Day 1 – The Sessions

October 1st, 2007

My entire day 1 schedule of sessions were all “Hands-On” sessions. Here is a summary of each one:

After Effects CS3 For Interactive Designers
This was my first class of Max. Overall it was pretty seamless – however, they were using VMWare on all of the student machines and pulling an image from a central server(s). This made it a bit slow (especially for After Effects). The presenter did a great job overall. I am pretty familiar with After Effects (ok, maybe two versions ago), but this was a good refresher. I hopefully will be showing some work here soon.

Introduction to Flash CS3
I kind of went incognito to this class. I was hoping that they would cover a good deal of the drawing and “non-code” interaction with Flash. They actually did, and I am glad that I went. However, when the teacher was explaining symbols, I must admit that I was answering work email and tweaking our Apache server.

Advanced Coldfusion Reporting
This was the kind of class that I was expecting when I came to Max. Dean Harmon (of the Adobe Coldfusion Team) did a great job with this class. First of all,
there were 73 pages of very detailed handouts. We managed to make it through two-thirds of the material in our two hour session. Dean was also great to give us access to all of the files for our personal use. The slow VMWare image struck here as well. It took some people around five minutes to start Coldfusion on their machine.

Currently, I am switching around a few things for my schedule today, but I will report back with all of the details tonight.