[thelist] Highlights/Lowlights from IW Chicago

[iibiz]

Spent the last three days at Internet World here in Chicago, and thought you
all might find the following interesting and/or amusing:

1 - Unfortunately, they had about half as many exhibitors as last year, and
horribly low attendance.  Debate is whether it's a reflection of the status
of technology here in Chicago, or poor promotion on the part of the
organizers.  Eh, in my humble opinion, probably a combination of both.

2 -  I attended several different seminars on web design, namely usability,
design, re-design, content management and "the BUSINESS side of a web site".
Nothing presented was particularly new to me (been doing this a while!), but
I was glad to see/hear that they were preaching clean, lightweight design
with the clearest navigation possible, especially since I could tell there
were some people new to design in the seminars.

Everyone that is, except Macromedia, actually put on by FlashCore.  There
was a full day of Flash seminars, all of course using Flash5.  I was a good
girl and didn't argue with them about their penetration percentages and
don't want to start that debate here again either.  But with some newbies in
the crowd, I had to cringe at their eyes lighting up to "98% of all users
have Flash", and jotting that down.

One of the presenters had a problem with the laptop they brought, had to
move everything to the computer provided by the conference.  Started
presentation, and gee, couldn't show us all the example sites they had
linked, because the computer didn't have the Flash Plugin on it.  So we sat
as they downloaded the plugin online....and oh yeah, rebooted.  And then of
course they couldn't show us how any of the features were created because
the full program wasn't on the machine.

Now really guys.  There were four people giving different segments of this
presentation, all with laptops.  I THINK they all had Flash5 on THEIR
machines......they used them for their presentations....and were still
sitting in the room.....

And I know there's a Macromedia guy on this list, so please forgive my rant.
And I'm not a Flash hater nor a Flash lover.  Everything has it's place.

Sandy