Up until recently, I wasn't really fully sure of what I could accomplish via Adobe's desktop sharing application - ConnectNow. I had thought that it was a pay-per-use option only. Boy was I wrong. Turns out it is FREE for up to 3 users. At first glance you might think - that's not really a whole lot of people. But keep in mind many times clients will be meeting in a conference room, sharing a connection. In situations like that, 3 users is all you need.

From the Adobe website:

"The Adobe Community Experts Program is a community based program made up of Adobe customers who share their product expertise with the world-wide Adobe community. The Adobe Community Experts' mission is to provide high caliber peer-to-peer communication educating and improving the product skills of Adobe customers worldwide."

We received great feedback regarding the awesome presentation by Alan Musselman of Adobe this past Saturday. Continuing on that theme, here is a great tutorial by Rodger Fuller on quickly mocking up a website in Fireworks.

This tutorial is actually a recorded session from Adobe MAX this past November. Very impressive stuff and shows you what you can do with this powerful tool that sometimes gets overshadowed (no pun intended) by big brother Photoshop:

http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f15383v1042

Wow. This tutorial from Tom Green is fantastic. Create photo albums without having to know any code. Very slick interfaces (even can export to DW or Flash). Extremely easy to create. Make sure you check it out.

 Don't forget - we have Alan Musselman from Adobe as guest speaker this Saturday on Fireworks CS4!

 http://www.layersmagazine.com/image-slide-show-in-adobe-fireworks.html

While not exactly an Adobe-based topic, I thought this was slick enough to warrant a post on. Tracking Santa's progress on Christmas Eve on your Mobile Phone using North American Aerospace Defense Command (aka NORAD) and Google Maps.

http://www.noradsanta.org/en/trackmobile.html

Just as Chris noted in his blog about the Dallas Flex User Group establishing an Adobe Group presence, so has your DFW AUG. Check us out here:

http://groups.adobe.com/groups/b2a9af8306/summary

The adobe groups presence gives us more of an opportunity to be known not just throughout the metroplex, but throughout the globe in that many times folks come to the Adobe.com site looking for more information. The DFWAUG adobe groups pages allow us to grab a wider audience and also to point them to the "portal that Gene built" here at dfwaug.net

Don't get me wrong - I think Photoshop is a heck of a tool and the "Mother of all Image Editing Tools", but I think Fireworks does a more than adequate job as well. I don't think it gets near the attention it deserves, and it is why I'm looking forward to next month's presentation with Alan Musselman on Fireworks CS4. 

Discovered this article regarding Adobe Zoetrope. It is currently under development, but is software which allows you to see past content on web pages, compare zones of a particular website, or compare multiple website content history.

Click on this link to see a 5-minute video demo. Very slick:
http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=183

"This demo illustrates our research to bring interactivity to video editing: Our system analyzes videos using computer vision techniques, enabling interactive annotation, browsing, and even drag-and-drop composition of new still images using video footage."

"This is a joint research project of Adobe and the University of Washington."

http://vimeo.com/2345579

...

Well, day 4 has come and gone and while I'm sad to see MAX over, it sure is nice to be back home. Today I had some good sessions, including: Mobile Web Development workflow, Advanced
Exporting in Fireworks (.pdf and flex files), Deep Dive in Photoshop CS4, and Video Production for the web using OnLocation, Premiere Pro and After Effects.