Jane Wells posted some new guidelines for WordCamp organizers and its raised quite a kerfuffle in the community.
Before I get into this, let me offer up a bit of background on my own involvement with conferences and events of all shapes. I’ve attended multiple WordCamps, both as a speaker and a participant. I’ve also helped organize BarCampOrlando, was involved with the first DrupalCamp Florida, and attended a number of other BarCamps and unconferences all over the country. I even booked and promoted concerts in a past life.
Let’s just say I’ve got a bit more Event Planning experience than your average bear, and have half a clue about what goes into making a good event great.
Here’s what I took away from the recent guidelines and along the way I’ll offer up a few assumptions of what I think are the motivations behind them, and what my interpretation of the guidelines are. This is by no means exhaustive nor is it intended to address anyone’s concerns directly.
Continue reading ‘I, for one, welcome our new WordCamp Overlords’
Keep Calm and Carry On
The Apple vs Adobe debate has been raging since the announcement that a change to the iPhone Developer Agreement, specifically section 3.3.1, would ban the Adobe Flash to iPhone App compiler. In fact, Adobe has already thrown in the towel on this, days after the tool launched with Creative Suite 5. The reasons for this are many and varied, but essentially it boils down to 3 main issues:
- Flash is not a web standard.
- Control over the features that developers use should not be dictated by a ‘meta-platform’, but by first party tools.
- Flash is buggy, crash prone and eats battery life like its going out of style. Especially on OS X.
Continue reading ‘Apple v. Adobe’
There is a new Air app coming which should delight any WordPress user. It is going to bring Comment moderation out of the dashboard and your email and into an app that you can monitor and respond to quickly and easily. This is going to be HUGE. Its not out yet, but it will be soon. And because its an Adobe Air app, it will be cross platform out of the box.
On launch it will be missing a few features that I hope the developer, Daniel Dura, will consider adding:
- Support for Multiple Blogs, since I don’t think you can run multiple instances of the same Air app at the same time. Besides who would want to?
- The ability to reply to a comment thread, instead of just moderation. This may mean adding support for unmoderated comments as well.
- A GPL / Open Source license. Can a geek dream?
Read more about it on his blog.
So I’ve had the device for a few days, and I have to say – the iPhone was totally worth getting. I love it more than I expected I would. The UI is incredibly expressive, and if the English language doesn’t have a word to express how intuitive and user friendly it is. I treated it like a movie I wanted to see and didn’t read much about how it actually worked. As I mentioned before, I bought the iPhone early and in a direct response to my unhappiness with how well my BlackBerry Curve II synced with OS X 10.5 Leopard. Plus the calendar on the BB was so ugly that it was practically unusable. In fact for a smart phone I only used 3 applications on it: Email, which was superb and in many ways still better than the iPhone; Google Maps, where the iPhone does trump the Curve; and TwitterBerry, a decent twitter client that allowed me to send updates and read a few of the last updates of my friends, but lacked any kind of ‘Wow’ factor.
In the end, I switched to Apple’s device for the promise it offered – having one device be the center of my digital experience, and one that I would use every square inch of. And it has more than delivered.
Continue reading ‘iMpressions of the iPhone’
So… I got an iPhone 3G. In fact, I was the 2nd person at my AT&T store to walk out with one. I was planning on getting one, and had budgeted it way in advance. I was already a relatively happy Blackberry user, and had been on that platform for about 2 years. I loved my Blackberries, but there was quite a bit of functionality that I never used because it was either ugly or unintuitive. Especially the calendar, which was so much of both that it was completely unusable. Syncing with my Mac (using PocketMac for Blackberry) was always a bit of an issue, but it got worse with Leopard. To give you an idea of what I mean, it made me create a calendar called “PocketMac” just so that it could sync any appointments I entered on my handheld back to iCal. Address Book was also a bit off, as double records were not uncommon, especially if I had filled out more information on a record on one side or the other. So with all of my machines but one running 10.5, I knew that an iPhone was going to be my next choice. At least I knew it would sync seamlessly, and the calendar app was basically mobile iCal. So when 3G was announced, I was impressed enough to be willing to upgrade early (I got my BB Curve II in December). So with a fist full of dollars, and my research done (despite thinking July 11 was Wednesday, and was all kinds of mixed up until one of my team mates, who also had the iPhone lust, corrected me) – I settled into the fact that I was going to get an iPhone and pay the $200 early upgrade, no-subsidy-for-you price of $399 for an 8gb iPhone. Continue reading ‘iPhone and Me’
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