Adobe Live has drawn to a close after two days, 4,500 attendees and over 150 seminars, workshops and lectures centred on creative technology.
The majority of the event was held at the at the Business Design Centre in Islington. It was - as expected - devoted to Adobe's new Creative Suite 3 applications, including the rejuvenated applications Photoshop CS3, Illustrator CS3, Dreamweaver and Flash CS3. There was also a healthy amount of developer action and demonstrations using Adobe's newest frameworks, Apollo and Flex 3.
Photoshop and Illustrator, together with Dreamweaver CS3 featured heavily in the workshops' area. Adobe's evangelists ran through each application's new features and tool sets.
The non-Creative Suite 3 presentations were led by the conferences' guest speakers and media partners. They included talks and seminars by award-winning designers Neville Brody, film-maker and Flash-guru Hillman Curtis, and interactive designer Brendan Dawes. Illustrators Jon Burgerman and design writer and lecturer Lawrence Zeegan also spoke.
"We've had a superb turnout over the two days of Adobe Live," commented Adobe's John Cunningham, Business Development Manager. "Obviously the guest speakers are a big crowd puller, but what's great to hear is that for so many of the attendees, this is their second or third Adobe Live conference - the event has really developed in terms of stature and reputation."
Adobe's new video and audio releases were also on heavy rotation. Production Premium CS3 - the audio-video editing side of the Creative Suite 3 updates - received a healthy dose of attention. Workshops for Premiere CS3, Adobe's new video editor, and for After Effects CS3 - the video world's Photoshop - were each packed out. And Hillman Curtis' talk on his web-video work was especially well-attended.
Subtle presence
Elsewhere Apple's presence was subtle but evident in the array of Macs on offer for the tutorial workshops. Unlike other hardware manufacturers keen to tie-in with Adobe's CS3, Apple didn't have a stall within the conference hall. But its presence as a media partner and sponsor of the show saw every demo, tutorial and talk happening on a Mac.
In the conference centres hands-on training area, 30 of Apple's 24-inch iMacs were available for attendees to follow along on. Particularly popular were Adobe's latest internet technologies. As well as Dreamweaver and Flash CS3, Adobe debuted its latest server-side technologies with new versions of Cold-Fusion and its Flex 3 framework.
A handful of hardware manufacturers were also present on the conference hall floor. These included graphics tablet manufacturers Wacom and 3Dconnexions SpaceNavigator, Nikon and printer manufacturers HP and Epson.
The first day of the conference saw Adobe introduce its inaugural developers session where it debuted Apollo - Adobe's next generation rich internet application (RIA) framework.
The demo showed how Apollo applications can be built via extensions that are due to be added to Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3 and the Flex framework. Adobe proudly showed off the Dreamweaver CS3 extension for Apollo which used XHTTML, CSS and Javascript to produce an Apollo driven application.
Apollo is currently in alpha. But Adobe hinted a full beta will be deployed soon via Adobe Labs , with version 1.0 is expected to be deployed in Q4 2007.
Tom Dennis
