I can’t believe that just a few short weeks ago I was at MAX Japan, and late yesterday afternoon I received a notice that it’s time to start planning for MAX 2009 in Los Angeles this fall. But it’s true. This year’s annual gathering of the Adobe faithful will occur from October 4th – 7th, 2009. If you are interested in speaking – or simply have a great idea for a session or lab, I’d encourage you to submit your suggestions. You’ll need to hurry though, as all submissions must be posted by April 15th.

Here’s the relevant links:
Post a Session or Session idea
Post a Lab or Lab idea

Be sure to visit the official Adobe MAX 2009 site to stay up to date with all the news. See you at MAX 2009! Cheers!

Only two short days ago, I awoke to find 30 or so Twitter notifications about new followers. This surprised me because I usually get 5 or 6 new followers on any given day. I thought this was a bit unusual, however my wonderment was short-lived. It turns out, my fellow Adobe Evangelist Serge Jespers – from the Platform Evangelism team, had taken it upon himself to compile a list of every (known) Twitterer at Adobe.

I can’t even begin to imagine how much sweat this must have cost Serge, but I am grateful to him – as I didn’t even know many of these folks were on Twitter! Amazing!

If I had a dime for every time someone has asked me “what’s new in [product name goes here]“, well, you know the old saying… And while there is a ton of information on Adobe.com about Creative Suite 4, it seems that a lot of existing users of Adobe products rarely take the time to explore the site to find the information. Additionally, it’s sometimes even more difficult to read a bulletpoint and truly understand what that could potentially mean to your workflow in terms of productivity increases.

To help illustrate the productivity advantages in CS4, Adobe went out and hired a consultant to actually “clock” the differences between CS3 and CS4. Being skeptical myself by nature, I was truly impressed by some of the results. I mean, I work with CS4 everyday, and I “feel” the difference – but actually seeing the hard data was eye-opening. As a result, the Creative Solutions Evangelism team has created a series of videos to highlight some of these specific “time savings” or “productivity increases”.

The first videos are up as of today – and more will be following over the next month and a half or so. We hope you’ll check them out:

• Everyday Timesavers: Design
• Everyday Timesavers: Web
• Everyday Timesavers: Video
• Everyday Timesavers: Photography

On a related note, I’m wondering what you value when making a software purchasing decision. Is information on a web site important? Is it more important that the information is from an independent, 3rd party resource? Do you go to conferences? Is a live, in-person seminar important? I’d love to hear from you, so comment away! Cheers!