paul nicholson

Post-Barcamp Nashville Post

In Blog Stuff, Cool Tech, Me on August 18, 2007 at 7:56 pm

Just got back from Barcamp.

Most of my random comments are with my many pictures on my Flickr stream. Check it out…then come back here.

First: I love that R2D2 showed up and presided over the whole thing. What more do you need to establish geek cred than to have ‘the Dome’ in attendance?

I am upset because i made another really intelligent post from my phone about this guy’s presentation (thanks to Kerry Woo for the pic) and it totally got lost. And i already deleted it off my phone to clear some memory (not that i was short, just an old habit). Dang it.

To sum up, he said that the iPhone rocked because it didn’t have an SDK and couldn’t run 3rd party native apps (though people are hacking their way in anyway). He said this was great because that way if your phone crashes the apps are all online anyway so you don’t loose anything. Apparently Mac people don’t back stuff up. He then said that the iPhone was cool because it was the first phone to support web-based applications, and it does it through the Safari browser. Um… Treos, Crackberries, my wife’s MDA… lots of phones have had browsers for years. With full support for Flash, Java, and AJAX i might add – all of which are lacking in the iPhone. So…not sure how that works… Then he made jokes about how bad AT&T’s network is. If all the applications are web based, then doesn’t a crappy network pretty much make your applications crappy too? If you don’t have signal, you don’t have apps. Anyway…

Most of Barcamp was pretty good, Mac Fanboy and a few others excepted. It was great to just be around all that geek-ness and soak up all the ideas and just think about random stuff for a day.

The only other comment i want to go out of my way to make about Barcamp was regarding the last presentation i saw…Penelope Trunk. Her presentation was like a lot of other ones. Not that informative, a little simplistic, and had more than a few self-contradictory statements. I was hoping everyone would just take Brittney’s sound advice and not feed the trolls. But no, several people had to drill her on questions, including a pointed question about “what happened at BlogHer”. Just let it go people. Move on and quit giving her your time and attention, and she will move out of your life.

But like i said, overall it was a great day. I would have gladly paid money (not too much mind you) to do something like that. Instead it was free and we got free food out of the deal. How sweet is that!

And great to finally meet all of you – well, a lot of ‘you’ anyway. I somehow missed a few. Now having you as friends in Facebook doesn’t feel as much like a loser ploy to just stack it with people that i am just aware of, but people who are actually friends :-)

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  • ElisaC

    Thanks for the recap.

    I do have to chime in and say: I have both a Treo and an iPhone. The web experience on the Treo can’t even come close to the iPhone. I’m going to cancel my data plan on the Treo because when it comes to email and web I don’t even bother using it anymore.

    If the AT&T network was better in our area I’d make a 100% switch, but right now I’m stuck between my Treo (which despite being a decade-long Palm lover I have to admit is the worst technology purchase I ever made) and the iPhone, where I’m stuck with the sucky AT&T network.

    Now, I haven’t been a Crackberry owner, so I can’t comment there :)

  • Rob Robinson

    I wish we’d had a chance to talk, Paul. Hopefully one of these days.

    I love my Treo, but I’ll never say never for the iPhone or a future counterpart on other providers.

  • Paul Nicholson

    I agree the iPhone is really pretty and very cool in a lot of ways. It’s just a crippled device. So short when it comes to messaging, full web features, 3rd party support, network choice, etc.

    To me it is more typical apple. 50% design, 40% marketing, 10% good ideas.

    A few generations down the road, or like you said Rob – when someone else fixes what they did wrong – it will be worth more. Same with the iPod vs most other PMPs. The iPods are way overpriced and under-featured compared to other players out there, but i do have to acknowledge that if Apple didn’t dominate the market with such a poor player, i’d never have my awesome little Sansa e200r so cheap trying to compete with it.

  • Casey

    Clearly some are more susceptible to the RDF than others. Look I’m a pretty solid Apple guy, but I bought my Pearl in response to the iPhone announcement. That said, I think the iPhone is fantastic, but for different reasons. The iPhone has raised the expectations for the cell phone user interface. Apart from the lack of real buttons, the iPhone GUI is light years ahead of anything else out there. This can only help spur the rest of the competition to kick it up a notch and in the end the consumer wins regardless which device you end up choosing in the future.

    BTW Paul, was great to meet you. Don’t forget to look up Crysis :)

  • Paul Nicholson

    Great chatting with you too. Downloading Crysis videos right now. Don’t forget to check out Team Fortress 2 and Portal.

    I agree about the interface. Apple has always been great at making things pretty and user friendly. I give them full marks for pushing the tech industry ahead on usability many times. It is the under-featured and over-priced products that bug me.

    Oh – per our Mac gaming conversation – i assume you saw that EA is finally going to be releasing 6 games for Mac (6 whole games!). Many of them are months late of course, but at least there’s something. I wonder if these will be bad ports of the console versions, or really bad ports of the PC versions which were bad ports of the console versions. We shall see :-)

  • Casey

    They’ll be bad ports of the PC versions. EA is using the Cider portability engine to bring these games across. So you have to wonder if this will end up being any better than simply running Windows under Parallels or VMWare Fusion and getting your gaming fix that way.