Wow, what a great turnout in Helsinki for our seminar series. The Finns turned out en masse for our special VIP event. The sneak peek of “Thermo” really got them all excited – thanks, Mike for one-up’ing Jason and I again! The seminar day itself was full of fun as well – albeit, some of the attendees decided to stay home instead of braving the cold, blowing sleet and rain. But for those that did turn up, we packed their brains with tons of interesting ideas, tips and techniques.

The best part of the seminar (for us internally) was that we finally solved a puzzling “bug” in Dreamweaver CS3. Stephanie had been plagued on stage by some really weird behavior when copying and pasting between Photoshop and Dreamweaver. Her images would randomly not appear on the page, or even replace the previously pasted image when she had clearly given the image a new name. I finally solved the problem when I realized that the issue occurred when she was moving internal CSS rules to an external sheet. Even though she gave the sheet a name of “styles.css”, Dreamweaver created the new sheet as “untitled.css”.

The issue is with the dialog “update” in Leopard. Unless you actually click into the dialog to select a folder, the name you choose is not actually applied to the file. Stephanie had simply been giving the file a name and hitting OK. So, if you’re seeing this problem, click into the dialog to change to another folder and then back to the one you really want.

Of course after the seminar, there was only one choice for dinner… well, actually, there are two choices for great dinners in Helsinki. (My apologies to my Finnish readers… there are many, many great Finnish restaurants, but since I get to Finland only 2-3 times a year, I like to visit my favorites!) Anyone who loves a good steak should definitely visit the Grill It restaurant in the Radisson SAS Royal hotel. They make simply the best steak that you can get on the European continent. And if you don’t believe me, check out Jason’s opinion.

The other insider tip for a visit to Helsinki is the Garlic Restaurant. Every single item on the menu has garlic in it – from the drinks (Stef’s “Garlic Mary” or Mike’s “Garlic Beer”) to the garlic steak, pork tenderloin to the dessert (yes, there’s garlic ice cream) or the garlic coffee. This is an amazing experience from start to finish… IF you’re a garlic fan.

The evening concluded with a visit to what we had “hoped” was a real ice bar experience, since we had “forgotten” to head for the ice bar in Stockholm (don’t even ask how we “forgot” since it is literally around the corner from our regular hotel). Unfortunately, the Helsinki ice bar is not nearly what the Swedish version is… instead of a large, hopping bar with good music, we were greated with a converted meat locker – with a maximum of 12 people allowed in the “room”. It was still fun – but I’m not sure the $14 Apple Martini was really worth it. Hmmm…


At any rate, Helsinki, you’ve once again been fabulous hosts.

Well, week one of the Adobe Nordic Tour is now behind us. Jason Levine, Mike Downey, Serge Jespers, Stephanie Sullivan and I had some great crowds in Stockholm and Copenhagen for the “Unlocking Modern Web Workflows” and “To the Web, the Desktop and Beyond” seminars. Over 400 people turned up for each of the seminars. The audiences were really fun and engaged, and we had some great comments and questions during the breaks.

It’s always fun to see that web crowds around the world are all struggling with the same issues and challenges – and this is especially true within the area of CSS. Stephanie did a great job taking the audience through the use of the new CSS starter layouts in Dreamweaver CS3. It’s rather amazing to me that there are still people who’ve not experimented them – but we definitely know that there are 800 new believers that will be using them.


One of the other highlights that got a lot of interest was the recently updated Spry Framework for AJAX – version 1.6. I’ve really been enjoying showing off this major step forward for Adobe’s AJAX support – no more getting beaten up at “standards” conferences when I show it. The best part is it’s ability to use HTML recordsets and unobtrusive Javascript! (And of course, there’s a whole chapter dedicated to using Spry in the upcoming book!)

This week we’ll be in Helsinki and Oslo – so if you’re in the area, we’d love to see you.

My apologies to all of the hotels in the world that really make an effort – however, tonight, I have suffered through 4 hours of net access ping-pong at the JW Marriott in San Francisco. You, Mr. Marriott, advertise wireless access in every room, and while I myself have had my wireless router go bonkers on occasion, a simple reset has corrected the problem. Why is it then that a modern hotel (and cudos to the JW Marriott – nice rooms, comfortable beds, central location, and really nice bathrooms with separate shower stalls) can’t figure out how to keep a wireless network up and running? When calling to the front desk, I was told on two occasions that they have not heard of any problems – the next call, however, routed me to their (outsourced) IT desk. A few moments later, it appeared to have solved the problem – only it was short lived. Finally at midnight, I’m surfing again – albeit I can’t get email from any of my Mac’s email programs – corporate email (via VMWare Fusion) or simple Apple Mail. Sigh… All the while, the internet connection appears to be once again stable. Hmm… </rant>