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October 08, 2004
[WWDC] Partial recant
When I returned from Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) back in July, I made a post accusing Apple of “shaving the edges” in several areas. Most of that post, I still stand by.
Howver, one area I mentioned was video. In 2003, all the sessions were taped, and DVDs of all those sessions were delivered to the attendees. This year, the big video cameras were absent from most of the sessions, there was no video available online via the Apple Developer Connection site, and there was no mention made of DVDs. I concluded that Apple had decided to forego the DVDs.
Things got better a few weeks later, when PDF versions of the slides (originally in Keynote) from all the sessions were posted. Those slides were, in most cases, more valuable than video of someone walking around on stage, but the contextual information of the presenter was still lost.
Yesterday, my DVDs (!) arrived - and now have I to take back all the nasty things I said in that arena. Turns out that while they didn’t videotape the actual sessions, they did tape the audio as well as the video that was displayed on the projection screen present in each room. My ten DVDs contain a nice little front-end application that lists all the sessions, and presents me with the ability to either watch a quicktime of the session (which is basically listening to the speaker while watching the slides in a 400x300 window), or I can view the slides myself at high-res (great for reference).
This is a lot more useful than a plain videotape of the session in progress. Great job, Apple.
Posted by jim at October 8, 2004 01:56 PM