At last, my DemoCamp16 report (the event was Monday night; it’s now Thursday morning. Let’s pretend that I’ve been spending the time thinking deeply about the presentations, shall we?)
The demos were really interesting this time, but what was really cool was the intermission between demos and ignite, where I ended up getting demos and talks about Android and hacking the Nintendo DS from Kristan. I also sat at a table filled with people I didn’t know, and my only regret was that I didn’t get any contact info from the Rails guys from Hamilton or their partner who worked on PinPoint years ago.
Also, while they couldn’t make it, I later pitched the camp concept to the non-profit I’m involved with, and it looks like we’re going to give it a try next year to help connect with some other groups and individuals in the GTA.
So, a selection of notes from the presentations, as re-translated from my hasty keyword entry on my E61:
SlashID makes an alternative to OpenID. I’m waiting for the response from the OpenID crowd on this one (James Walker says he’s got something in the works.) I use OpenID for a few things, but to address one of the primary selling points of SlashID, it’s largely for stuff where I don’t particularly care if AOL can go and log in as me if they want to (I use RoboForm To Go for the rest and hope I don’t forget my USB key when I leave the house.)
UTest gets points for their site copy (“please choochoochoose an assignment”) and use of “Dr. Evil” for the test professor’s name – little quirks like that definitely help liven up a demo. The system is a unit test runner for programming classes – students can submit their test suites to run against their professor’s solution to evaluate how close their solution might be. Somehow this got me thinking about CRobots, and maybe there’s a service like this already, but it would be interesting (to about 5 people) to have some kind of unit test “battleground” online.
ShapeShop3D fit the pattern that anything demo’d in 3D should be fun and lively. I haven’t sat through a demo with a child-like smile like I did here since BumpTop was presented. It’s not something I’ll use anytime soon, but I like the way it’s going, and if I ever got a tablet I’d install it as the demo app of choice, just like Google Maps for Mobile’s My Location is my sample for the E61 (when wifi is available, anyway.)
The Ignite presentations were all good, with a few breaks in the flow as people paused to wait for the slides to catch up – a bit of a change from the “gotta talk faster to keep up with the slides” in the earlier days. The thing I’m finding about Ignite is that the talks are becoming like TV shows, or possibly YouTube clips – they put my brain in certain patterns, and I get ideas from them, but the substance of the talks themselves usually doesn’t give me an immediate call to action. It’s a refreshing format though, and I want to see more of them (aside: I just accidentally subscribed to several Christian podcasts after searching the iTunes Music Store for “Ignite.” Minor brand collision, guess I’ll stick to the direct links for now and avoid the “do I buy an iPod Touch or iPhone” debate for another day.)
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