these guys are used to – usually they’ll get a lot of “Oooooh”s and “Aaaaaah”s when presenting – but Wellingtonians are a little bit more reserved. My personal feeling is, that because in Wellington a lot of people work for government, many of the attendees won’t get an upgrade to their current software anytime soon. They can only dream of all the new features that could make their lives easier and increase productivity, it’s simply not their reality. I was sitting next to three ladies, who have just recently been upgraded from CS2 to CS4, and would in theory be entitled to a free upgrade to CS5 by Adobe – but “impact assessments” required by the organisation’s IT department would take a long time and are apparently rather expensive, so they simply won’t be upgraded.

But apart from the crowd being a bit quiet, it was a great show.

After the roadshow Mike, Andrew and Paul joined the Wellington Creative Suite User Group for a very special meeting. Adobe New Zealand sponsored an enormous cake to celebrate the release of CS5, and all attendees got some further insight into the new features. A software raffle at the end of the meeting saw one lucky user group member walk away with a brand new copy of a Premium Suite license.

What a great day – big thanks to Mike, Andrew and Paul again, and to all the other Adobe people, who made the roadshow and the user group meeting a highlight!

Software Requirements without Tears by Robin Hillard

Define your requirements by asking the right questions. A mini-manual to get those requirements right before starting the design/development. Robin finished his presentations with a little quiz, and I teamed up with a friendly chap next to me. Although I paid attention during the talk, we really sucked at identifying some requirements. Certainly something I need to follow up on.

Usability: Thinking about the user, not for them by Richard Turner-Jones

Richard was around when I had the second-scariest experience of my life. Only 3 people witnessed me freaking out on the horrible ferris wheel at Disneyland during the conference party at MAX in Anaheim a couple of years ago. Surely I had to attend his session, especially since it wasn’t solely development focussed. The main take-away for me was the link to www.guimagnets.com for some sort of a prototyping on a fridge (or whiteboard), which I wasn’t aware of before. The talk covered some of the basics only, which was ok since it was advertised for general audience and it was my own choice to still go there…

Wireframes – From Screen Concepts to User Interaction by Mia Horrigan

Mia presented a case study and shared her experience with a project that went wrong in several areas, and she explained how she brought it back on track. I always appreciate a speaker’s personal experience – you can read about the theory behind a topic in books, blogs and magazines. But if someone tells me “That’s what I did and that’s why it worked or didn’t work”, that’s when it gets useful for me.

The Hotness of Agile Software Development by Matthew Hodgson

My favorite of webDU. I fell in love with Matt’s presentation style at last year’s webDU, and he didn’t disappoint me this year either. Unfortunately he gave some insight into how his team works, and that totally made me want to work for them. Look for yourself.

The Mobile User Experience by Rod Farmer

I now have a deep respect for all the designers/developers out there, who manage to deliver a consistent user experience across different mobile platforms, screen sizes, networks, carriers, etc, etc, etc.

The Value of a Ruber Chicken: better team development through shame… and tools by Tim Buntel

Tim just recently moved to Sydney from the US, and it was great so see that he and his family seem to have fully adjusted to life in the southern hemisphere. His talks are always fun and enjoyable – it doesn’t really matter what he’s talking about. I would probably even go and listen to him speaking even if it was about some alien hardcore coding language, but this time I was lucky and I learnt more about different approaches of version control.

After a Round Table session with some of the key speakers (highly entertaining, but no women on the panel) sadly the conference came to an end. On the day after the conference, us Adobe user group managers from New Zealand and Australia held a mini UGM summit (including a surf lesson), and in the evening I interviewed Peter Bell (which is available on createordie.de or interpreted by a robot via Google Translate). The legendary Aftershow-Party at Deamon HQ brought the whole conference experience to an end.

The slogan of the conference is”Like a Rock Concert for Geeks”, and I can totally relate to this statement. And for me it was a “Beach Party with Friends” as well!

* Photos from the webdu2010 Flickr stream

We’re moving into a new venue (Natcoll Design Technology in Wellington’s CBD) that allows us to cater for more attendees and we’re going to have 2 parallel tracks this year! If you haven’t been at Flash Platform Code Camp 2009 have a look at the agenda and presentations from last year to get started!

Come along and learn about Adobe’s Flash Platform and creative tools for building Rich Internet Applications: Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash Builder, BlazeDS, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle Designer and lots more. This is also a place to meet and greet, share cool stuff, try out new technologies and code together with other like-minded people.

