While his was also a tale of a personal journey, I was definitely struck by the warmth and authenticity that he radiated. My friend Jose was first up with the second talk of the conference on the indie lifestyle. Jose Vazquez - Going Indie ( slides & audio) Saturday kicked off back at TechNexus with some solid breakfast sandwiches and much-needed coffee before getting back into the talks. I particularly enjoyed catching up my friends Phillip Bowden and Marko Karppinen and finally meeting in person Patrick Thomson, who I'd previously only known on Twitter. EveningĪfter the talks, we all headed back to the hotel to hang at the ground floor pub, Elephant & Castle. If this is your cup of tea, be sure to check out Brad's blog post on the topic. If that wasn't enough, he proceeded to show how such technology could be ported to the iPhone, where QC isn't available. All the while, he was explaining this in a way that made sense to me, where previous talks I've seen on augmented reality have left me scratching my head a bit. He demonstrated how GPU processing is up to the task of realtime video frame analysis and alteration in situations where normal CPUs would be likely to choke. Basically, he was able to wave around a yellow ball in front of his laptop's iSight camera and produce a video of a computer-drawn proxy object overlaid on top of the yellow ball. Brad highlighted QC as a prototyping tool for things like OpenCL, since you don't have to worry about all of the legwork for things like camera input, basic UI, and data exchange when you can quickly whip it up visually in QC.īrad then proceeded to blow us all away with a demo of color detection and augmented reality in QC. Also, like me, Brad shares a love for the underdog in Apple's development suite, Quartz Composer. His main point was that the GPU can be used for some very fast math and that we should be making better use of it. As David mentioned in his introduction, Brad is one of those guys who's always working on something that turns out down the road to be the next new hotness once everyone else catches up.īrad spoke about GPU-based processing on both the desktop and iOS. I was very much looking forward to Brad's talk as I'd met him at C4 before and he never fails to impress. Brad Larson - Realtime Camera Processing Using the GPU - ( slides & blog post) Ben's talk was the first of three during the weekend on "the indie life" (all of which turned out to offer unique insights, not overdoing the topic), and while I was expecting more of a talk on keeping at it on your own for a long stretch of time, it was more about a personal journey through technology and how the indie landscape has changed, mostly for the better. His talk immediately put my mind at ease, however.īen detailed his journey from Newton to Nokia, through Palm and Pocket PC, on to the present day on Android and the iOS platform. I knew roughly half of the slated speakers, but the conference's first, Ben Gottlieb, was known to me only in name (I've used his Twitter-OAuth-iPhone code on projects before). I was curious right off the bat to see what kind of calibre of speaker SecondConf would hold for us. Friday Ben Gottlieb - Living the Indie Life for the Long Haul SecondConf had become its own thing.ĭavid's explanation for the naming of SecondConf was twofold - Chicago is the Second City, and SecondConf represented a second chance for an indie conference and a second chance for many people to attend one given C4's popularity, then demise. But once David's opening remarks were done, I don't recall another mention of C4. Going into the conference, it was obvious that it was largely inspired by C4, so I was curious to see how much it called out C4 specifically. Once we finished dinner, David gave a brief welcome, thanking us for arriving and giving a brief background for anyone who wasn't familiar with the roots of SecondConf. Throughout the conference, the food quality and service was very good-to-excellent, particularly considering the buffet throughput and the size of the space. We got settled in and shortly thereafter, head organizer David Kinney set us loose on dinner. My friend Eric Sinclair was holding down the registration fort. When I got there Friday night, I met up with my friend David LeBer and my roomie Jose Vazquez and after checking in at the hotel, headed to TechNexus to register. Logistics & KickoffĪs a whole, the logistics of the conference seemed to go very smoothly. I haven't seen any comprehensive posts about it (but please feel free to comment if I've missed one) and I definitely think it's due one, so here goes.Įdit: I have posted my photos from the event as well. As a followup to my Looking forward to SecondConf post, I wanted to be sure to talk about the conference after the fact.
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