Looking Back at the Adobe MAX 2013 Conference

A week ago the Adobe MAX conference was just kicking off with it’s keynote. A lot of things were shared. The biggest buzz is that Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription offering will now be the only way to get the latest and greatest from the company as they are phasing out traditional software purchasing. A lot of people are up in arms about this. Some argue that the numbers don’t add up, and perhaps for those who preferred to skip a generation in software releases this will be true. I myself am not surprised nor am I put out by it.

As a consumer of the company’s products, it’s certainly important for me to feel like I’m being given a good deal, but as someone who is part of a larger industry by which Adobe is a huge contributor to, I think they are doing what is necessary to keep themselves relevant in a world of technology noise. This was also indicated by the showcasing of projects that the Adobe XD team is working on.

To summarize, my take on the Experience Design team at Adobe is a team that lives at the crossroads of innovation and user experience, where they prototype out ideas that reduce the friction associated with current user technologies. At the keynote we saw projects Mighty and Napoleon which venture into the world of hardware as a tablet stylus and a digital ruler with a few tricks up their sleeve. We also saw project Context, an interactive ecosystem of software and touch screens aimed at alleviating the pain associated with bringing multiple pieces of content together for collaborative review.

In all, I think a lot of the conference attendees, with their consumer hats on, were left with a little bit of a “WTF, where’s the rest of my consumer features?” aftertaste, but as Apple’s new leader undergoes innovation scrutiny and the spotlight is shining brightly on Google’s Glass, Adobe had to make a statement of relevancy, and they did a decent job of it.

The biggest disappointment of the conference for me was the complete shunning of Flash. Maybe I am biased as a Flash Developer, but I wasn’t expecting Flash to headline this thing as it has in the years past. The new web is certainly the topic of focus, and rightly so as it’s capabilities are quickly growing. But, not even an opening number from Flash! “Oh the irony” I cried as the conference intro video involving thousands of dynamic 3D polygons flew around the screen, which even if the creator didn’t use Flash at all to build it, they did themselves a disservice by not.

I’m gonna keep this Flash rant short, but here is why Flash still deserved, at the very least, a nod:

• There is still a huge Flash designer and developer community.
• Companies want interactive HTML5 content, but they aren’t getting it; Flash is still the only choice for a lot of situations.
• As a programming instructor, ActionScript 3.0 is the best language to teach beginning programmers from the ground up, especially for OOP concepts.
• AIR to Mobile packaging is phenomenal for quick app development across one or multiple platforms.
• Gaming, gaming, gaming. The last 18 months of what Flash has now proven itself worthy of building from a 3D and GPU accelerated point of view is astonishing.

Lastly, we saw a huge focus on the individual creator at the conference. These new creative cloud tools were shown off heavily from the perspective of the starving artist, or maybe the flourishing artist who only starves themselves because it’s artistic. This was really the biggest disconnect for me. While I am an individual creative at times, I am often looking to collaborate more with my team creatively, and I think the mark was missed from that perspective. Sure it’s great to freelance, or be a dark horse sitting in the corner of your imaginationarium churning out masterpieces, but I think Adobe got caught up in the romance of it all a little too much. Next year I hope to see a little more practicality mixed in to the presentations.

Aside from those few critiques about the keynote, I had a really successful MAX this year, meeting some really interesting and cool people and attending very engaging sessions and labs.