BarCamp Auckland
279 days ago by Peter Asquith — Comments
The countdown is on to BarCampAuckland, on December 15, the free, web community, “un-conference”.
Whether they know it, or not, everyone attending is an expert at something and has the opportunity to present and generate the content. The schedule emerges at the start of the day and the fun begins – the more attendees, the more content and the more discussion. This is going to be a great day!
[Aside: Yikes! A post!]
iPhone
422 days ago by Peter Asquith — Comments [1]
C and I were in San Francisco, on Friday, coincident with the much anticipated launch of Apple’s iPhone. We saw the queue stretching up Stockton Street and into O’Farrell at midday, then in the evening we got back to the Apple Store at around 6:20pm having been longer exploring than we’d expected. We missed the launch by twenty minutes but, given the crowds, we probably wouldn’t have seen too much. We got there in time to see some of the first of the new iPhone owners emerging from the store.
We talked to one guy who’d caught our eye in the morning, He’d been waiting since 2pm on Thursday and was number three in the queue. What had attracted our attention was that he was the only one in the line-up wearing a suit. He had a tent with him. His office was nearby and he was able to carry on working with his laptop and mobile phone during the wait. Apparently the choice of attire had got him interviews with quite a few of the media. He was very happy to have his hands on a new iPhone.
A couple of hours after its launch, I was able to touch an iPhone for the first time at an AT&T store on Market Street and on Saturday morning I had a bit more time with Apple’s latest product at the Apple Store.
Although I wasn’t able to use the iPhone as a phone nor experience its EDGE data rates, I was left gagging for the day that it, or a descendant, will be available in New Zealand.
The iPhone is a thing of beauty that exudes quality; all shiny glass and metal. It feels superb in your hand. It has presence and enough weight to feel solid while not being heavy. It’s thinner than you imagine. The 160dpi display is beautiful and pin-sharp. The multi-touch UI is responsive, precise and intuitive. Typing on the virtual keyboard is at least as natural as, and more accurate than, using my Motorola RAZR’s keypad (though the RAZR, perhaps, isn’t the finest example of a keypad for touch-typists!)
I loaded up wasabicube in Safari and was amazed at how detailed the initial, non-zoomed, view of the site looked. The multi-touch display allowed me to select menu items despite their tiny size. Simple zooming – either by double-tapping or using the finger and thumb zoom gesture – allowed the columns of the site to be seen easily. Scrolling up and down, or left and right, by dragging a finger was very natural. With Wi-Fi the pages loaded with the same sort of pace I would expect them to load on my MacBook.
The little UI touches make the experience. The bounce that a scrolling page makes when you it the bottom, or the top, seems right. The ability to flick through photos or album art and have the physics agree with what you expect is truly captivating.
The iPhone was very hard to put down. The pre-launch hype was well deserved. The iPhone, in my opinion, delivers.
This is a groundbreaking product. Some say that it’s too expensive, others that is doesn’t do all that their Blackberry or Treo can manage. Others that the EDGE data performance is pitiful or the built-in battery is a hamstring. While all that may be true I think it’s the things it does do that are the deal maker. It does everything it was claimed to be able to do. In many ways it does them better than expected. The iPhone will appeal to a wide audience. It’s the future, now. It changes the way we think about interacting with devices. It makes the current crop of mobile phones, PDAs and music players look and feel dated.
For a first generation product it’s amazing. I can only imagine what the second generation iPhone will bring!
[On Saturday afternoon I saw my first iPhone user in the wild; a woman walking up Market using an iPhone as if she’d had it forever.]
Teeter
520 days ago by Peter Asquith — Comments
Are we teetering on the brink of a dangerous Internet? Are the misanthropic hordes at the door? The recent, appalling, threatening, behaviour towards Kathy Sierra plumbs a new depth from the counter-community that signals a warning that we must heed and from which we must develop strategies to protect our privacy, publicity and physical safety.
The strength and beauty of the Internet is the ease with which we can communicate, form networks and broaden our social and intellectual horizons. Communities can form across a myriad of related and, more interestingly, unrelated topic threads. We can share our passions and interests and we can share our lives.
The Internet has proven to contain a rich vein of humanity, of bonhomie and been a huge spur for intellectual discovery. I can say without doubt that I have met hundreds of individuals both at conferences and through the ether who are an affirmation of the good that can come of this overarching medium. It is hard for me to recall a single exception.
