Month: July 2008
Quick comments live from F8
The Facebook F8 conference is underway and its quite the collection of folks. There is twittering, blogging, live video streaming all happening at the same time. It was a bit insane. More people were looking down at their laptops typing than actually watching the speaker talk. Here are just a couple of thoughts I had during the keynote:
- Regardless of his net worth, Zuckerberg is a terrible public speaker
- They need to hire someone that can scroll through slides properly
- There are now 90 million Facebook users
- 2/3 of the users are international
- Their approach on internationalization is right on and they are releasing the tool to all application developers. That’s exciting if Facebook can continue to push into international markets.
- 400,000 developers
- New profiles isn’t that awesome and there were obvious issues with the rollout
- Facebook Connect demos were exciting — Digg, Citysearch, Sixapart
- Lots of guiding principles for application develpment — no more spammy apps
- New developer website released
- New verification and great apps program released — makes a ton of sense
Overall, very cool.
Cannot upgrade iPhone to 2.0 Firmware
I just tried to upgrade to the new iPhone 2.0 but couldn’t. There are reports that its “bricking” older generation iPhones. I’m wondering if they took it down to fix some bugs.
Oh well, I’ll just try again later.
iPhone Apps Coming out Soon!
Remember that old web based Flash game called “The Penguin Swing“? It sure did waste a few hours of my life back in the day. Well, they have come out with a Viking version for the iPhone leveraging the tilt-sensing abilities of your iPhone or iTouch. Ok, so its stupid but there are some interesting things to gleam from this.
- iPhone Apps is due out this week and I believe this will be more interesting than watching those Apple idiots line up for a new iPhone. (Can you believe the service pricing?)
- Wii is to gaming as the iPhone is to mobile apps — Just like the Wii, the iPhone should introduce some interesting application leveraging the unique features of the iPhone.
I’m still putting my thoughts together for a more robust post about the iPhone development environment but my first reaction is that they did a great job. Barring of course the criticism of the lack of API’s such as background tasks, it should be enough to get going with the majoring of iPhone applications. xCode and all of its supporting tools is really well bundled together including the slick iPhone emulator.
Anyway, I’m looking forward to the iPhone Apps store release this week. It should be interesting.
Registered for Facebook F8 ’08
I’ve taken a moment to sign up for F8 ’08. Unfortunately, I was not able to attend last year because of a business trip to Europe but this time I’m in town. A number of my friends and ex-coworkers will be in attendance representing their new companies. It will be interesting to see what they unveil this year to try to top last year.
If you’re going to be attending the event, let me know and we can meet up.
