Woke up late and barely made it to the Politics of Open Source panel, where my old boss Brian Behlendorf is a no-show. What’s up with that Brian?
Two nights in a row, after the various parties at SXSW have wound down, we’ve all ended up in the atrium lobby bar of the Omni Hotel. It’s a nice change after the loud music and activities, and allows for great conversation. Last night I spoke with Kevin Lynch of Macromedia for an hour about my love/hate relationship with Macromedia and their products. The cool thing is that Kevin was very receptive to my concerns and actually echoed some of them, which tells me that Macromedia is very aware of how their products, especially the Flash Player, are perceived among both the end user and the developer crowds. I forgot to ask him about Macromedia’s plans (if they exist) for integrating SVG capabilities into the Flash Player. This may be the solution they need to improve the client-server interaction that is currently weak in Flash. He even admitted that Macromedia Generator is a dead project and no longer under development.
Sitting across from me is Mike Kuniavsky, who has a book coming out soon from O’Reilly called User Experience Research Techniques. It’s interesting how SXSW is such a social conference. A few years ago I met both Mike K. and Jeff Veen when they were still at Wired. At the time I was living in Ann Arbor, Michigan and I learned that Mike K. is from Ann Arbor and Jeff went to college in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And, of course, the well-known information architecture firm Argus and Associates founded by Louis Rosenfeld was in Ann Arbor.
Doc Searls yesterday made the comment about how many Titanium Powerbooks there were at this conference. It’s easily a ratio of 4-to-1 against Windows laptops. SXSW is definitely a creative-technical conference and naturally the attendees are accustomed to using the best hardware for both their creative and technical needs. Almost every single Mac I’ve seen in use has been running Mac OS X. I guess it’s finally time for me to take the leap and start running it on my Titanium. In contrast, I popped into the “Advergames” session and all five panelists had Windows laptops open. I listened to some guy talk about running a Web server behind an online video game that builds a custom Web page as you play. Sounded intriguing but *yawn*.
The SXSW Web Awards last night were fun. Most of it was typical blah-blah I’d-like-to-thank-the-Academy speeches, but there were some high points. One of which was Mena’s (fromDollarshort) speech for winning the award for Best Weblog.
Several people have said the CamWorld t-shirts are the best swag at SXSW. You can order one for $10 and I’ll ship it out later this week.
Posted by Cameron Barrett at March 11, 2002 07:36 PM