Well, my friends, we’re off again – this time to my (adopted) homeland of Germany, with a stop in Austria as well. This time out, I’ll be joined by Jason Levine and Rufus Deuchler, my colleagues in crime. During the course of a long (6 hour) seminar, we’ll show you all of our tips, tricks and workflow habits, taking you through all of the products in Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Master Collection. No product will be left out. So, whether you’re coming from a print background, web background or video background, if you’re faced with moving your media to one of these other venues, there’s something to learn. Wir freuen uns auf ein Wiedersehen in Muenchen, Frankfurt, Koeln, Hamburg und Wien. Anmeldung und andere wichtige Infos finden Sie auf Partner Web-site, Cancom. Bis bald!

The final stop on our Scandinavian tour was possibly the best one of them all – thank you, Oslo! Our special VIP event had the biggest turnout of the tour, with more than 70 web professionals showing up for a fun evening of software, sandwiches and drinks. One of the more interesting conversations was with a developer who is doing a lot of Flash work, but making it completely accessible – rock on!

The actual seminar day began in a bit of a hectic scramble as I had somehow set my alarm to the time we were supposed to meet in the lobby… hmm. A quick shower later, we were off to the venue, which fortunately was only five minutes away by foot. But it was definitely a COLD five minutes.

Amazingly, almost everyone who registered for the event turned up and we had a packed house of almost 300 attendees. (For those that don’t know, seminars usually have a 30-40% no-show rate.) The show went off perfectly, with no technical difficulties – and Stephanie remembered how to work around the Leopard/Dreamweaver bug. Jason was literally on fire, with some great new material.

It’s always sad when we come to the last tour stop. We’ve had a lot of fun, met some great new friends, and… hopefully… sold some software! After all, that’s what we’re here for.

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.