Just got back from LA. And yet another very successful Adobe MAX conference completed.

This year had a distinct theme – devices. From the free devices handed out to attendees, to the devices in the keynote, to the devices shown on the floor of the community pavilion, it’s clear that Adobe is very intent on getting their content production tools’ output on as many formats and platforms as possible.

AIR for Android, AIR on TV, Google TV, Flash Player on Mobile… Wow. The digital Publishing Platform alone is a huge step forward for publications looking to expand their reach to devices where they previously hadn’t been able to target. Pretty amazing overall, really. While some of the technology is probably still a ways off, such as the Mobile jQuery extensions for Dreamweaver (which John Resig helped to announce), there are other things like Flex Hero, with support for Mobile Development, are basically here (though in a Beta form). It’s exciting indeed.

Check out my photos from the event (shot on my spiffy new Canon S90)

The keynotes got mixed reviews from a lot of the attendees, and most all the people I track on Twitter that weren’t at the event were handily panning the skits and overall presentations given. Honestly, while yes there some dry spots (the Omniture skit spoofing Jim Kramer was terrible) and there were a couple minor technology issues (Epix’s video demo failed), I enjoyed them. I really though that Martha Stewart’s appearance, the BlackBerry Playbook demo and the mind blowing High Performance Flash player demos of 4k video and StageVideo, and MoleHill were just awesome.

One thing I noticed… The show’s opening with Joa and Natzke jamming some sick visualizations to a live AudioTool performance showed just how tough of a audience Adobe has to please… Here, I thought it was awesome and so did a lot of designers that I follow on Twitter. On the flipside… There were a ton of really smart and well known developers totally slamming it. WTF? It just highlights the heterogeneous nature of the Adobe customer base. You have creatives used to making beautiful or fun stuff with CS products and then you have these computer scientist developer types using Flex, LiveCycle and Coldfusion that just don’t care about that side of Adobe at all. One has to think that maybe Adobe needs to think a bit harder about what they want to be when they grow up… Or at least get the kids on each side of the fence to get along better. I stride the line between the two camps, so I love the creative mind blowing visuals and the whiz bang tech demos. Not everyone agrees.

Beyond the keynote announcements, there was some awesome labs sessions and concurrent presentations (my own presentation on Mobile Learning included. ). I really enjoyed Nate Beck’s multiplayer gaming session and the other labs I attended on both P2P and RTMFP and the other on the OSMF platform were both really enlightening. I attended a session on the Adobe InMarket service… and while it looks like it could be good eventually, it looks like it is a ways off for being flexible or powerful enough to warrant the effort. A lack of a public roadmap for the project could be a major turn-off for most app developers. How can you pin a business plan on a beta product?

The sneak peeks were great as always. Again Flash player improvements abounded as well as some super cool Flash player performance testing tools and output paths to HTML5 definitely caught my attention. The Coldfusion sneeks were pretty snoozeworthy to me, but I’m not much into that tech in general as it is. The real star of the sneak session was William Shatner though. Obviously oblivious to the bulk of the tech shown in the demos, he absolutely kept everyone entertained with a pile of jokes and incredulous responses to the advanced stuff on the screen behind him. Tons of fun.

The MAX bash was a great affair, with good food, entertainment (including some crazy dancing scantily clad snake lady, living statues, celeb look-alikes and a chain saw juggler), and the headliner “The Bravery”. A nice addition to the party, The Bravery put a good show on!

My session went well. I had about 60 attendees and ended up with a decent, though not superb rating. My topic, “Creating Mobile Learning with Your eLearning Toolkit” is an interesting one, mainly because it’s pretty much totally new to the Adobe crowd. The recently released eLearning Suite 2 doesn’t actually ship with a way to target mobile right out of the box, so it’s a little bit of a stretch for a lot of rapid eLearning tool users like people that use Captivate daily to entertain firing up a command line tool to package up the materials for AIR for Android or the iOS packager. I hope to release the deck and the demos files here soon, so please come back to get those here.

