My first year at Adobe MAX and it was awesome! Great vibe from everyone, great excitement, and overall great atmosphere. I didn’t know what to expect, I had no idea Adobe goes all out like that, thank you so much for doing all this for the fans and users!

The staff was very informative, and ready to help you out when you had questions or got lost on your way to the next lab. The sessions were very casual and informative, even though a couple seemed somewhat basic, I was hoping to get more in depth in some of the labs for Catalyst for example, but being such a new product, having introductory sessions makes sense. I did learn some neat tricks that I didn’t know though, so in the end I was satisfied.

Some of the coolest stuff was during Sneak Peeks, some will make it to the market some will not. The Adobe Rome project really stole the show though, unbelievable what can be accomplished with actionscript, 200k lines of code to be exact, still once you see what it can do you will be surprised it only took that 200k. Think Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks combined, with a slick and minimalist UI design that removes any unused clutter from the workspace, and you have Adobe ROME. I really can’t see this project ever making it out to market though since it would really cut into Adobe’s profits Buying ROME would mean no need to buy the full suite anymore. Anyways, below is a video of it in action!

Dan Goldman also showed a very cool “content aware” spot healing brush that just makes removing things from photos so quick and easy its unbelievable, that tool I am sure is being shipped with CS5. Photoshop has a history of updating their favorite cloning and healing brushes in every version of Photoshop. My wife will be so excited when this comes out, it will make her post photography work so much faster. Check out my HD video below.

Another cool sneak was the smart paste in Dreamweaver, being able to just copy and paste flash files, spread sheets, images, and videos straight into your html files, WTF!? Video below.

Also, on the next video Chewbacca displays some awesome physics in flash, wow!

Here is a link to the Adobe Max photo stream on flickr, enjoy!