Long time, no post. Agh, sorry.
Barcamp Auckland is going well, we’ve secured all our sponsors and I’m just awaiting artwork for the t-shirt designs! But, more Barcamp Auckland stuff in a later post. This post, is all about motion picture! No...not movies, but podcasts! Specifically video podcasts!
My (one-man) design firm, WebCreative, is now producing a weekly podcast called the Second Draw Down. The show is hosted by my great friend, Novia Ng, who’s doing a great job so far. The show was supposed to be aimed at teenagers but it seems the show has a much more general appeal, with almost a 50/50 adult-teen split (We did aim the show at the older teenager which is why this general appeal makes sense.) As you would hear Novia say, the show is as random as the stuff you find in the second drawer down! This means that anything off-beat and exciting we find on the internet and around Auckland, we’ll stash in the second drawer down (which is usually a collection of strange, single-use utensils) and then share this with you every week when we release the show.
Please visit Second Draw Down and watch our latest episode, and then subscribe if you like it! Following is a little behind the scenes video I made using iSight to just share how we do things and to share some important tips I’ve learned along the way.
How to make a Podcast from Ludwig Wendzich on Vimeo.
Always, and I mean always, make sure your website works in all current browsers if your target audience are web geeks. Seriously ;) Even though, logic (and even statistics), tell me that most people who would be visiting Barcamp Auckland 2‘s sexy (if I do say so myself) new website, http://bca.geek.nz, it seems that almost all of them decided to check the website in the delightful IE7. Which, isn’t a bad browser as such, just doesn’t quite agree with Firefox and Safari. They then proceeded to tell me that my website was broken in IE7. Thanks guys.
But seriously, I love you all. You are all awesome and I’m so glad you visited the site, multiple times ;) This brings me to the point of this blog post.
That is right my friends, all the fun and games from last year is back this year and, as the strapline goes, its bigger and better. This year I’m expecting about 120 people to signup and hopefully, the same number to attend. I won’t be surprised if the number of registrants go over 120 (but the cut off will be 150 registrants.)
The event will be held at the same venue, the lovely, Botany Downs Secondary College (thank you so much for sponsoring the venue and wifi once more) and will be held on Saturday the 12th of July, 2008. As always, the event will be free! I hope I don’t need to ask you again to sign up! Please spread the word! Blog, twitter, email and tell your friends.
As we are expecting 120 attendees this year sponsorship will be even more important. If we are to meet the high standard set last year (yes, I’m talking about the great food and awesome t-shirts) then we’re going to need a lot more sponsorship funds. At an approximate cost of $35 per head, we need to rally a total of around $4200 in sponsorship this year.
I hope that your company can help. If you think you can, please get in touch. Remember, every contribution helps (we aren’t expecting a $2000 sponsorship from each company!)
Oh my! That looks so awesome! It will make Expression Engine such a more compelling choice as a content management system - flexibility in templates, content-type/database management and now, control panel views (such as Publish/Edit screens,) Accessories (additions to the control panel that enable you to give information on how to use the system - including mini-screencasts!) and more (since it’s now based on CodeIgniter.)
I can not wait! Watch the preview below.
http://expressionengine.com/ee2_sneak_preview/
How much more will it cost though?
I am honoured to have been invited to the KiwiFoo/Baacamp weekend organised by Nat and Russel. It was held the past weekend, Feb 1-3, which was filled with amazing sessions, very smart and creative people and lots of “corridor talk.” The people ranged from Tech Nomads from Estonia (Tony had fascinating tales to tell), Media folk (such as Radio NZ, Weta Workshops and TVNZ), robot-heads, web geeks (I met some of the Shift guys, who were awesome), crafties (Lucy from felt.co.nz was always interesting to talk to), events organisers (such as the organisers of Barcamps Wellington and Christchurch, as well as Natalie and Simon from Oxford GeekNights - now livin’ it up in Brighton), Kiwis livin’ it up in the Valley (such as Ponoko) and much much more.
The one thing Foocamp has over Barcamp is the control over who is attending. Where Barcamp is more a web geek event, Nat and Russel could control who was invited to KiwiFoo and so could make sure there was a great variety in attendance allowing cross pollination of ideas. The invite only part meant that everyone was cutting-edge or leaders in whatever they did, so a lot of the more technical talks were way over my head.
I especially enjoyed Justine‘s talk on Usability and the effects of change and unintentional blindness and the effect on user interfaces, e.g. showing errors, opening new tabs in the background or even just navigation to a page with a left-hand side navigation adapting for the current page. A lot of the time, the change is not apparent so we are lost, trying to figure out what we are meant to do next.
Another talk (the last one of the weekend) was also about usability, and this was basically a round table discussion about solving some issues with a particular site’s “Privacy and Security” form. It is a real mess, looks like a port from the database structure to a form. My immediate reaction was to solve 90% of the problem with only 10% of the interface. After a heated, sometimes boisterous discussion, we seemed to reach that conclusion. Showing 2 options “Public” and “Private” then only revealing more of the options when you select private. Simple check boxes will do, no need for Yes and No radio buttons!
