I found the SXSW Interactive sessions I attended to be, in nearly every case, thought provoking and of a fairly high quality, and I typically found myself jotting down many notes and things to followup, such as books or web sites mentioned. Over the course of the conference, three core trends or convergence points emerged, at least for me, given my intrinsic interests/biases: (1) lifestreaming/tracking/curation, (2) leveraging technologies for creative collaboration, and (3) data mining/analytics. Each of these (admitedly, rather broadly defined) areas has an associated set of panel sessions, apps, companies, books, etc, and over the next few weeks I will try to give a meaningful overview of each one.
In the mean time, I think it's useful to at least summarize the sessions I attended:
I had an amazing time in Austin for SXSW this year. I headed down on Thursday March 8, and was there for the entire duration of the festival, closing it out with the annual SXSW Softball Tournament on March 18. This was my second time in Austin, but my first time at SXSW. I'd booked my trip back in September 2011, and had developed pretty high expectations as March rolled around. It did not disappoint.
Although there are a number of different components to SXSW that happen in tandem, it consists of three core parts: Interactive, Music, and Film. The Interactive segment went from Friday March 9 - Tuesday March 13, at which point the Music segment kicked off and lasted until Sunday March 19. The Film portion spanned the entire duration, woven into both the Interactive and Music segments. Another major component was the SXSW Screenburn videogame convention, which will become SXSW Gaming in 2013, and perhaps become more prominent.
When I planned my trip back in September, the only hotel that had vacancies for the entire duration of the festival was the Wyndham Garden Hotel south of town, which is where I stayed. The hotel was pretty comfortable, but being so far from downtown where all of the action is turned out to be pretty inconvenient. I had to rely on the R&R shuttle service, which was pretty unreliable, at least for the first half of my stay. The next time I do SXSW, I will most definitely find a way to stay closer to downtown. Really that, and the few days of chilly rainy weather at the start of Interactive, were my only complaints.
During the next several weeks, I will attempt to process everything I experienced there: all of the seminars, interviews, panel discussions, book readings, and networking during Interactive, and all of the new bands I discovered and films I watched. In the midst of all of the varied content, there were definitely some convergence points and trends, which I will try to distill out into coherent narratives.
A quick update on the project management front: CulturedCode just recently released to the public a beta version of the upcoming cloud-based version of their app Things, which you can read about on their blog. After a couple of weeks trying to use Evernote for task/project management, I'm throwing in the towel and happy to be revisiting Things. I am, however, still on the lookout for the next big upgrade of Action Method Online, to see how it compares.
I also recently learned that Mariner Software released a major new update, version 6.0, of MacJournal, which I use. Although Evernote is not well suited for task/project management, I still think it can play a role for my extended notes on projects. So, I'll be attempting to gauge which one of these apps, MacJournal or Evernote, will be my de factor app for notes/journaling. One thing in Evernote's favor is that it is cloud-based, and as far as I can tell, v.6 of MacJournal does not yet introduce cloud sync.
Last January I set out to teach myself how to build an app for iOS (i.e. for the iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch). The notion had been swimming around in my head for more than a year, for example, I'd already joined Apple's iOS Developer Program the previous year (which has a subscription fee of $100/year), but I'd never fully committed to doing it until a year ago. I think there were a number of factors that contributed to my finally taking the plunge: (1) it's simply a pleasure to learn a new language (Objective C) and SDK, (2) it's also very appealing to learn a new marketable skill, which seems to be increasingly in high demand, (3) I had a fairly specific idea for an app to build, which I felt would provide for me an awesome creative outlet, as well as an excellent context for learning and (4) Apple has built an amazing piece of technology that is a pleasure to use, so why not get in on the action of trying to harness it?
I'm happy to report that I did indeed follow through with my plans, having clocked probably something in the range of 500-1000 hours in the evenings and weekends over the past year teaching myself Objective C and learning the iOS SDK, as well as designing and building my app (I'll describe that in more depth in future blog posts). As I mentioned, I had already subscribed to the iOS Developer Program, and so began by playing around in Xcode. There is a wealth of information through Apple's developer portal, but I tend to learn best from books, so I purchase a couple of O'Reilly books: 'Learning iPhone Programming', by Alasdair Allan and 'iPhone App Development, The Missing Manual', by Craig Hockenberry. These were ok, and certainly helped me start getting my hands dirty. I also started exploring some of Apple's WWDC videos that are available via the developer portal. I think by March of last year I had developed enough basic skills that I was able to build a very crude first prototype of my app, which was fun.
But, I definitely felt as though I was only scratching the surface, and had a pretty superficial understanding of the entire iOS platform. So, I endeavored to learn more and to go deeper. I came across what turned out to be a very effective source of training: Stanford's iPhone Application Development course (Winter 2010), which was available online through the iTunes U collection of educational videos. I later discovered the Fall 2010 version, taught by Paul Hegarty, which is even better than the first course. Today I learned that yet another semester of this course is available: iPad and iPhone Application Development (also taught by Hegarty), advertised in the video above. They cover some relatively recent developments, such as Storyboards and automatic reference counting, which look pretty cool.
