What a fantastic conference!  The Adobe CS3 conference was a two day (June 19 and June 20) networking, product immersion and just plain old fun “experience” for only $199; can’t beat that! 

That price not only included a bunch of classes and networking opportunities, but also a fantastic dinner on the first day (I mean shrimp, prime rib, Chinese food and even an open hosted bar).  

There were plenty of networking opportunities as well, including the lunches and dinners, the get-togethers after the days ended and a bird-of-a-feather meeting. 

Pre-conference Sessions
The conference started with a “Pre-Conference Session”.  There were 5 sessions to choose from, including Rich Internet Application for Developers, Video, Management/IT, Photographers and Print Service Providers.  

I debated whether to take the Rich Internet Application or Video Track.  I ended up choosing the Video track.  I’m glad I did.

That track covered the new Adobe Media Player as well as OnLocation CS3 and Ultra CS3.  With the exception of Ultra CS3, which I already use extensively, I liked the track itself.

The new Adobe Media Player (which is in pre-beta…not released yet) has a lot of potential.  Adobe, in my opinion, is trying to go after iTunes (even though when I asked them straight out that question, they said they are not in the “retail” business….right!)

The application is completely written using AIR (previously known as Apollo).   The download of that application would include the AIR (the runtime engine) built in.  The Adobe Media Player offers the ability to play FLVs, content protection and tracking capabilities.

It looks promising, but there are some serious drawbacks to it.   First of all, it will only play Flash Videos (flvs).   I don’t get that move.   They name it Adobe “MEDIA PLAYER”, yet, it only plays Flash Video.   Adobe, either fix this serious issue or rename it to the Adobe Flash Video Player.

The other negative issue is that they will only show certain media in their “store” from certain major publishers.  What about us, the small guys?   iTunes allows us to upload Podcasts and video Podcasts and appear in the store next to everyone else.   In fact, I can appear next to ABC Podcasts if I’m popular enough (though I’m not).

You can publish your .flvs, add an XML file on your web server and then tell all your users to go subscribe to that XML feed and they get your channel.  Cool, but still not cool enough.   I want to appear in the main “store.”

I asked about controlling the store home page to point to a store created inside our company (our own video store only viewable to our users).   Not available, but he (the presenter) sounded interested in pursuing that idea.

The other products they covered were Adobe Ultra CS3 and Adobe onLocation.  Ultra CS3 is used for DV Keying and OnLocation is used for on location video tape recording and video monitoring.  I won’t talk much about them here since I will be writing separate blog entries for each of these apps.

Keynote
The keynote was pretty cool.  They had 2 DJs, a huge stage, lots of music and they kept introducing different people from Adobe to talk about the roadmap and then specifically, to give an overview of each application before the next day’s events where you hit the ground running by attending application specific classes.

So that was the first day.   The second day included a bunch of classes on different Adobe CS3 applications.    Below is a list of the classes I took.

Getting to know the new Adobe Fireworks CS3
Fireworks CS3 is pretty powerful tool for creating prototypes quickly to share with your clients.  It works hand in hand with Photoshop (you can import Photoshop files into it without a problem).  You can then create slices and add behaviors to those slices such us pop-up menus, links to other pages, etc.

And speaking of “pages”; you can create what Fireworks CS3 calls “pages”, which contain different layers from your design.  So you can create a layer that has the “banner for your page” and another layer that has the “navigation” for your page and then share those within other pages for your home page and sub pages.   You can even link all those pages so that you create a “workable” prototype to show to your clients.  Each “page” in Fireworks CS3 is a “web page” in real life.

Pretty cool stuff.  The only thing I did not like was the presenter.  Don’t get me wrong.  He was friendly and seemed very knowledgeable; however, he went too fast and didn’t explain how he did certain things.  I know he was limited by the time, but I would have liked a bit more “in-depth” on this presentation.

I’m definitely going to head on over to Lynda.com to take her training on Fireworks CS3.  Since I create a lot of “UIs” for our homegrown CMS application where I work, and Fireworks has built in “screen objects” such as pull down menus, checkboxes, etc, I can see myself staring to use this application in my web development workflow immediately.

Design and Develop with Adobe Dreamweaver CS3
I’ve been using Dreamweaver since it has belonged to Macromedia (remember Macromedia?) as a coder, not a designer.   However, I’m starting to see the positives of the “design features” of Dreamweaver.

The CS3 version of Dreamweaver heavily emphasizes CSS as the way to design your website.   Everything is CSS related, they really don’t want you to use TABLES anymore, which makes sense, not only from a “standards” basis, but also from a “SEO” perspective.

The CSS Styles panel has been redesigned and improved to better see the exact CSS that is being used for each element in your page.

There is a library tab where you can drag assets from to your page.

