Saturday, June 23, 2007

Developer Conferencing still needs work

This morning we have a two and a half hour conference on Skype with text, audio and video (we actually met on Windows Live). Seeing me first thing in the morning isn't pleasant and on the weekend too, but we gave it a go anyway.

The idea was to hack together some ideas for a mobile app we're working on. We all have 8 MB (actually around 6MB) broadband and are based around the UK (three of us).

It went... ok. As a start, SharedView is alpha, not beta. 200 year old NetMeeting worked great, but SharedView didn't work so well, cutting out and leaving large grey blocks on the screen (we couldn't use NetMeeting due to some Vista sharing issue for one of the guys).

I want a true, developer hackable platform that i can share and collaborate on, with audio and video built in - without paying a fortune or requiring anything more than an 8MB line (i remember doing Netmeeting app sharing on a 56k line).

Still, i'm an optimist and the experience was not too bad - it's certainly hard being the POC for some of these ideas, but in truth the only part which was a bit of a let-down was a SharedView product that is in "beta". If they can improve that then our experience will be a LOT better.

Now for some breakfast and to bring together some graphical ideas we had!

Oh, it did occur to me that it would be neat to do all this stuff in Second Life ;)

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