Late last summer I discovered a couple of books that I highly recommend: 'Programming iOS 4' by Matt Neuburg and 'Core Data for iOS' by Tim Isted and Tom Harrington. I dedicated a couple of months reading both of these from cover to cover (well, mostly). The Neuburg book is very pedagogical and well organized. The Isted/Harrington book is decent, but derives it's value mostly from the fact that there aren't many books out there about the Core Data framework for iOS. More recently, as a more robust version of my app has taken shape, I read the book 'App Savvy' by Ken Yarmosh, which describes the process of distributing and marketing your app on Apple's app store.
Even with an entire year of fairly focussed self-guided learning, I still feel I have quite a bit yet to learn about building mobile apps in general, and for the iOS in particular. I feel that you can only take your understanding so far while learning on your own 'in a vacuum', and so a couple of weeks ago I started attending an eight week long 'Introduction to iOS Programming' course at the start-up incubator EnterpriseWorks in the Research Park on the UIUC campus, taught by Mike Haberman. Even though I know quite a bit already, I'm finding the course to be very useful in helping to fill in gaps here and there, and I'm starting to meet fellow mobile app developers, which is my main motivation for taking the course.
On March 8th, I'm flying down to Austin, TX for the week and a half long SXSW festival. I started planning my trip back in September and am super excited to be going…this will be my first time attending. If you've never heard of SXSW, check out the above video montage from the SXSW You Tube channel and Baratunde Thurston's video for SXSW newbies, where he refers to SXSW as the "Mardi Gras of the online world". It's a massive convergence of creatives and entrepreneurs from the worlds of tech, music and film…a celebration of resourceful innovation. For the past several days I've been pouring over their event calendar, tagging talks, movies, concerts, meetups and parties I'm interested in: go check out my schedule so far. There are so many intriguing events, it's a bit overwhelming. My strategy has been to tag anything that sounds at all interesting, and then I can make the tough choice later which ones to actually attend. They did a great job on the web interface for setting up your schedule. They also have a social component to their site (check out my profile), which will come in handy during the festival when you want to try and track down someone you might have met at an event. I've been to Austin in March, and it was very pleasant. I'll hopefully be blogging/tumblogging/tweeting throughout my trip as well. Should be a blast!
Last year I wrote a short review about Action Method Online, a cloud-based task/project management system that I'd just switched over to from Things. Over the past year I've found myself using it less and less, and once again have been looking for the 'killer app' for project management. Over on the AMO blog, they've announced a future overhaul is on the horizon, and I'll be very interested to see how this turns out.
In the mean time, I've decided to start using Evernote as a unified solution to store ideas and information, while at the same time tracking todo items. I think that's one of the problems I've had with AMO: I found myself always needing to expand on a task, but not being able to. That is, you can jot down a quick summary of the action item, but within the same widget view, you can't write additional notes. Additional notes can be written separately and associated with a specific project, but not tied closely with a specific todo item. In that regard, Things is starting to look more appealing again, but the problem with Things is that it is not cloud based, although they are actively working on that feature.
So, I'll be on the lookout for future versions of AMO and Things. But until then, I'll be trying my luck with Evernote as a light-weight project managment system.
About a year ago I bought a new Taylor acoustic guitar and acquired a renewed interest in songwriting (see related post). At the time I did a little bit of research into online sites for musicians, which fall into two broad categories: music sharing and music collaboration. Although I have an interest in both aspects, at present I'm mainly concerned with having a means to share my creations with others to get feedback, as well as possibly develop connections with other musicians and tap into their music feeds for inspiration, very much analogous to the Instagram photo sharing ecosystem. Last spring I decided to try using the site garageband.com, and posted a music player widget on this site so people could listen to my works-in-progress. Unfortunately the site shut down several months later in July 2010.
Recently, after doing a bit of research into the current music sharing landscape (see below), I've decided to try using SoundCloud, and posted one of their widgets on my music project page with my previous song sketches (warning: my vocals consist of humming, in order to get the melody down in the absence of lyrics...so there is an unavoidable repetitiveness). The widget is well designed, and even allows anyone to post a comment at any point in time along the track. Their service is focussed on providing tools to help create connections and communication between musicians, and they offer free desktop and mobile (iPhone and Android) apps in addition to their web-based interface. I've just begun to use the service, so I can't offer much of a critique yet. It looks promising, but doesn't seem to have hit that design/functionality sweet spot that Instagram has.
There are quite a few different music sharing sites to choose from. I chose SoundCloud mainly because it is designed for amateur musicians, while other sites like bandcamp.com and reverbnation.com include features targeting professional musicians, such as building a revenue stream. All three sites seem to be enjoying a growth trend over the past year, according to compete.com:
Sunday, March 25, 2012 at 5:57PM 
