Category: General

Tuesday 3.13.07

• Will Wright Keynote Presentation – Scott
  
• Worldchanging 2.0 – Ken
  
• The Future of Television: Super-Modality – Ken
  
• Web Typography Sucks – Ken
  
• Bruce Sterling’s SXSW Rant – Scott
• The Technologist Agenda: Political Activism for Geeks – Scott
  
• The Future of Television: Supermodality – Scott
  
• Web Typography Sucks – Scott
  

Monday 3.12.07

• Nintendo DS Guitar – Scott
  
• Austin rocks except… – Ken
  
• EyeToy-like fun at Screenburn – Ken
  
• The Death of the Desktop – Ken
  
• Rails and AJAX: Building Enterprise-Class Web Applications – Ken
  
• The Growth and Evolution of Microformats – Ken
  
• Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid – Scott
  
• Design Patterns: Defining and Sharing Web Interface Design Languages – Scott
• Bullet Tooth Web Design: Plan Your Web Site like Pulling off a Robbery – Scott
• The Growth and Evolution of Microformats – Scott
• American Cancer Society: Applying Disruptive Technology for the Nonprofit Sector – Ken
  
• Get Unstuck: Moving From 1.0 to 2.0 – Ken
  
• Scaling Your Community – Scott
  
• AJAX Kung Fu Meets Accessibility Feng Sui – Scott
  

Sunday 3.11.07

• Trade Show – Scott
  
• Uniting the Holy Trinity of Web Design – Ken
  
• Ten Ways to Run a Startup Like Genghis Khan – Ken
  
• Accessified! Practical Accessibility Fixes Any Web Developer Can Use – Ken
  
• Everything You Wanted to Know about the Mobile Web, But Were Afraid to Ask – Ken
  
• Non-Developers to Open Source Acolytes: Tell Me Why I Care – Ken
  
• Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic – Ken
  
• Designing for Convergent Devices – Ken
  
• “I’m Good, Really!”: Self-Marketing for the Freelance Web Geek – Scott
  
• Spam of All Kinds – Scott
  
• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Mobile Web But were afraid to ask – Scott
  
• Design Workflows at Work: How Top Designers Work Their Magic – Scott
  
• Game Perverts: A Robot, a DS and a Dot Matrix Printer Menage a Trois – Scott
  

Saturday 3.10.07

• High Class and Low Class Web Design – Ken
• Ruining the User Experience: When JavaScript and Ajax Go Bad – Ken
  
• Grids are Good – Ken
  
• Tag, You’re It – Ken
• Getting to Consistency: Don’t Make Your Users Think – Ken
  
• Why XSLT is Sexy – Ken
  
• High Class and Low Class Web Design – Scott
  
• TV: The Next Generation – Scott
  
• Tag, You’re It – Scott
• Getting to Consistency – don’t make your users think – Scott
  
• Emerging Social and Technology Trends – Scott
  

A little thing called ScreenBurn Festival was also going on at SXSW this year. It was kind of like a smaller trade show full of video games. It turned out to be mainly just a bunch of jr. high kids sitting around a the demos playing first person shooters. There was one really neat product that was being demoed there though. It was a cool game for the Nintendo DS similar to Guitar hero, but better in quite a few ways. I belive the game is called Jam Sessions and works really well with the DS touch pad. You chose the cords with the directional controller (displayed on the upper screen), and then you use a real guitar pick to strum some virtual strings on the lower touch screen. The game is published by Ubisoft, and I was talking to the guy at the booth and he said that you can basically do whatever you want with the game (play your own songs), but there will be songs on the game to play along with. It won’t be in the Guitar Hero style though, since you’re actually strumming and chosing notes to play instead of just hitting colored buttons. I played around with it and it works really well. I don’t really think it will teach you how to play the guitar, but for just messing around (it is just a game), it’s pretty cool.

The SXSW trade show opened at noon today. The session I had prior to it opening wasn’t that great, so I was in line when the doors opened. There was a nice collection of vendors, and an even nicer collection of swag to be had.

There were actually quite a few large city film associations (the interactive and film conferences share the same trade show). There were also a decent number of DVD/CD pressing companies as well. None of those really interested me.

Google had a nice booth there. I thought it would be funny to go up to them and pretend that I didn’t know who they were. “So, what exactly do you do at G-g-google? Am I pronouncing that right?” I had a hard time keeping a straight face and blew the whole thing. They at least pretended to think I was funny and gave me a mouse pad. Another great booth was Mozilla Firefox. They were giving out free t-shirts to anyone who would be a temporary Firefox tattoo on their neck or face. They were also selling shirts so I just bought one. The girl who sold it to me seemed a little disappointed that she didn’t get to put a tattoo on my face. I figure Firefox is a good cause and I’m happy to give money to them. I’ve looked at getting a Firefox shirt several times in the past, but just don’t really like the navy blue one they sell online (the one I bought was a brown ringer tee). The Creative Commons had a booth where I also purchased a shirt (again, another organization that I’m happy to give money to). Another interesting booth was a company I’d never heard of before today called LuckyOliver. They’re a stock photo shop similar to istockphoto, which I’ve used before. They use a token system (I got 4 free!) to purchase photos. They also accept photo submissions and will sell your photos for you. The site looks (good collection of images) works very similar to other stock photo sites, so at the very least, it’s another alternative when i can’t find that perfect image. The last booth that stood out for me was the Make Magazine booth. They’ve just launched a new magazine called Craft which is more on the crafty side of things where Make is more of the hacking and building super-cool ray-guns side.

It was a good trade show, and there were plenty of booths giving out candy so I’m sure I’ll stop by from time to time throughout the week to have a little snack.

We’ve arrived in Austin!