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.

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

A couple of cool new things were presented at the Sneak Peek session. As always everything shown is pre-alpha and there is no guarantee for further development or publication. One of highlights was certainly Thermo, a new tool which allows designers to create Rich Internet Applications in a very visual manner. Artwork can be converted into working components in a single click. Aral Balkan took a video of the sneak peek session, and it’s definitely worth a look. Aral recorded the sneak peek demonstration of Flash Player 10 as well.

The other presentations in a quick overview:
1. Visual Communicator 3
Interesting solution for easily creating video content.
2. “Pacifica – Adobe VoIP-Technologie that can be used with own Flex- and AIR-applications
3. Flash Home for Mobile
Mobile booting directly into a Flash Lite application as a home screen (incl. adaptation of background)
4. Photoshop Express Online
Unbelivably cool consumer version of photoshop as hosted service
5. Fireworks “Next”
6. ColdFusion
7. Web2Print
A combination of InDesign Server and Flex
8. PDF Packaging
Acrobat PDF reader AND Flash Player rolled into one (to embed eg flash videos in a PDF document), PDF goes future proof!
9. Flex Builder Linux
1o. Flash and C/C
11. iSeam
A brilliant tool for manipulating (esp. resizing) photos (the inventor got employed by Adobe within minutes after the video appeared on youtube).

That was Adobe MAX 2007 for me. I will add some pictures and comments during the next couple of day as well as a summary of the Sneak Peek session and the big party on Tuesday night.

To end his presentation he points out a cool project that he thinks needs more support, called www.kiva.org. And he does a little bit of advertisement for one of his upcoming seminars as well as for his company www.miskeetcom, which focuses on socially-conscious sites, products and services that improve the world, in big ways and in small.

My personal conclusion of this session: from all the “famous” user experience experts that I saw so far, Robert Hoekman is the one I like most. His thoughts made sense during the whole presentation, he admits mistakes so others can learn from them and he has an inspiring and fun presentation style – it simply doesn’t get boring to listen to him. I’m really looking forward to reading his book.

The roles and goals of the XD Team within Adobe are:

- Inspire
- Initiate

– Implement
Their work and ideas seem to be pretty well regarded within Adobe.

What makes the team work?
- Emphasize Making (Generalist over Specialist)
- Promote Trust and Freedom
- Have Fun

How do they work together?
- Communication is crucial (communication is very informal)
- Process isn’t that important (focus on creating, not on following a strict defined process)
- Focus on the visions and goals

Their 5 rules of working:
- Simplify the problem
- Trust your instincts
- Share everything
- Fail fast (to suceed sooner)
- We are all peers before the objects

How we design:
- Useful.Usable.Desirable.

Next Andrew talks about the cornerstones that Tom Hobbs and Chris Heimbuch mentioned in their session on Monday as well
- What’s your point
- Content is King
- Create and experience, not an interface
- Choreograph sequence and flow

Mobile devices have evolved from merely functional tools to our constant companions. But the web experiences that we can get with our mobiles are boring, especially Facebook and MySpace, the most common social networks, look awful on the small screen. Josh shows some examples how the sides could look better, richer, more accessible. He shows the outcome of a survey that mentions iPhone owners with 77% being the most satisfied users of mobile phones and sees a real opportunity for designers and developers in this changing industry. But how to get up the experience to this level? First of all it needs to be an experience that puts the user first, they must be expressive and desirable. For this it’s important to know the user and his behavior.

Design principles for creating engaging mobile experiences:
- The Mobile Context is Relevant (they should not only be smaller, but smarter than desktops => focus on the user’s mobility, fitting, get the hardware to test immediately. As an example he shows google maps on a mobile, which was just text in the beginning and was changed to a great application for mobile devices after the problem was realized.)
- Capture and Guide Users (=> establish clear focus, direction and emphasis, Maintain context, Preview and deliver. As an example he show Yahoo go, which is today easy to use)
- Differentiations is a Feature (=> stylize, demonstrate brand, deep customization, thrill, fresh and dynamic. As an example he shows “Living World”, an application that gives an identity to the device)
Sum up: there is a hunger for mobile experience and providers who realize this potential we have an amazing opportunity.

So there we have “Buzzword” now, a word processor that convinced Adobe so well, that the developing company will now join them to be a part of the Adobe Family. After a quick overview what is available on the market right now and what these word processors can do, it becomes pretty clear, that Microsoft Word, WordPerfect and OpenOffice actually do deliver the tools to produce good documents, but they are huge, need a lot of memory space on installation and are not easy to use and share. Main feature of Buzzword is the online storage of documents. It saves a lot of time and emails going back- and forward, if several people are working on the same document. You can get a list of all available documents sorted by author, number of pages, title. You can define if people are allowed to change the document or just read and comment on in. Documents that have changed since you last opend it are indicated with a red mark. Buzzword is WYSIWYG and everything from typing over spell-check to zooming works in real time and watching the demo on the screen already makes me want to try it and hundreds of ideas come to my mind how this can make my day-to-day work much easier. The comment function really impresses me – everyone who has ever worked with track changes in Microsoft Word knows how much of a pain it can be. Buzzword even offers a time line which shows the document at various stages so that you are able to get back to earlier versions without confusion about who changed what, when and why.

