Andrew Shorten

Yes, next week I’ll be giving away full conference passes to MAX Europe here on my blog - in addition, one winner will also get their flights and hotel accommodation paid for!

First things first - this competition will be open to UK and Irish residents only. Sorry if that excludes you - there are some other competitions running elsewhere in Europe so keep an eye out for those.

Here’s how it is going to work:

• Each day next week I’ll post a link to a site where you will need to answer a question and provide your contact details.
• Each day one winner will be randomly selected
• If you win on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday you will win a full conference pass AND your choice of either a copy of Flex Builder or a copy of Flash CS3.
• If you win on Friday you will receive a full conference pass, return economy flights and accommodation at one of the designated MAX hotels.
• Each daily winner will be announced on my blog the following day

This is a summary of how the competition will work - full competition rules and conditions will be posted next Monday.

Make sure you check my blog each day next week for the question and the chance to WIN

Here is a BIG reason to get yourself to MAX Europe - as part of the Keynote you’ll get to see for yourself what “Thermo” is.

Thermo is one of the coolest and most important projects underway here and it made me very, very happy that I had rejoined Adobe when I learnt about what Mark Anders and the product team were doing.

The quality of the user experiences we are going to be able to create and the way in which designers and creative developers can contribute to the creation of Rich Internet Applications is going to change a whole lot with Thermo. Come and see for yourself at MAX in Barcelona

More about Thermo from Mark Anders and Ryan Stewart and here is the job posting which started the discussion on Thermo.

In addition to the Adobe people I mentioned that are coming out to Barcelona, there will also be a some well known names from the Flash/Web/Design/Development community speaking at MAX Europe in a series of “Inspire” sessions.

Each of these sessions will provide an opportunity to learn from and be inspired by individuals who have made a significant contribution to our community.

We’re still working on the details for some additional sessions, but we’ve already announced that Grant Skinner, Aral Balkan, Erik Natzke, Sean Corfield, Owen van Dijk, Rick Treitman, Dr Woohoo, Mario Klingemann and Carlo Blatz will be presenting.

Session descriptions are listed on the MAX Europe website (page search for ‘INSPIRE’), but I’ve highlighted the titles of each session below:

• Grant Skinner - 50 Reasons AS3 Rocks
• Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge; The Art of Playing
• Sean Corfield - Design Patterns and ColdFusion
• Owen van Dijk - Interactive Video
• Rick Treitman - Making Buzzword
• Aral Balkan - Rediscovering Fun
• Dr Woohoo - SWF Panels in CS3
• Mario Klingemann - The Blind Sketchmaker - Exploring evolutionary and generative art with Flash
• Carlo Blatz - Flash vs AJAX - The best of both worlds

I hope you can be in Barcelona to see these ‘Inspire’ sessions in person

Seb Lee-Delisle, a self proclaimed Flash ambassador for Brighton (from his blog) has a rather nice write-up of Microsoft’s MIX conference which he was invited to attend last week. You can read his two part summary here and here.

Meanwhile, Tim Anderson, a UK-based journalist who has been tracking both Microsoft’s and Adobe’s RIA-related developments has an article on SilverLight at MIX 07 and a write-up comparing SilverLight and Flex on his blog.

Whilst Microsoft has desires to interact with the design community, both Tim and Seb noted that the majority of attendees (90%+ as far as I could see) were existing .NET developers, many of whom were eager to learn more about SilverLight 1.1 and RIA. It’s great to see so much interest in improving user experiences and the development of Rich Internet Applications from this community - it’s a shame however that they’ll be waiting until the tail-end of 2008 or sometime in 2009 (allowing for some penetration of the SilverLight 1.1 runtime) before they can deliver their applications when they could be doing it today using Flex.

In a series of posts over the next couple of weeks I’m going to highlight some of the reasons why you should be attending MAX Europe in Barcelona from October 15 -18th.

In this the first post, I’d like to highlight some of my colleagues at Adobe who will be coming to speak at the first ever MAX Europe event.

With dozens of Adobe speakers flying in from San Francisco and San Jose, alongside those based in Europe, MAX Europe will provide a great opportunity to see members of the evangelism and product teams present, for you to ask questions at the ‘Meet the Teams’ evening and interact during the ‘Birds of a Feather’ sessions.

I can’t name everyone here, so I’ll highlight some people who I’m sure you’ll recognise:

From the Platform Evangelism team: Mike Downey, Ben Forta, Kevin Hoyt, Duane Nickull, Danny Dura and Ted Patrick.

From the Product teams: Lori DeFurio (Acrobat), Bill Perry (Mobile), Greg Rewis (CS3), Matt Chotin (Flex), Ely Greenfield (Flex), Kevin Towes (FMS), Jen Taylor (Flash) and Adrian Ludwig (AIR).

From Adobe Consulting: Alistair McCleod, Steven Webster, Ty Lettau and Andrew Lin.

We’re all ears for feedback on our current products and future plans and so I know the people listed above will be looking forward to engaging one to one with you at MAX Europe.

Reminder: Register by 14th September 2007 using the code ECM297 and the price is 500 euros (+ 16% tax).