Make sure you follow @fpcodecampnz on Twitter for further updates and registration notification.

On our second day living in New Zealand I joined Wellington City Library, and I’ve been a regular visitor since. I love books and DVDs, I love the people and the atmosphere and I think they’re doing a lot of things right when it comes to delivering a positive customer experience. But today, they topped everything they’ve ever done so far, at least for me personally. It seems like they’ve tailored their offering just for me! But let me explain…

On the weekend I sent out the following tweet:

I got a few responses and started fighting the fruit flies with apple cider vinegar and lemongrass oil – the situation inside the house is now well under control. But I really do need to improve conditions for my compost bin. And as if the library knew I  needed some advice, today they sent this tweet:

And from there they made it very easy for me to follow up on the seminar: one click on the link brought me to their events calendar.

And another click on the ical icon automatically transferred it into my calendar on my Mac and my iPhone. Couldn’t be any easier – I wish more service providers would make processes so easy for me…

Unlike most women I’m not a big clothes or shoe shopper. I could even go as far as to say that I absolutely dislike it. My body has some common weaknesses, that the clothes industry doesn’t seem to be willing to cater for. One aspect of this is having calves that don’t seem to fit into any boots. I do have a pair of brown boots I got at least eight years ago, that I love with a passion, but I can’t get that particular brand in New Zealand. And I had a pair of black boots, which I have never really liked, that needed to be replaced.

When I went boots shopping on Saturday I didn’t really expect to be successful. I thought it would be another one of the tours around Wellington’s shoe shops, with intrusive sales girls, trying to talk me into buying something I would look ridiculous in. But this time it was very different… My first stop for the day was Kumfs on Willis Street. And it turned out to be the last one as well, since I got what I wanted, and left the store smiling happily.

The first thing I noticed when I entered the store, was that it was clean and tidy. The colour scheme is pretty neutral and there are inspiring words like “beautiful”, “charming”, “warm”, “exceptional” painted all over the wall. Despite not having much room in the small shop they had a reasonably good choice of shoes and boots available. Two salesladies were present; they noticed me when I entered, but left me alone browsing for the first little while. That’s one thing I really like – there’s nothing worse for me than having someone breathing down my neck before I was even have an overview of what’s on offer. It almost seemed like a miracle that the first pair I picked up had some kind of stretchy material at the back, so it would offer enough room for my calves.

As soon as I had this Hmmm-I-would-love-to-try-them-in-my-size-look on my face, one of the saleswomen approached me and offered help. She got me my size, and half a size smaller to find the best fit. The boots were awesome and I don’t think I’ve ever bought such expensive shoes within a few minutes of entering a shop before. At the check-out I was offered a free membership at the Kumfs Club, which allows me to return my boots within 30 days if they don’t work out for me as well as some other benefits, which are not quite so important for me. Although it took some time for me to fill out the form, they allowed me to join before the purchase, so I could take advantage of the benefits with this first buy. They gave me a huge fabric bag (“yay” for not using plastic bags) which has the same inspirational words on it as I saw on the wall before. A very happy me left the shop.

But the experience did not end there. When I unpacked my new boots at home I found a Thank You note for choosing Kumfs, some care tips for my boots and a feedback form in the box. I must say, I was deeply impressed. Since then I have had a brief look at their website, and even that seems to be ok. They are even on Facebook. In their About Us section they state: “Kumfs is a family owned business that operates with passion and dedication. Part of the our vision is to have pride in the quality of our work, provide the best customer service and to always delight our customers.”

All I can say is: yes, it works. At least for me.

Update:
Wow, less than 24 hours after publishing this blog post I got an email from Kumfs, telling me they love it and asking for permission to share it with their Facebook Fans. Not only do they know how to create a brilliant customer experience in their shops, they also “get” social media. Couldn’t more companies I engage with be like this?

If you can’t be bothered interrupting your well deserved sleep for some software demonstrations, you might want to register at http://cs5launch.adobe.com/ap/ instead. The special Asia-Pacific launch event will take place at a much more humane time (4pm in NZ) and I guess it will cover exactly the same things as the US event.

I did ask on the WCSUG (Wellington Creative Suite User Group) mailing list if people were interested in watching the US event as a group, but that was before the arrangements for the Asia-Pacific event were announced. So I’ll go back to check with members if they would be happy to check out CS5 at 4pm as well. If you are interested, but not yet a member of WCSUG, you can join us at http://tinyurl.com/wcsug.

