5 Aug, 2005
The OSCON Friday Keynotes are over and here are my notes. To save folks some trouble (in case none of these people interest them), I’ve listed the speakers:
- Conference Announcements - Nat Torkington, O’Reilly Media, Inc.
- Linux - In Search of the Desktop - Asa Dotzler, Mozilla Foundation
- Open Source Biology - Drew Endy, MIT Biological Engineering
- Open Source Licensing Issues - Tony Gaughan, Computer Associates
- On Evil - Danny O’Brien, Need To Know
- Howtoons - Saul Griffith, Squid Labs
And the afternoon closing session was keynoted by Miguel de Icaza.
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2 Aug, 2005
Kathy Sierra’s talk on Creating Passionate Users was quite good, unfortunately it was very visual and involved several group projects (even having the slides won’t do it justice). Thus it is quite difficult for me to sum up. The key take away is that getting users passionate about your product is that your product needs to empower the user and fade into the background (I know, it seems like there’s a disconnect). The secret is to get to the state where your customers have an “I rule!” experience — they care about how they feel from using your product, not about you or your company.
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27 Jul, 2005
There’s a great interview with Wil Shipley at the DrunkenBlog, with a nice treat at the end (a history of UI design for Delicious Library). Wil has his own blog which is geared more towards programmers — but the interview isn’t really about that.
In drunkenbatman’s interview with Wil they go into why Wil left (or was asked to leave) The Omni Group; his founding of Delicious Monster with Mike Matas (and Mike’s decision to leave for Apple); the success of Delicious Library; Wil’s troubles with depression; Cocoa programming; and some great advice for ISV entrepreneurs. It’s definitely worth the time investment to read it.
29 Jun, 2005
As expected, Apple has released a new version of iTunes which supports Podcasting. The integration into iTunes is great and, unfortunately for ODEO, I prefer it to the alternatives since I don’t have duplicate Podcasts sitting around on my disk now (well, atleast I don’t have to manually remove them). I will say that, currently, ODEO seems to have a better selection of what Apple is calling ‘Indie’ Podcasts — but I’m sure that will change as more folks register with Apple to have their PodCasts added to iTunes.
Tangentially, this morning while working out I was listening to the DSC and heard that the CastBlaster beta is available for download. So I rushed to the website and found out it’s only available for Windows. Ugh! Fortunately, it looks like Apple is pushing GarageBand as a Podcast recording studio. I haven’t tried it yet, but perhaps over the weekend I’ll experiment with recording a Podcast. I haven’t the faintest idea as to what I’ll speak about though.
