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FEATURE
Too Much Fun!
What happened in Austin doesn't stay in Austin
Issue: 13.3 (May/June 2015)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 31,615
Starting Page Number: 27
Article Number: 13304
Related Web Link(s):
http://austin.about.com/od/austinattractions/p/Bats_in_Austin.htm
http://www.xdevmag.com/downloads/batmovie.mov
Excerpt of article text...
Arriving in Austin, Texas, I was greeted with a ping on my iPhone welcoming me to the city. This was a nice touch from the folks at Xojo—prior to leaving home I'd installed the Passbook pass they'd released and it detected I was in Austin. Similarly, when I eventually arrived at the Xojo Developer's Conference (XDC) registration desk at the Radisson hotel, it knew I was there and brought up the pass.
In my case—being the tech geek that I am—I had to be a total nerd and use my just-delivered Apple Watch to register. The Passbook app on the watch displayed the barcode and Dana Brown was able to scan it with her XDC registration app (see Figure 1). Just like that I was ready for the conference!
Using Passbook was a new experience for XDC. It worked really well, both for attendees and for Xojo. In fact, on Thursday, there was an addition to the schedule as Xojo engineer Greg O'Lone explained how he built the pass, the Xojo registration iOS app, and the XDC app (both web and iOS this year). Most of the technologies are going to be open-sourced by Xojo so all of us can take advantage of the tools and use them in our own projects.
After registering and getting my badge and cool Xojo t-shirt, I headed over for breakfast and began connecting with folks I hadn't seen in a year. After attending so many conferences, almost everyone is familiar, but it sometimes takes me a moment to associate faces with names. This is always the best part of XDC. The sessions are informative and useful, but meeting people in a social gathering just can't be duplicated in any other way.
An At-Home Feel
Every XDC has a certain unique atmosphere generated by the conference location, setting, session lineup, attendees, and potential news. At the Radisson in downtown Austin (see Figure 2), we had the second floor conference area to ourselves, complete with two seating areas, the registration table, food tables, and the two conference rooms (see Figures 3-8). This gave us plenty of places to congregate and there were groups of people gathered in chats or huddled over laptops discussing code all over the place. It was definitely one of the best atmospheres for an XDC that I can remember. (Last year in Vegas the hotel was so huge we felt invisible, and we had to walk through lots of non-Xojo areas just to find each other.)
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