Unfortunately I had to shorten the interview a little bit for Create or Die, so here’s what the fairy said in full length (enjoy!):

Hi Airpoints Fairy – how has your day been so far, what have you been up to?

My day has been great; I have spent today forfilling Airpoints member’s wishes to go to the Michael Hill NZ Open this weekend in Arrowtown.

You support Air New Zealand by granting flight-related wishes to your followers. For how long have you beein doing this? Where you contacted by Air New Zealand staff if you would like to take this job on, or was it your idea?

I was born in response to a tweet on Monday 14^th September 2009 – ‘wondering where the Airpoints Fairy lives…. I could do with a few thousand right now’ When I saw this I knew that this was my calling. On 16^th September 2009 the Fairy took flight on Twitter and at 12.35pm the first ‘random act of kindness’ was a pledge of 500 Airpoints Dollars to the girl who had written the first tweet.

Read the blog by the first recipient.

Who can send you wishes?

Airpoints members everywhere can send me wishes – they can do this via twitter.com/airpointsfairy or through my fairyland home at
airpointsfairy.com.

What kind of wishes to you make come true? What was the biggest/smalles wish you helped out with?

I make lots of wishes come true – mostly Airpoints related, always Air NZ related. My smallest wish was granted yesterday, someone wanted 0.33c (Airpoints Dollars) to make her balance an even 100 Airpoints Dollars. Larger wishes included organising Chocolate Kapiti Icecream for someones upcoming flight.

Are people reasonable with what they are asking for, or do you receive wishes asking for too much?

I receive lot’s of wishes, of varying sizes. I only have so much Fairy Dust and I want it to last as long as possible, so I have to vary the size of wishes which I grant. Sometimes small wishes can make a big impact on a person’s travel experience.

Sometimes people get very creative when it comes to wording their wishes – like www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dN1TiKI2Q4 for example. What was the most creative way of you receiving a wish?

This YouTube wish was the most creative by far – I would love to receive more creative wishes like this. It’s great to see passion when it comes to making wishes.

The 12 days of Christmas, when you gave very special prizes to your followers on the 12 days leading up to Christmas Day, were very popular amongst your followers – do you intend to have special events like this more often in the future?

Absolutely. I have recently celebrated Air New Zealand being named Airline of the Year by sending chocolate cakes to 10 lucky followers, so they can have a celebratory afternoon tea. It’s great to have fun with special events.

With www.airpointsfairy.co.nz you allow your followers and people who are not on Twitter a window into your world. What made you decide to put your world on display?

I wanted my followers to see me fly!! Have you seen me do acrobatics in the air? It’s also great that more people can now make wishes (it does make it harder for me to choose who to sprinkle fairy dust on though!!).

Why are there no other fairies to see in your online world? Are your friends busy working for other airlines, or what are they up to?

Fairies are very busy – take the Tooth Fairy for instance, she is one of my good friends but is always on the go collecting teeth while children sleep. I have other friends in Fairyland, you may have seen them.

For Fashion Week you dressed up in a cute little black dress (and since then in several other costumes for different occasions). Pretty shortly Air New Zealand is going to change the uniforms for cabin staff. Are your going to wear the same uniform in your Twitter avatar to support Air NZ staff with the new uniform during the first couple of weeks after introduction?

Funny you should mention that, I am just having my uniform made at the moment. It’s smaller than the other uniforms, so it is a bespoke piece. Keep an eye out and let me know what you think!! I think I will look great in it.

Have you ever travelled with Air New Zealand yourself? If yes, what was your most memorable experience?

Obviously I often fly myself around. But if I am going to a destination where Air New Zealand fly then I usually will choose to travel onboard. The service is fabulous, and it nice to give my wings a rest (especially on a longhaul journey).

Thanks for taking some time to answer all these questions, lovely fairy, – and keep doing the awesome work you’re currently involved with!

For one, I didn’t like the old, gloomy theme, so it made me feel depressed when I looked at it. Why I chose it in the first place? No idea.

And sometimes, when I had a thought I wanted to get out there, I did a search and saw that someone else had discussed something similar, I chose not to blog about it. Which is stupid, I know. If there was only ever one opinion allowed for each topic, we would live in a very sad world.

I didn’t even blog from MAX last year, which was very stupid, too, since I like going back to look up the sessions/speakers I saw and review how they influenced my opinion over the time. It’s easier to do this in my own blog, than trying to locate my notes somewhere on my computer. But at least I had a good reason not to blog from there: I tweeted live from the conference for the online magazine Create or Die and wrote some more articles related to the conference for them. This was probably the only good reason not to post something to my blog for the whole year of silence.