The reality, though, I find the “design” side of Dreamweaver as a great way to create simple static sites, however, if you need to code for it, you need to switch to “Coder’s View”, which, by the way, it’s great.

I use the coder view for all of my ColdFusion MX 7 development and I love it.   You can see your CFC’s broken down, you can change attributes of tags, plus a host of other things.

One cool feature is the ability to check your page against a variety of other browsers (even if you don’t have them installed on your system).   You can even turn off certain “versions of browsers” by un-checking them in the “Check Page” pull down menu under “settings”.

The other big thing in Dreamweaver is the incorporation of the Spry Framework, which is a set of javascript libraries based on AJAX that allow you to easily create components that update data on the fly without page refresh.  Pretty cool stuff.

It would be nice if they added any “SEO” tools and/or features into Dreamweaver, but they didn’t.  Imagine having an “SEO Checker” tool or a META data tool to help us in our eMarketing efforts within Dreamweaver.   Maybe in CS4 Adobe?

Adobe Lightroom 201
I love this program.  I’ve been using it since it has been a public beta and it only got better once they released it.  This class was a more advanced class covering the develop module in Lightroom including white balancing, the tone graph, Saturation and Vibrance, etc.

The presenter said that Adobe Bridge CS3 would be able to see the changes made in Lightroom without exporting the image.  That is pretty cool. However, after trying this out, this was not the case.  It only saw the “original” photograph without any changes.  Maybe he meant Bridge would see the changes after I export the photograph with the changes in Lightroom, but if he did mean that, that’s pretty lame, nothing impressive.

One thing I did find interesting and didn’t know is that each picture has its own history, so one image’s history does not override the other history.  Pretty neat compared to Photoshop where the history is for the session you are working in.  The other neat thing is that even if you close down the application, the history remains for all images.  That’s awesome.  I’m assuming that history is part of the meta data and saved in the XML file for the image.

HP used the last 10 minutes of the seminar to talk about printing from Photoshop Lightroom to HP printers.  Pretty interesting (and it tied real well to my future purchase of the HP Photosmart B9180.)

Adobe Acrobat Professional for Photographers
I never knew how much you can do with Acrobat.  I always think of Acrobat as a form processor.   Oh no….there is so much more to it.   Here are some ideas (from the class) of how to use Acrobat Professional for Photographers.

You can “export” any photograph in Photoshop as a “PDF”.  You can select a variety of presets including “low quality”, “high quality print version” or even a “protected version”. 

In Acrobat, if you click on CTRL+D, you get the document properties which show you where the image was created in.

Acrobat cannot ingest PSD (or multi-layer) files and/or raw files.  It will accept just about any other type of “flat files”.

You can also create PDF slide shows through Bridge by selecting your images and then going to Tools–>Photoshop and clicking on “PDF Slide Show”.

You can add music and buttons to PDF documents to create cool slides.

You can easily protect your acrobat document by adding password protection to the document.

Other “Stuff”
This show was great, not only because I got to learn about the entire Adobe CS3 product line, but I made some great contacts and got to see some great products (Adobe Partners) that will improve my interactive media development workflow.

1. Contacts – I met a lot of people.  From designers to developers to video people to photographers to print people.   They were all there and they were all awesome!  Got some good contacts and told as many people as I could about The Digital Media Dude! ;-)
2. WACOM – The WACOM Intuous 3 6×11 tablet is really cool.  I think I can be more productive and creative using this tablet both in Photoshop and Lightroom, heck, even in my editing with Premiere Pro and Final Cut and I can see this being great for Apple Color.  The 6×11 widescreen is designed for a “widescreen” monitor or 2 monitor setting.  The tablet is pressure sensitive and only costs $349.  Not a bad deal!
3. I1Display LT – I never understood how those little electronic gadgets work that you put in front of your monitor and it helps you calibrate the monitor.   I still don’t get how it works, but after watching a demo, it does a great job making your monitor look great.  They calibrated a MacBook Pro and even though I thought the screen looked great, after the calibration, it looked awesome.   I can see needing this to calibrate all my monitors, especially now that I’m starting to use Apple Color for color correction.  The cost?  Only $179 retail.  Street price is sure to be lower.
4. HP Photosmart B9180 – This is an incredible printer.  I saw some of the prints it made and I could not believe my eyes (same reaction from the people around me in the show).   The color saturation was fantastic; the eye lashes of a girl in a photograph that was printed was so clear that it blew my mind.   And speaking of blowing my mind, the cost of this printer?  $699 retail, street price sure to be much lower.  Not too shabby.  It uses 8 ink cartridges. Pretty good stuff.  I’m thinking of purchasing one in the future.

Well, that was it for the Adobe CS3 conference.  Two awesome days of networking, learning and just getting excited about the technology.

Until the next blog entry!

Cheers!
- Marcelo Lewin
The Digital Media Dude