First thing I am sure you are wondering is, “Where did part 2 of Day 1 go”? Well soon after the sessions I had to leave the convention to work on some client requests, so was unable to attend a few of sessions I had registered for.

Once my work was done I met up with some friends and headed over to the “not so secret” Blackberry Mixer at the Grammy Museum. We were greeted by finger foods, alcohol and tons of time to network with other conference attendees fortunate to get a “Golden Ticket” for this event. About midway through the event Blackberry started having us line up to receive a “parting gift”. In this Blackberry gift bag was a Blackberry Torch and a voucher for a Blackberry Playbook when it comes out next year. Oh and both devices run Flash!

Here is a quick shot of the swag up to Day 1.

Motorola, Adobe, Blackberry and Martha Stewart. Which one of those would you think didn’t show up at the Adobe MAX Keynote? Well if you guessed none of them you’re right, yes, really. Martha Stewart was on stage at MAX showing off her companies digital publishing displayed on tablets with interactivity included.

I figured after seeing Martha Stewart we were in for a huge keynote, and boy was I right. Adobe announced and released a bunch of new technologies, libraries and tools. Included in that list was Adobe AIR 2.5, Flash Catalyst beta, Flash Builder beta, AIR for TV and a bunch of other really cool stuff.

The actual keynote stage and design was awesome, there was live coding and art before the keynote began which played into the CONNECT, DISCOVER, INSPIRE tagline of MAX. I am pretty sure the event was recorded so once a link is available I will post it.

I am in sessions at the moment so I can’t pull up too much specific information, but look out for a full blog post on the technologies later on. Apologies for the brief post, but I wanted to give my readers a heads up on new cool stuff!

Oh and what was Motorola doing at the MAX Keynote? Giving the “e-finger” to Apple and ending by every MAX attendee getting a FREE Droid 2. Its safe to assume they got a loud applause for that one.

If you missed my previous post about Adobe MAX Day 0, read it here.

So Day 0 (precon) is wrapping up. Today I had an all day User Group summit with Adobe so I can’t really speak about specifics, however I can say Adobe is an very interesting company. By interesting I mean they actually give a damn about their users and community. Many think that since Adobe is a publicly traded company they only care about one thing, but that simply isn’t true. Of course the majority of today was under NDA like much of what is told to UG members . At the end of the day what I have been given is a look into how Adobe helps in promoting User Groups, how to gain more members and most of all, how to make engaging sessions that teach the members.

All of what I have learned today will benefit the Boston Flash Platform User Group (BFPUG) of which I am co-manager of, simply because I have been inspired by the Adobe evangelists and other UG members to create awesome meetings. It was also very cool to meet familiar faces from previous conferences and learn they are also fellow User Group Managers and Co-Managers.

Now I can’t go into specific changes or cool things to come for the meetings, I can say it will be a fun road.

Oh and I also would like to mention two final points. One, LA is full of traffic 24/7 and two, Adobe MAX kicks ass, make sure you make at least once. Its worth all the expense and you make it back in time.

Stay tuned for more MAX updates as the week progresses.