Live iPad Draw - Recording Available

I've popped a copy of the live recording in the members feed so you can see it at a higher resolution (960x540) than the version transmitted - one of the many benefits of being a member. Mind you, seeing my ugly mug in HD may not be considered by many to be a benefit!

If you'd like to see a streamed recording of the show, you can do on your iPhone, iPad or Mac at http://www.screencastsonline.tv

Although the live recording format is fairly stressful to put together (at least whilst I'm getting used to the format), it seems to be well received.

I'm kicking around a few ideas on how I might do this on a regular basis.

One idea is to do a 30 minute show every second Wednesday to cover the previous two weeks screencasts, follow up on members questions, offer clarifications, that sort of thing. If you have any other suggestions or comments, please feel free to post to the comments thread (or email me directly at screencastsonline@gmail.com)

Live iPad Prize Draw

If everything goes to plan, the live draw as mentioned in my previous post will take place at 10pm UK time. - other time zones

You will find the live stream and chat room at http://www.screencastsonline.tv

Live iPad Giveaway

Well, I promised I'd give away an iPad today, so I'd better set something up.

Update: The draw if for ScreenCastsOnline members only. Details of how to become a member can be found here. More information on the T&Cs for the draw and the entry form can be found here.

However, my immaculate planning (!) has resulted in a clash with the proposed time and the England match! So rather than 9pm, I'll push it back to 10 pm tonight.

Rather than do a 30 minute live show like last time, I thought I'd keep it short, and rather than replace the normal show, I'd do it as a supplement to the usual show.

So this week, there's a normal free show going out, which I'm just in the process of publishing. Once I've done that, I'll need to sort out the technology for the live stream.

Last time I used Ustream, (which is a free service) and had mixed results. I had people who were able to watch the stream fine, and others who had real problems.

This time round, I'm going to try a paid service - BitGravity.

With me being away at WWDC, and spending most of this week preparing the normal show, I haven't really had much time to focus on getting things sorted out. In fact, the BitGravity account was only setup yesterday, and I only got the stream enabled at 10pm last night. So not much time to play considering it should take me the best part of the next couple of hours publishing the normal show.

So for this "test" live show, I'm shooting for a smallish audience, to test out the waters. That's why I've not made too much of a fuss about publicising the live show.

In the event of technical problems (of my own making) or running out of time, the fallback position is I'll do the draw offline and publish it via the blog.

So, if all goes to plan, I'm hoping to do the live draw at 10pm UK time.

I'll publish the link to see the show later on today via the blog and Twitter.

Further WWDC Thoughts

Although the sessions of WWDC are covered by NDA, I don't suppose there are any restrictions on discussing what wasn't covered?

We all knew well in advance of the event that the Mac and OSX was taking a backseat this year. From the absence of Mac OSX sessions, to the blatant exclusion of any entries in the Apple Design Awards, we sort of got the idea that Apple wanted to fixate purely on the iPhone and iPad this time round. No suprises there then!

However, I have to admit being slightly perplexed by the actual focus of WWDC, namely just the iPhone. After all, Apple were touting the event as an iPhone and iPad development event?

The iPad received little coverage in the keynote, other than the expected sales figures at the beginning of the event, and the iPad was quickly forgotten about, once the iPhone segment kicked off. We already knew that the iPad would have to wait until later in the year for iOS4, as this had already been mentioned in the iPhone OS 4 announcement earlier in the year. But no confirmation in the keynote, no proposed launch date.

Very strange?

Apple certainly do seem to have adopted a laser focus at these events, concentrating on a single message at each special event.

So are we to expect a special iPad iOS4 event in the summer with an announcement of any special tweaks for the iPad? Will iOS4 be the same on the iPad as it is on the iPhone? I for one, am excited at the prospect of the multitasking and folders on the iPad.

But what about the Mac?

Despite all the doom and gloom from certain quarters, the Mac is going to be around for a while yet. So what about OSX 10.7? Snow Leopard has been out for almost a year and was a maintenance release.

Apple have not even mentioned they are working on 10.7, no feature announcements, nada!

Surely, they can't leave it another year until the next WWDC? Surely iOS5 and the new iPhone 5 will be in the frame by then!

So do we expect to see another Apple special event before next WWDC focussing on the Mac?

It's fascinating to see Apple doing so well, especially as we still don't know the full story going forward...

Last morning at WWDC

It's the final morning here at WWDC and time to reflect on the overall experience of the week. Although I've been tweeting, I've not really been able to blog much about WWDC as all attendees are under NDA and except for the keynote on Monday, everything else is "secret". Except it's not really, my take is that the NDA arrangements are purely to keep the value of the ticket price and encourage more people to attend.

So what are my positives and negatives to take away from WWDC and was it worth the expense as a "non-developer"?

I've attended a number of sessions but haven't tried to religiously attend every single one. The sessions are available after the event as videos so any I miss, I can catch up later. The ones I have attended have generally been highly technical but in each one, there has always been a nugget of information or an increase in my appreciation of the topic.

Networking is always valuable at these events and the WWDC crowd is a different crowd from Macworld. It's been good to meet with various developers, both previous and potentially future ScreenCastsOnline participants, and it could be said that the price of the ticket was worth it for that.

The conference organization has been pretty good, dispute the early problems with the wifi, but I have to say, the conference food has been pretty dire! Plenty of it, but yuk!

The iPad has proved to be the perfect conference computer. Light, portable, amazing battery life, just fantastic.

Slightly different for me this time away, was an experiment to see just how easy it was to create and publish a show away from home. Despite the obvious impact of making sure the time was available, it wasn't too bad at all. I need to sort out a decent audio setup though, but editing and encoding wasn't problematic at all. The ridiculously fast wired Internet made uploading a breeze.

I'll have to break off now to grab some coffee and queue for the last sessions. Will post some more WWDC thoughts later.