Today’s post is a brief recap of my experience in the keynote at this year’s Adobe MAX conference. As we prepared for it, I expected it to be relatively easy given my experience with the keynote last year. Some readers may remember that I wrote a blog post detailing the extensive preparation that goes into these demos.

But it was actually harder. There was more to demo this year, which on the one hand is good news because it means that we made a lot of progress maturing Adobe XD over the past year. But it also just made the act of boiling everything down into a brief demo much harder. On top of that, preparing the demo for the new voice features was very stressful: they were just becoming finalized as my demo was taking shape, and so for a little while there their reliability—and my own ability to use them reliably—was pretty shaky.

It would’ve been so much easier to stick to just demoing stuff on the desktop because the tech and the usage patterns are so familiar. But that’s not realistic; the world is changing and software has to change along with it, and so do software demos. Next year’s demo is likely to be even more complicated. I feel sorry for the poor soul who has to get up on stage and do that one.

Cheers,
Khoi