I attended Macromedia's worldwide user group meeting this afternoon (The 2:00pm Eastern Time one) in Philadelphia, with PACFUG. Of course, we showed up fashionably late. Not on purpose, but we missed an exit on the highway. Whoever made Route 320 exit 330 needs their head examined. Either that, or maybe we should just pay more attention to signs when driving.
Anyway, the meeting itself was pretty neat. They used Breeze live to connect everyone and give the presentation. We saw the Macromedia's computer screen as they were giving live demos of the new MX 2004 product line. With the chat capability we were able to ask questions in real time and have people give us the answers via the speakers hooked up to our local computer.
All in all, it was a good experience. There were a few technical difficulties (lost audio sometimes, sometimes we lost the screen feed as well), but I'd say it was a success at least for our local group.
I didn't win the copy of Studio MX 2004 that was raffled off, or the one year subscription to the Community MX website, but I did have fun meeting and interacting.
It would've been nice to be able to see the presenters with video, and allow them to see us with video, but we were already sucking up so much bandwidth with just audio, text and screen images that asking for video as well would've put too much pressure on the servers.
A link was also shared to a "beta" site that Macromedia has made with the MX 2004 line. I won't divuldge the link location - it will be available to the public in the near future... but it's nice to see that the company uses their tools just like the community would.
Thank you Macromedia for involving the community like this. It's great using products from a company that cares about it's end users and values their opinions and feedback.
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