Today's Conference Events.
About half the attendees to the conference cleared out today, so all sessions were pretty empty. My names for them is as follows (mouse-over the links below for real names):
I attended the Photoshop one because the first presenter (Myke Ninness from Microsoft) was awesome when I saw him yesterday. This guy has probably one of the best jobs in the world. I can tell by searching his name on Google that he does conferences a LOT. He didn't have a website or a weblog (that I know of), but he definitely knows a lot about Photoshop, Flash and Livemotion. And best of all, he works at M$ and gets to do demos on a Mac! I got a ton out of his presentation and was inspired to become a Photoshop expert. As we all know, this is not possible unless I have a project to use it. I could go home and read 10 Photoshop books, do all the tutorials, and become a Photoshop guru (in my own mind at least) but I'd lose it all in two weeks if I wasn't applying it. So I have a project. I have a daughter that's scheduled to enter the world in early November, so lots of pictures of her (and video) will become my new found hobby. I'll use Photoshop, iMovie, QuickTime and Flash to publish her childhood to the rest of my family via the web. I'll keep you posted.
The second Photoshop presenter was Chris McCormack, who also had lots of good tips and tricks. Unfortunately, his website has some issues in Mozilla on my Mac (Mozilla 1.1, OS X 10.2). You probably get that fixed, Chris.
I checked out the XHTML and MX sessions late afternoon and both were pretty basic, so I ended the day with a session on Flash by Philip Kerman. This guy appears to do a lot of these conferences and has lots of good content, but he's kind of a dry speaker. He seems to have written a lot of Flash books though and he obviously knows what he is talking about. My advice: work some humor into your preso's and you'll be really blowing people away. That's probably the best advice I can give all these speakers - put more humor in your sessions and make it fun for listeners. That's what Myke did and it sure made it more interesting and enjoyable.
Overall, I thought the conference was great and I think I learned enough to make it work my while. My current client will benefit from my new found SMIL knowledge (still to be discovered) and some client-side table sorting.
I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't blown away like I was two years ago when I attended Web Design World 2000 in Denver. But at that time, I didn't know as much as I do know, and my lack of new knowledge gained is a kind of weird validation that I'm catching up to the web. Also, I'm sure all the speakers could teach me a lot more if they weren't required to appeal to the mass audience. In hopes of learning more from these experts, I'll be posting a list of their weblogs (if available) on this site tomorrow.