Another session I attended was led by Russel, Rod and Mauricio, entitled “Fixing broken revenue” in which we discussed the current advertising model and how this was broken when it came to smaller publishing companies. It was definitely an interesting discussion that I’m excited to keep going.
By far, my favorite sessions were about “building web communities” and “bringing geeks out of the woodwork” - which is ideal since I believe the reason I was invited to Foo this year was because of my organising Barcamp Auckland. The first session, which was entitled “Web Community NZ, who is it and how big , is it closed shop? How to nurture it” we discusses whether we were missing out on something and if we were, how we could find out about it. We decided that yes, a lot of us were missing out on something and that was mainly because of lots of “pockets of community” that weren’t interlinked or communicating with each other. Our solution? A single agnostic activity aggregator. More on that later.
The the next morning, Simon and Natalie presented a session on “bringing geeks out of the woodwork.” Natalie started by talking about her experiences organising GeekNights and how this quickly grew to a large event. Mike, Mike and I talked about our Barcamp experiences (Sydney, Wellington and Auckland) and others talked about other smaller communities such as The Valley in Christchurch.
Mauricio rightly blogged The conversations around here are not NDA, but it’s a matter of principle to only disclose things if you ask and receive a positive response.
so although I’d love to share more details I don’t think it’s appropriate to share more than an overview of the weekend.
One thing I can share, and we’d really like to share, and would love you to pass on is a little thing entitled “NZWC.”
What is it? Basically NZWC is the agnostic activity aggregator I talked about stemming from the building web communities session. We decided the best thing we can do is to create an aggregator of everything happening in the NZ web scene. It’s open to anyone to post to, just tag your stuff with “nzwc” and our stuff should start appearing on the site.
Currently the actual site is just some information about the project and a quickie MagieRSS mashup, but we plan to build it out into something a little more useful. Of course, if you start tagging content you believe is relevant to the NZWC then we’ll be able to see how people use it a lot better and build a better experience around the content.
Something to note about posting to NZWC. The content you put up there doesn’t necessarily need to be your own. You can add it as a del.icio.us bookmark, tag it with “nzwc” and it’ll show up just as well. The idea is to surface as much content concerning the NZWC as possible.
We are planning to support Flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us but could possibly later include support for Twitter, Upcoming etc. All we need from you right now, is to tag stuff. Surface it, for the rest of us to find on NZWC.
I bought my first Mac (a MacBook) in late October/early November and it arrived on the 20th November. As soon as it arrived I started downloading trial versions of all the software I felt I would need; think Coda, Pixelmator, Inkscape, iWork, Adobe Illustrator et cetera. As the trials started to expire I started purchasing the apps.
First Pixelmator. I really didn’t want to buy Photoshop (it was the reason I switched to Mac; the indie developers) so I was glad when I got my hands on this beautiful app. Then came Coda. Again an amazing app that is always running. I love Coda and don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to Dreamweaver without feeling like I’m missing some great experience. I ditched Inkscape because it wasn’t working out (which is when I actually got the Illustrator trial) and considered purchasing Illustrator. Which I did, along with InDesign and Photoshop (it was a special Creative Design Suite which had a price I could not deny...even if it was slightly higher than just buying Illustator.) And finally came iWork ‘08, which had long expired but I hadn’t needed to use for a couple of weeks.
I asked to borrow my parents’ credit card and hopped onto Apple’s website. I was excited to purchase software from Apple because I believed the Indie developers based the experience on that which Apple offered (and the experience from the Indies were awesome.) Alas, I was mistaken. Apple was behind the curve and the experience was pretty sad.
After my dad’s credit card failed (because it had expired) I was logged out. I logged in again, went to check out and tried with my mum’s credit card. It went through.
I got an email after a few minutes. “Thank you for shopping at the Apple Store. We’re processing your order now.” O…
This was followed by another email, “Order Acknowledgment” containing “Thank you for shopping the Apple Online Store. We are processing your order now.” Wow, thanks - again.
I searched through those emails trying to find a serial number. Come on, anything that looked like a serial number. It must be there...Come on, all the Indie guys had them in their first email! Annoying.
What makes it worse is Apple sells their computers with iWork ‘08 Trial Version on it! It’s not something I need a DVD for, and you can download the trial anyway. Why make me wait 3-4 business days before I can get my serial and use the application when I can have it instantly.
I’m really disappointed in the company who’s business model is commonly referred to as a “distribution” model. Not just music either, tv shows, podcasts, movies and even iPod games. Come on, iTunes Activation for the iPhone should have helped them improve my experience! Why not let me activate iWork from iTunes? I want my application running now!
By doing something so simple as to include the serial number in the email (either “Thank you for shopping the Apple Online Store. We are processing your order now.” one would work,) the experience of buying software from Apple Inc, could have been so much more enjoyable, but alas, it was frustrating.
Note: If they do give you the serial somewhere then forgive me. Still, it shouldn’t be that hard to find.
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