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The following is my personal review of the MiniMAX 8 Conference in DC.

I have never been to a MiniMAX before, and the premise seems good enough.
Unfortunately, it did not go as well as planned.
I took a few notes, but I might have the sessions in the wrong order.
If I seem a bit too negative with my review I mean no offense, I am just trying to get this published ASAP so I can get some sleep to be rested for the conference tomorrow.

The Hyatt had our meeting room setup in a very hard to find location. Due to some kind of upgrades/work being done on some of the levels, we were not able to utilize the escalators, and had to find a hidden elevator to get down to the conference room.
We were about 10-15 minutes late for the 8pm start time. But when we got there, we realized that we hadn’t missed anything yet. It seems that through some communications error, there was no projector available for the presenters. It took almost 45 minutes for the projector issue to be resolved.

Adam Bell performed a skit parodying Al Gore; having him confuse ColdFusion with Cold Fusion. The premise was good, but I didn’t really like it.
That may not be their fault. The conference was already running almost an hour behind, it felt hot in the room (was it just me?), and I felt that there were parts of the dialog that kept dragging on and on and on for no real added comedic benefit.

Chaz Chumley gave a presentation on Dreamweaver. He demoed some of the new features in Dreamweaver CS4. I don’t use Dreamweaver and do no plan on updating anytime soon, so I really don’t have much to say about this session.

Adam Bell gave a demo/preso on Spry from a non-programmers point of view.
He demoed some features he came up with for various clients using Spry to do some JS GUI magic to give the clients the rich application experience they were looking for, without spending a lot of time trying to code all the functionality by hand.

Simon Free gave an excellent and entertaining presentation on the differences between Blaze DS and LifeCycle. He is an excellent public speaker and he was able to get the whole audience to participate. He very clearly outlined differences between the two competing technologies and the pros/cons of each.

Yancy Wharton gave a presentation on AIR. Frankly, this one almost put me to sleep. If I hadn’t played around with AIR before, I can see how some of the material would have been interesting, but it was a little to dry and basic for me…

Nathaniel Kelso gave us a demo/preso focusing on using Character Styles in Illustrator as well as a basic overview of what CSS does for you in a variety of places (HTML, FLEX, etc). I am completely ignorant of the Illustrator tool, and have no use for the product line, so this presentation did not mean much to me, other than giving me a little more knowledge as to what Illustrator is actually used for.

Simon Horwith, dispite his best efforts to the contrary, gave us a very funny presentation. It seems like the preso was a shorted version of what he will be covering in longer sessions throughout the CFUNITED conference. That by itself would be a good enough presentation… but Simon’s laptop had a mind of it’s own. It appeared as though the trackpad was locking up in the “scroll up” or scroll down” modes, but it affected different applications differently. In some windows he opened, it would scroll immediately to the bottom, in others, it would keep scrolling up and prevent you from scrolling down, and if that wasn’t enough, on some screens the text kept resizing bigger and bigger!
This is all stuff that I am sure falls under the category of “Guess you had to be there”, but it sure was funny when it was happening.

In a rare luckly moment I won a copy of O’Reillys ‘Flex 3 Cookbook’!
Seth won ‘Adobe AIR for JS Devs’.

I do want to end by saying that even though some of my comments seem to be a bit on the non-positive side above, I definitely appreciate the amount of work and dedication that it took to pull all this together. Thanks guys!