After all is said and done, though, the best thing was seeing so many friends from the community. Chatting with awesome people like Jesse Freeman, Elad Elrom, Michael Labriola, Aaron Pederson, Leif Weils, Stacey Mulcahy, Scott Janousek, Zach Stepek, Chris Girffith, Ben Stucki, Brian Rinaldi, Andy Mathews and so many more really made the time a lot of fun. I finally met a lot of people in the community that I follow on Twitter like James Ward, Rob Huddleston and Russ Ferguson and was reunited with a former classmate of mine from Bradley, the humble Flash platform genius, Dave Knape. Honestly, talking and connecting with so many smart, fun, and engaging people in a cool setting with so much going on is really the reason to go to these conferences. I get so much out of hearing their stories and experiences and sharing mine, too. These interactions are far more educational than any labs, really. Can’t wait to seem ‘em all again.

So what’s next for Adobe? Hopefully some great success for this year across devices and more OSes… For now, I’m recuperating and then starting to plan out what to build on my new Droid 2 and Google TV. Maybe some mashups or apps are in order… Choices, choices, choices.

I have been really busy on another of my blogs, Float Learning. This year, my company has dove right into mobile, and specifically the world of mobile learning. I’ve been buried because of that, in case you couldn’t tell here.

We’ve been writing a ton of great stuff at that blog. You should check it out when you have a moment.

I promise to get back to posting here, and have a couple drafts nearly ready, but for now, I’m going to be mostly active on Twitter and may have some delicious links to post coming soon.

That said, I do have a couple milestones to share… It’s been 1 year since my URL shorteners went live at fnaweso.me and fnla.me… go use em and say hi, if you haven’t recently.

Also, this is my 500th blog post. Sweet.

At The Iona Group and our new venture, Float Learning, we have been very busy seeking new opportunities and trying to reach new potential clients in a variety of interesting, non-traditional ways.

Mini sites. Bah, old hat. Social Networking… hmm, not as effective for a small marketing business as you might think. Demo reels? Been there done that. Carousel Galleries? Puhhhhleeazzzeee.

So, we’ve been thinking a little “outside the box”… cliche I know, but the things we’ve been working on are hardly typical. Check this 3 iPad synchronized reel.

Or this multiscreen game featuring SMS interaction, mobile web and custom iPad development. We unveiled that last month at mLearnCon for the eLearning Guild..

Strange times, (and this economy certainly is a strange time) call for creative measures. We are definitely being creative. Its been a lot of fun working on efforts like this with the team we have at The Iona Group.

The very interesting thing about this is that after people see the demo, or play the game, not only do they want to talk to us more about our work, but often times they actually want to have a custom multiscreen demo or a mobile phone based game produced for them. It’s funny, but the portfolio pieces/demos we have created have actually become solutions that customers want for themselves.

I’d like to alert my readers of a new site I helped create with the talented people at The Iona Group. Float Mobile Learning is our mobile learning strategy practice. We work with companies to understand and leverage the power of mobile learning. We help them meet their business strategies by making useful information accessible, anytime, anywhere.

The site features some great art from my friend and coworker, Matt Forcum. Matt runs the site Robot Beach, a webcomic about robots, crabs and seagulls. It’s good.

Take a look at this illustration from the site:

I hope you find the content at the site useful, as well. We are looking to make FloatLearning.com THE resource for mobile learning strategy news, information and opinion.

At The Iona Group we produce a lot of experiences for museums and tradeshows. These are often installations that will run for a solid 8-12 hours a day for weeks and be in operation for years on end (many exhibits have 5-10 year life-spans in the museum world). Uptime and dependability is crucial. Over the course of too many projects to count, I’ve assembled a list of must dos for any kiosk we build. These are things that have worked for us and sometimes learned via trial and error, this is offered up as a hope that you won’t need to experience the same sorts of learning as I have encountered. Here is a list of things to consider before installing and walking away from any kiosk job. These will help you get less support calls and allow you to sleep easier.

These tips aren’t about writing good software in the first place. This is all about the deployment and delivery phase of the project. A lot of these suggestions came from projects we have worked on over the years. Many of them are canon in our workflow because of our Technology Director, Jeremy LeBeau. He blogs at Silverwire and is on Twitter as jleb. Look him up!

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Alright… so unless you you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple years, you know that TDD, Source Control and Build Automation have fully hit the Flash design and development scene. It seems as though everyone is talking about it. A lot. And then commenting on it. A lot. (more…)

I’ll have a full recap on the conference later, but for now, here is our presentation deck. Enjoy!