What brought me back to rethinking my habits was that I noticed some people officially quitting their blogging activities. I know that in times of Twitter blogging seems to be a bit “old-fashioned”, but other bloggers still are a great source of knowledge and inspiration for me. I don’t read all the feeds I get into my Google Reader, but I do scan all titles at least a couple of times per week and I follow up on what catches my interest. I makes me feel sad to see people giving up on it and I was just about to start moaning about it, when I realised that I wasn’t any better. I never officially quit, but reading some of the “latest” posts made me aware that it was going down and then stopped with no explanation. I don’t want it to end like this, and even more I don’t just want to consume other people’s work. I want to contribute again, and I’ll make the best effort to get back into regular blogging! :-)

Where?
Modica Group
Level 4, Anvil House
138-140 Wakefield Street
Wellington
New Zealand
google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=138-140+Wakefield+Street+Wellington+New…

Doors open at 5.30 for social gathering and drinks; presentation (Kai Koenig: “The Spry Ajax-Framework and Dreamweaver”) starts around 5.45.

Please register for the event at http://wellingtoncsug.eventbrite.com. Your registration helps us with the preparations for the meeting and you’ll automatically take part in an awesome prize drawing later this year.

Speaker:
Kai Koenig – Ventego Creative

Dreamweaver CS 3 and CS 4 have introduced a few new very handy features for website developers using the Spry AJAX/libraries. Kai will introduce Spry and show how it integrates into Dreamweaver. We’re also going to have a quick look into integrating Spry with server technologies, but that shouldn’t keep anyone from coming…

Where?
Modica Group
Level 4, Anvil House
138-140 Wakefield Street
Wellington
New Zealand
google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=138-140+Wakefield+Street+Wellington+New…

Doors open at 5.30 for social gathering and drinks; presentation
(Philip Fierlinger: “Rapid Prototyping in Flash”) starts around 5.45.

Please register for the event at http://wellingtoncsug.eventbrite.com. Your registration helps us with the preparations for the meeting and you’ll automatically take part in an awesome prize drawing later this year.

Speaker:
Philip Fierlinger – Head of Design, Xero

Philip will give a condensed version of his Skyrize.com rapid prototyping in Flash workshop. See a wide range of different prototypes created for major global brands as well as innovative startups. Plus, get tips and tricks on using Flash to build these prototypes.

Join the group at http://groups.google.com/group/wcsug.

The second one was “Video Basics”, which helped me increadibly to overcome my fear of Premier Pro. After installing Pr CS4 at home I only had a brief look at it and got scared by all the unknown features. After 90 minutes playing around with some videos I’m much more confident that I can work with it.

In the afternoon I learned more about Acrobat 9 and went to a presentation of the new features in Photoshop CS 4, skipped the last session and ended my personal MAX 2008 experience by hanging out in the Community Lounge. That leaves one more night for catching up with people and one full day of sightseeing, yay! MAX 2009 will take place from 04. to 07. October in Los Angeles.

Right after the Peeks we were picked up by busses for the great “Customer Appreciation Event” – I think that’s what they’ve called it and I’m sure that in previous years it was always just referred to as “the night event”, but I could be wrong. The journey ended at the California Academy of Science and the De Young Museum, where food, drinks, shows, and heaps of geeky stuff were waiting for us to be explored. One of the highlights was the new planetarium at the Academy (all digital now, no longer theses big metal machines in the middle of the theatre that we know from our childhood). There were heaps of live animals, in aquariums and other enclusures, but I’m not a big fan of living creatures in way too small cages, especially when they are ripped out of there natural day/night rythm and have to listen too loud music of not their choice. I tried to think that Adobe must have paid heaps of money for this event and that finally the money goes back to the animal by ensuring the museum doesn’t run out of funds. Apart from this it was a great night, a fabulous opportunity to catch up with people and the best food I have encountered in the US so far… Unfortunately we were kicked out at around 10.30 pm, I would have loved to stay a bit longer…

Next session, and my last one for yesterday’s afternoon, was “Accessibility Basics: Making Websites More Useful for More People” with Derek Featherstone. It was exactly what the title said it was  and I feel I need to mention this because I saw some guys in front of me marking something different on their evaluation forms. There were a few nice tipps how to pimp the accessibility of your website in some very quick and easy steps. Great presenter, useful hints, although not much news, which again was absolutely ok, given the title of this session.