Some C4 thoughts
So I got back to Philly late last night from C4. It was a great conference. First and foremost, a big thank you to Wolf for putting it on. It was a ton of work and I’m very appreciative of it. For those who weren’t there and want a full review I’ll point to Daniel’s post which has a great run down of the speakers/topics. Audio and video was captured and I’ll link to it on the Clickable Bliss Blog when available.
What I liked overall:
- Catching up with friends I haven’t seen in a while (or never did, ala IRC #macsb room).
- Meeting new people and hearing what they are working on / excited about.
- Getting the opportunity to thank people in person for their apps/blog post.
- The size of the conference.
Speaker specific:
- Wolf: Interesting background on his vision for the conference. Great new gang sign.
- Gruber: I agree with many of his points on how the UI is pretty much a free for all these days. “Does this look good?” is the new HIG. For the high order geeks it won’t be a problem and will be welcomed visual candy — but I wonder what the long term usability effects will be for the masses if every app starts doing this.
- Brent: It was interesting to hear some of the issues he has had to overcome in creating NNW and offer syncing. Also fun to see some small sample of where NNW is headed.
- Aaron: I don’t know if I agree with Aaron’s take on the demand for Cocoa people. Maybe it’s metro specific but in Philly it’s pretty bare so far. I also disagree with the notion of people flipping to Mac from PC for the perfect solution. Very few offices use 1 app, and many need to support the Visual Basic 5 app built by the intern 4 year ago that we also lost the source too. Intel Macs makes this easier but not turnkey.
- Gus: Being a #macsb regular I’ve heard Gus talk about Lua before but it was great to see it in action. Also nice to see how easy it is to add.
- Steve: Steve’s talk is a great example of one I wouldn’t have asked for but I’m glad I saw. I’m someone with no real experience with system thread stuff and nor do I want to gain any. From the talk IO looks like a very light, yet powerful way to approach this problem.
- Brian: Cool insights into the future of Subversion and some good answers during the Q and A I may be able to apply to my work today. The idea that “.svn” directories may go away in favor of a more project central db to keep track of things would helps us Mac folk who deal with bundles tremendously.
- Panel: Probably the only thing I would put in the negative column. Not because of Drunken Batman or any of the panelist but the fact that the crowd got to steer the conversation and the topics of “Carbon vs. Cocoa”, “DRM” and “Piracy” for me are issues that have been talked about in the past to the point of being not useful anymore.
What I disliked:
- Not getting to sleep till 3 AM on Saturday, thus oversleeping the next morning and missing the Adler trip.
- While I did have a few good conversations with people on the train rides, the extra 2 hrs of travel did take its toll. Hopefully next time we can work out getting hotels closer to the meeting space. I would though like to keep it in town however — RailsConf was 100% at the airport (blah) and it’s nice to see the city.
Ideas:
- Most of the attendees seemed to be indies (or people who do Cocoa part time and want to do more) and thus I would like to see a talk (possibly from Adam Engst who did this so well at MacHack) on real ways to improve your marketing/dealing with customers/making money/staying in business.
- There was also a session I saw at Rails conf where people were given 5 (or maybe it was 10) minutes to talk about something they thought was cool/interesting that also worked well. They had two alternating laptop hookups and a moderator with the hook to keep things moving. Some talked about a project they had in production, others about projects they thought were good ideas and wanted feedback on. Anyways it was interesting, could be in a group like this as well.
Posted on: October 23, 2006 – 1:51 pm
2 Comments
I want to start a Flickr group of developers throwing up the square brackets. Is it really C4 only, or can any Obj-C lover sport the brackets in a photo and not be a poser?
I’d guess Wolf has the final call but I think all Obj-C lovers are in the clear. :-)
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