Buzzword is free and will stay free in a basic version for indivinduals, maybe there will be a kind of premium version with additional features which could cost some money. For the future Buzzword will be available on AIR, so that it can be used on- and offline. That will be a very cool feature especially for us in New Zealand, where the speed and stability of internet connections still often sucks.

Next in the spotlight is Steven Webster, showing a video about working processes at MFG.com and how they implement LiveCycle products in their daily life. Afterwards he talks about LiveCycle ES a bit more in detail.

The following part consists of four people presenting a couple of Adobe Services.

1. Dough Mack shows “Scene7″, an on-demand rich media publishing system.
2. Andrew Shebanow shows “Share”, a file sharing and store application.
3. Danielle Deibler talks about “Pacifica”, a communication tool (voice-and-video-presence-service) with very high voice quality, text instant messaging and a planned integration of video chat and landline telephone network. Seems to be a kind of Skype without using Skype… I’m not really sure what this is about.
4. Nigel Pegg presents “CoCoMo”, a new version of Connect based on a client-server platform.

Next huge topic after Services is Tools and first project that’s shown is “Thermo”, a RIA Design Tool, presented by Mark Anders and Steven Heintz.

Mike Sundermeyer presents the Adobe XD team (some of the guys I met at last night’s meet-the-team session) and shows the webpage that was presented in yesterday’s session XD:Adobe’s Approach to Application Design.

Last thing that is presented is a prototype of some Flex suff for boats, as they can’t bring a boat on stage they show a video about it.

More information about the keynote and other things that are happening at MAX are available at Aral Balkan’s Blog and in German language on Create or Die by Kai.

Aaaahhhhrgs, I know these slides – I’m out of here!

AIR brings branded applications out of the browser and onto the desk top. Everyone loves their desktops and fit them to our own tastes and likes. Desktop applications require trust and belief in a brand. A web page is only a destination, while the desk top is part of our personality.

User surround themselves with touchpoints, potential environments where a brand can reach the user. The more touchpoints a brand uses the more chances a brand has to get noticed. Carefully identifying and shaping each touchpoint provides a holistic user experience. As an example Gabor shows Finetune.com, an online and offline usable music library.

Currently AIR excels at creating passive experiences and future applications will provide an active experiences. Advantages of AIR:
- AIR brings web design and development skills-sets to the desktop, which is necessary because the next generation of users are growing up on web based interfaces.
- The best UI designers in the world are currently working on web based experiences, with AIR they have the chance to create for the desktop as well.
- Cross Platform – build one, deploy many

Now Tony Mac Donnell comes on the stage and starts talking a bit more about the technical aspects of AIR. He goes on with more advantages of AIR: the opportunity to create nice atuff and having access to the file system.
The session ends with an outlook on visions and hopes for the future and a Q&A round.

He goes on with the definition of Adobe Express: It is an online application suite that allows you to edit, create and share your media without leaving the web (build entirely in Flex). Ty then shows an example application of Adobe Premiere Express (a RIA for simple editing of digital video files) that can be customised to the clients needs. It’s currently used for example by Photobucket and MTV.

The early concepts of Express started with what was known to the team: the desktop. But it turned out that this was the wrong approach and we are guided us through some “historic” versions of Express to show the development over the years up to how it looks like today.

What’s next? Express is an ecosystem, not a singular product, so the concepts can be implemented and used in other applications for future visions.

While waiting I just googled Jesse James Garreth and he even has a Wikipedia entry, that explains the number of people here and pushes my expectations even further… ;-)

He starts off with promoting his book (good that I already got it) and explaining what his company Adaptive Path does. He then goes on with the question “What is the web good for (or at)?” and goes back to the invention of television, which was only compared to things that were known before (it’s like radio but with pictures/it’s like theater without going out) and only some ten year after the invention people started to understand the real purpose of TV. He thinks that this is exactly what’s happening to the internet right now. He (as everyone else at this conference as well) sees the power of the internet in the content and in the combination of content and RIAs. He sees the beginning of the current hype in the late 19th century, when visions about the change of photography (from taking the pictures on glass to taking them on film rolls) changed the use of cameras from being professionals based work equipment to something everyone could use because it was so much simplified and suddenly usable.

Reasons for creating a new product could be to produce something profitable or reliable or, in the best case, something people say “I can’t live without it”. He goes back in history to show the development of some products that changed people’s behavior and desires, like video recorders or early word processors and how devices became more and more complicated and harder to use by adding more features. He does a quick digression on video games and digital music players leading to the success of the iPod. The reason why a product that came later to the market and had fewer features than the competition’s could ever get this popular, is, that people see their favorite products as people, too. He mentions a couple of more products and applications that changed the user experience over the last couple of years (eg. google calender, medicine packaging, flickr, mobile phones) and points out that it’s not only the website that makes the overall experience for the user, but the interaction of every party involved (call center, mail advertisement).