Additionally, here is the handout we provided to the session attendees to help them determine if an API was right for them:

The eLearning Guild’s annual developer conference is rapidly approaching. DevLearn 09 is sure to be a great event with keynotes from Leo Laporte and more. The conference this year is particularly interesting, with a complete ARG being played around a “Zombie Apocalypse” scenario. Teams, points, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and more are all coming together in a very fun interactive way. It’s been great so far! I’m looking forward to see where it goes once the conference gets started.

The Iona Group will be going, with myself, Mark Tovey and John Feser all attending. Mark and I will be presenting. Our topic is about the use of APIs in eLearning. It’s a topic that is pretty dear to us. We have learned quite a bit about this through our experience getting Doctum up and running. The concept of building a resuable, sharable codebase is very prevalent in web and interactive development, but we have found that in the eLearning community it is relatively unheard of.

This could be due to a number of things, but by and large it appears to us that this may be in large part due to the fact that eLearning tools are not focused on separating content from presentation and behavior.

This practice is the foundation of of OOP and implemented in all of our work at The Iona Group. We’re happy to talk to others about it.

Here is the link to our presentation… check it out.

I just took an extended vacation. 10+ days actually. Went with the family to visit some friends and relatives. We had a great time. I was computer free for the entire time. *GASP*.

I was in an environment with a number of people that use a computer only as a communication tool, email, etc. Their level of web saviness and familiarity with computing in general is pretty low. They are casual technology users in general, not early adopters. They are all what you would consider white collar workers in various economic sectors. All are pretty successful in life, with nice homes, families and all the things that come with it. All of them great people, and people I consider myself lucky to know. Their lines of work and the careers they have built through their hard work are all things to be proud of, and rightfully so. I feel the same about the choices I have made in my professional life, too.

There was a clear dividing line between them and myself that was far more important, though much less noticeable than simply being a power user or a casual user of a computer. That line? A clear and driving force behind the work we choose to do. You see, I haven’t really ever considered a career path that didn’t involve design and interactivity. Since high-school, I wanted to be a graphic designer. I avidly learned Photoshop and Illustrator, Aldus SuperPaint and Apple Hypercard, etc… Once in college, I taught myself HTML and dug into Apple Media Tool, Director, and picked up Flash. Since then I have expanded into user experience design, application design and social media design. All evolutions of the same basic tenet, creating and providing superior experiences for the people that use my products, services or solutions.

The paths the others had taken or are currently taking, these friends and many of my other friends included, have been a little less clear. A few years in consulting, maybe a few in real estate or retail, on and on… not really in one sector or even one basic task/goal type. I find this a difficult life path to comprehend. To not love the work you do so much, that it is really about the only thing you want to do, so much that you are willing to take a lower paycheck or see a lull in your billable hours, just doesn’t sound rewarding to me. To be able to move from selling Widget A to selling Widget B without a blink just isn’t me. I love the weekend, but I’m never really working for it.

In the wake of the dot com bomb, I was unemployed for a while. Taking any sort of design oriented gig I could scrounge. Websites, brochures, banners, web games, etc. I interviewed a number of times for creative positions, but to no avail. At the lowest point, after the work dried up and we were seeking to buy a home to start a family, I interviewed for a position selling technology products at a full commission store. The interview was great, I was virtually a shoo-in with my level of expertise on computers, home entertainment gear and the like… then the big question, “What will you do if a position in your previous line of work becomes available locally?” My answer, “I’d probably take it.” They promptly shook my hand and showed me the door. I just couldn’t do it, I needed a design job!

It makes me think. What other career paths are out there that people take that they are so passionate about that they just can’t think of doing anything else? Teaching, Law, Medicine? What? I am anxious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you love what you do? Could you envision yourself in a totally different job or career path? I’ve made my decision. It’s like some sort of tattoo. Design.

Iona pulled in 6 regular Addy awards this year, in categories like Best Business to Business Website, Best Special Effects, Best Audio, Best Local Ad Campaign, Best Use of Text Messaging in Advertising and Non Broadcast video. (Check out the links to see the samples). In addition to the regular awards, two special awards were won, a Judge’s Choice award for the Bradley Gala Text Messaging project based on creativity, and an Award of Excellence given to Steve McNair and Scott McCormick (two of the founding partners of the Iona Group) to commemorate their 25 years of great service to the local advertising marketplace.

Congrats to all involved on these efforts. We did some great work and it got noticed. If you’re interested in learning more about the winning projects (toolsets, process, etc) mentioned in the post… let me know!