When I arrived, I found the registration process to be more than a bit chaotic and disorganized. I was told my press credentials were on the 4th floor. The people on the 4th-floor then promptly sent me back to the lobby, who told me I would need to go to the 4th floor. After 30-minutes, or so, we finally got that a bit straigtened out.

When I opened the Welcome Package, I found a copy of Layers Magazine (a publication dedicated primarity to Adobe), a copy of Pocket PC Magazine, and a copy of Photoshop User (again for Adobe). But NO copy of MXDJ, which does report about Flash (this is the FLASH Foward Conference). I wish my parent publishing firm, Sys-con, had a sales department that stayed on top of this more. I can only hope we will be better represented at MAX convention (ever feel like you are fighting a losing cause?).

I got into Brenden Hall's talk about ActionScript As A Toolbox. I had to double check myself to make sure I wasn't hearing wrong. If we follow Mr. Hall's advice, we should all move back to Flash 5. After some superficial comments about loops and variable names ("you should use a for loop instead of a while loop". Of course he never spoke about the other loops and when to use those) he gave us this advice:

Do not use OOP
Put all of your code in Frame 1 of the main timeline
Do not put code in Button or Movie Clips
Do not use cutting-edge techniques

Of course later on he spoke about reusability. Didn't seem to phase him that the techniques he advocated severly limits reusability.

I am outraged that a convention that purports itself to be devoted to the state-of-the-art Flash usage, would put something like this on.

About half-way through I had had enough and wandered over to the Flash Video Workshop by Robert Reinhardt. For many there, some of the Video technology and terminology was quite new. I thought Robert gave and EXCELLENT presentation on the subject and delivered a lot of new ideas. For me, it was the highlight of the morning.

I will be on later with more news.