Getting to the end of the session he shows a video about the Adaptive Path’s vision of a new medical device called charmr for people with diabetis, a really cool device which sounds so useful that it should be created and hit the market!

The MAX keynote feels a bit like a religious event: huge crowds (more than 4000 attendees) celebrate Adobe, themselves and the community. Kevin Lynch, Chief Software Architect at Adobe Systems, welcomes everyone and presents the Adobe Developer Connection, a developer’s network which was just ready on time for MAX. For Abode’s 25th birthday we get an overview how things developed from floppy disk in the 80s, over CD Roms in the 90s to RIA’s in the 2000s.

- After a big thank you to the community he hands over to Shantanu Narayen (president and COO of Adobe) who talks about the importance of contents and User Experience and how usage of devices needs to be personalised and simplified to be attractive for users. After this he presents the new Adobe Media Player, which covers all of the above.

- Back to Kevin Lynch we learn more news about Flash and its current updates. Flash Player Moviestar for example offers an incredible quality of video, it’s really amazing. The new features include H.264, HDTV with 1080p and full-sreen hardware-based scaling. The Adobe Media Player is meant to be a desk top application in addition to Flash Player to bring the online experience to the desk top. The family is complete with the addition of Flash Lite 3, bringing the experience to mobile devices (available from next month on the Adobe website).

- Scott Fegette and Ben Forta, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion heroes, talk about new features of these Adobe products. Here it gets a bit too technical for me, but again all that’s shown is awesome. There are no boundaries for imagination anymore.

- After Scott and Ben, Kevin Lynch is back on the stage again and talks about Scapblog to show the limits of web browsers and how people develop and adapt existing applications to overcome such limits.

- Next in front of the camera is Ed Rowe, talking about Adobe AIR, here again we see a lot of coding and the outcome is impressive. AIR really puts a rich experience to existing websites. AIR Beta 2, Flex 3 Beta 2, Dreamweaver Air Extention and Flash Authoring Air Extention are available for download at Adobe Laps today.

- Next presentation, by Heidi Williams, is about Flex Builder. She shows the Profiler, Language Intelligence, Advanced Data Visualizations Comps and Flex Framework Caching as a taste of the new features of Flex Builder.

- In the last couple of weeks Adobe had an AIR competition, called the AIR derby, and Kevin Lynch presents the winning applications of this contest, called Agile Agenda.

- A lot of major global market players (like AOL, FedEx, SAP, QVX) are running on AIR and Ebay is relaunching today. One company, frogdesign, actually gets stage time to present their app (developed in AIR), it’s a tool for travel agents to book travels to Disney Parks. It’s pretty cool as it offers all the features that travel agents usually ask for (like local storage), it’s easy to use, makes comparisons easy as and offers extensive mapping features. Great!

- Kevin shows a couple of more applications in AIR (tweetr, Snippage, Pronto!, PayPal, SAP-Briefingbook and a new messanging tool for facebook) and plays around with sounds in digimix. He presents a kind of desk top letter magnets to build words and shows “buzzword”, a very cool word processing application, that can even work with word-documents. The guys who developed this application now belong to the Adobe Family… ;-) Next he shows the overall shopping experience at Anthropology, starting with an email, going over a great online catalogue and ending with an easy exiting process buying and receiving the stuff ordered. Most amazing part is, that once you decided buying something, you can search for other clothes that matches in color. And you can even upload a photo and search for matchings clothes for stuff you already own.

- Next generation Flash will be called “Astro” and will have Advanced Text Layout Support, 3D Effects (simple API for transforming display objects in 3D space, full interactivity, high performance), Custom Filders, Blend Modes and Fills (to build your own effects).

Wow, this was a great keynote! We really need a lot more of this stuff in New Zealand.

Myth 1 – more features=more value
Cornerstone 1 – What’s your point?
Myth 2 – more chrome
Cornerstone 2 – Content is King (this is a big theme this year, we heard it already in the keynote)
Myth 3 – apps are just the sum of their parts
Cornerstone 3 – Create an experience, not a UI
Myth 4 – Animation is gratuitous
Cornerstone 4 – Choreograph sequence and flow

They finish with the conclusion: It’s about immersing your users in an experience, and the experience of content… forggetting that they’re driven. And with this conclusion the official part of Day 1 of Adobe Max ends for me. I will now attend the Sponsor Reception and enjoy my evening!

After not having been to MAX last year, I notice one thing that’s quite different to previous years: all the presenters use a Mac to show their stuff and in the audience there are more and more Mac-users as well. So finally people realise, that things can be much easier using the right hardware… ;-)