However, I have the nagging feeling that I’ve been myopic. The Internet that I see – my Internet, if you will – is an exciting place of social software, like-mindedness, sharing, caring and interacting; it’s a place of interaction and productivity the like of which we’ve not seen before. When I stand back, though, I’m reminded that it’s not all sweetness and light. Take the thousands of spam and scam emails that assail my inboxes each year; take the port-scans and virus payloads; take the bigotted, blinkered and polarised comment threads that infest the fora associated with newspapers and current affairs sites; take the humourless, crass and utterly childish “comments” that regale YouTube posts; take the use of encrypted email and chat-rooms that coordinate acts of terror and crime; take the sick and threatening behaviour towards Kathy and you see that all is, indeed, not sweetness and light.
The freedom to connect, to express, to interact is not only available to us but is equally available to those malignants that wish ill on the world. The information we publish about ourselves; our beliefs; our values our physical and geographical states all reveal potential vulnerabilities to our privacy and our well-being. For every picture we put on Flickr; for every personal musing we tweet or blog, we reveal something of ourselves to the vast majority – to whom we wish to reveal – but also to the minority who may bite back.
The Internet was built upon openness, on gentlepersons agreements, on equitable interconnectedness and the free passage of data – it was built on trust. Spam, viruses and threats of a tiered Internet reveal those foundations to be shaky, as do criminal and spiteful characters hiding behind cloaked identities. Added to which, legislation has not kept up with the pace of change and has difficulty with an international jurisdiction.
How do we strike a balance between publicity and privacy; between vigorous debate and sniping; between individuality and anonymity? How do we broaden our audiences and our circle of friends while keeping the voyeurs and advantage-takers at bay? Building walls around our opinions and knowledge, restricting our art and literature to a hand-picked clique does not seem like a step forward. Perhaps we need a new framework of trust and responsibility. We must work to ensure the golden age of the Internet is ahead of us not merely a fading memory.
Meetup momentum
566 days ago by Peter Asquith — Comments [1]
Had a good meeting at the Auckland Web Design and Development Meetup last night.
There were some new but well-known faces and quite a buzz about future meetings. Bitter-sweet for Nathan , I should think, who presided over his last meeting for a while (he’s off to work in London, shortly). Nathan started the group back in 2003 and he’s stuck at it to the point where there are now over a hundred members and regular turn-outs of 15-30. Well done, Nathan, and good luck with the London stint. The reigns have been handed over to Paul Gutch with John Ballinger helping out.
Yesterday, Nathan did a quick presentation on CSS, which lead to some good discussion of best practise and tools and plug-ins that ease the process.
Glen Barnes gave an overview of the Subversion (SVN) version control system and, despite the lack of Internet access to his SVN repository, gave us a good idea of the benefits of version control even when working on small, personal projects.
Finally, Matt Broad spoke about NZ Webmasters, which is a community site he’s developing for anyone who is in New Zealand, or New Zealanders abroad, doing stuff with the Web. The site aims to be a community portal to encourage people into the industry, to further their knowledge through contacts and to provide a platform for “webmasters” to offer their services to charity and not-for-profit organisations.
During the course of the evening Karl from Cactus Lab put in plenty of plugs for Charles his, as he puts it, “HTTP proxy/HTTP monitor/Reverse proxy”. It’s very impressive and a huge boon if you’re developing with Ajax or database-drive Flash or just to see the amount of traffic and data that’s passing between you and the sites you visit/develop. Excellent.
Old Skool no more
574 days ago by Peter Asquith — Comments [1]
So, yesterday, I buried my Old Skool Flickr identity and “merged” it with my Yahoo! account. I’d put off doing the meld on other occasions when the Yahoo! corporate machine made noises but this time there was a deadline, so I decided to bow.
Despite the obvious benefits of a unified ID (and if you’ve ever been involved with developing and maintaining on-line applications you’ll know what I mean), I still felt a little part of me fall off its perch and go to join the choir invisible. Flickr has become an important part of my life and, since I publish many of my photographs there, a part of my identity.
The Old Skool Flickr was a young upstart showing what could be done with the Web, with its own quirky way of doing things. Then it was subsumed into the Yahoo! corporation but there was still a core of the personality that made Flickr so attractive in the first place. I’m pretty confident that as long as Stewart and Caterina are in the mix there will always be a bit of that Ludicorp spirit, however, a chapter has come to an end; an identity has been homogenised.
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