I spent the better part of the week down in Los Angeles for Adobe Max 2018. It was my second time going to Max and it was an overwhelming, inspirtional experience. In the ten years since I had been there last, it has transformed into this giant, juggernaut of a conference. It was a great experience and covered a host of things that are relevant to what I do. I'll follow up on this more and post some photos as time allows ...

Another year at DS, in PDX, which reinforced a number of trends that we've been dealing with the marketing site for DAT.  Good to see folks again and catch up ...

Digital Summit 2017 in PDX - met up with some old friends and found some good technical insight into SEO best practices and starting to get interested in Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) ...

I made a point to attend the Adobe Creative Cloud event in Portland at the wonderfully hip EcoTrust auditorium in the Pearl District near downtown. I try to make events sponsored by the various Portland Adobe User Groups when I can. This time, I was curious to see more of the new work-flows and approaches that Adobe is promoting in the Creative Cloud 2014 release. In particular, I wanted to see if they were addressing some of of the gaps that have appeared with the demise of staple tools Like Fireworks CS6. While there wasn’t a lot of specifics regarding the tools gap, they did demonstrate a number of things that differed from the Adobe keynote last month ...

I went to the June AEPDX/3DPDX user group meeting in Portland recently. It was a good chance for some folks from Adobe and Maxon to show off the latest features of After Effects CC and Cinema4d Lite via the Cinemaware plugin. I have to say the new features are definitely pushing the product in the right direction. I think the tighter integration with Cinema4d is a good thing and will be looking to see how it evolves. The improvements to the warp stabilizer, including the new reverse stabilize feature is insanely great. I’ll be looking to do some some tests over the summer with that ...

I went to Webvisions PDX 2013 this year. This is the third year in a row I’ve been to Webvisions at the Portland Convention Center. It’s a good show but you can tell it’s struggling a bit to find it’s comfort zone. I usually attend the Web-related workshops and sessions. This year I did two workshops on CSS3 UI Design and CSS3 Animation. I really found Rachel Nabor’s CSS3 Workshop and session to be pretty enlightening but also got me thinking about ways in which to apply this fairly bleeding edge tech. The obvious downsides to CSS3 animation is that there are very few tools to animate with so it’s mostly code driven, which for longer animations can be awkward ...

There were some good sessions at Webvisions 2012 this year in Portland, OR. I had a busy schedule, so I was not able to attend the full second day. The highlights for me this year were the HTML5 game design workshop using ImpactJS and the ILM talk with Jeff White. I really liked seeing the visual progression of the Avengers and how large of a data flow multiple teams were working on. Other great moments were the opening remarks by Baratunde Thurston. I’ve heard Baratunde before on Leo Leporte’s TWiT network, which is one of my favorite places for podcasts. He is a great and entertaining speaker. There was also a good talk on building web applications with web standards ...

Webvisions 2011 was an interesting conference. I enjoyed the discussion by the producers of Portlandia ...

The Thug team and I attended the UIE Roadshow session in Portland this year. Being a UX type group of designers and new media thinkers we thought it would be right up our alley. And it was, but I couldn't help but feel like I already knew a large number of the concepts discussed. Unfortunately, I had to cut out a bit early to make it back for a client meeting, but it was great to spend most of the day at the session and workshop. We also all went out for some tasty Chinese food for lunch ...

Some of my favorite sessions over the past few days have been Von Glitschka’s illustrator/photoshop session and hearing about the evolution of a brand with the Toki Doki founder. All in all, this has been a great experience and really helps focus my energy for the coming year ...

The day 2 presentation was great and it was fun to see some of the lighter applications of the Flash technology including running a C++ app inside of Flash ...

Adobe Max 2008 is great! I am definitely digging the scope of this and the keynote was simply awesome! Was really good to hear some of the vision behind the Flash platform and how Adobe technology will be key for building new interactive experiences. I saw a lot of their material poised Flash to address some of the particular shortfalls that critics say that MS Silverlight provides. Also some of the tech demos dovetail into some of the work that I have been working on with various clients over the past few years. Very cool and definitely validating ...