The first ever MAX event in Europe has come to a close, with pretty much everyone I spoke to giving great feedback as to the success of the event in Barcelona. Blogging throughout the conference proved difficult (there was just so much going on) so instead I thought I’d summarise what MAX Europe was for me now that it’s all over.
So, for me, MAX was… spending a day with 20 or so representatives from interactive agencies from across Europe, watching a great MAX keynote, being interviewed for the BBC’s Digital Planet programme on the World Service (and podcast) talking about AIR, eating too many McDonalds (I found them to provide a good pre-speaking burst of energy, but maybe not so good for the diet), debating with some of the UK journalists about ‘what exactly is a runtime’ over drinks, delivering sessions on Designer/Developer workflow and building AIR applications using Dreamweaver & Spry (those who know me will be surprised by the topic selection allocation, but I now have new-found respect for Spry – check it out on Labs!), giving press and analyst interviews on AIR, Flex and RIA, walking way too far to get to a restaurant (thanks to Robin Charney who believed the concierge that it was a 10 minute walk and refused to get a taxi, an hour later we were still walking), meeting with people that I have only ever seen on Twitter, Facebook and email, listening to the buzz around Thermo, watching the Sneak Peeks (and being very impressed with some cool image stretching demos), catching up with Ben Forta, Mike Downey, Mark Anders, Serge Jespers, Waldo Smeets, Enrique Duvos and other Adobeans, mingling with people in the Community Pavilion, getting stressed by last minute changes to the Birds of a Feather sessions and room locations (it was all OK in the end), helping Andy Hood from AKQA out of a laptop issue in his session, being impressed with the conference wi-fi network (it worked), being stopped from taking two MAX mugs home (my Adobe badge didn’t wash with the security guard and it’s one per person) and attending the MAX Royale official party. Boy, am I glad that I came back to Adobe… MAX was a busy but fantastic three days.
From an organisation perspective I think things ran really smoothly (it felt like there had been a MAX in Europe for years) – I’ve heard there were a couple of presenters who had technical setup issues and I hope we can improve on that in years to come, but for my sessions everything worked OK.
It really was great to see 1200 designers and developers from across Europe at this event and to really feel the momentum that is building around Flex and AIR here. If you attended MAX and have got some feedback on what went well and what you’d like to see us do different next time please leave a comment or contact me direct.
I look forward to seeing you at next year’s MAX Europe in…. (to be announced 🙂 ).
Andrew Shorten's Blog 
It was NOT an hour! A little fresh air is a good thing!
On Monday, the rooms (at least the smaller rooms) were too cold, AC was turned on way too much. It was better on Tue and Wed.
Also, the BOF session times were not very well advertised. I only saw them projected way back in the community pavilion (among bunch of other info, and thus easy to miss).
Other than that, excellent conference!
And a tip, next year try to put something unique in the keynotes/sneak peeks for European conference. Then people who follow MXNA religiously will have something new to discover as well 🙂