JD on EP

NB: Links will be in reverse-chronological order, newest first. I may refactor the page later today.

Afterthought essays:

Ryan Stewart: "At the Engage event this week, it was interesting to hear people as they started to grok Apollo. It really isn't a web technology or a desktop technology. I compare it to WPF at times, but I think in a lot of ways, the only similarity is that they run on the desktop. Apollo is about creating a new breed of application and this public alpha will give us an indication of what developers can do with that mindset." (That first sentence has a startling phrase, of being able to actually perceive how someone else's thinking changes.)

Paul Kedrosky examines if the event had an effect on the company's stock price; promises a followup.

Dion Almaer: Now sees Apollo as "Web+ rather than Desktop-", and wonders about abstraction layers vs native-code dependencies.

Anne Zelenka is seeing evidence that network applications beyond the browser (or emailer, or RSS reader) might be both possible and desirable.

Ted Patrick: "Our guests made this conference a wild success. We invited some of the best minds in the software/web industry to attend and Adobe's best customers to present. It was a rare treat to listen and understand the perspective of all our guests. Engage was intended to showcase leading projects and to understand our guests perspective in an open format. I learned a ton over the last 2 days and walked away with new friends/contacts and a fresh perspective on the future of the web and software." Much more too.

Links found Wed Feb 28:

atsushi ties together various on-site reports to highlights new on Virtual Ubiquity's Buzzword in Japanese (see rollover hints). There's mention in a Hebrew weblog too, but my translation efforts sputtered.

Generally today the echoes from splogs have hidden new comments... I see lots of blogs reprinting Robert Scoble's items in order to garner ad revenue, and so have to recognize repeated phrases in the search engines in order to avoid time with frauds. MyFeedz eliminates duplicates, but doesn't seem to have as wide a sample universe yet, and page delivery is significantly slower than Google Blogsearch. After a few hours the blogsearch engines get damaged by false results.

Ryan Stewart, at TechCrunch, reports on demos by Virtual Ubiquity, Scrybe, yourminis, and Intelisea.

Simeon Simeonov has a fascinating post about the afterhours discussions, including a section on the tricky aspects of timing the disclosure of business plans to potential allies. "... Ultimately, investing is a reputation business, a repeatable game where news of bad behavior spreads and where those who misbehave see their deal flow dry up. That's the market feedback system that keeps things from going out of control. Startups are most likely to get burned in one-off situations where the game is not repeated, where bad behavior has limited consequences." Simeon also has a set of notes on the presentations.

Ryan Stewart describes the experience of being in that roomful of people, and the Twitter backchannel.

Dave Coletta talks about the day, from the Viritual Ubiquity point of view.

Tom Ortega says "This is what I thought Silicon Valley would be like", and has notes from the day.

Links from 4pm - 8pm PST:

Tim O'Reilly on Virtual Ubiquity: "This is a REALLY sweet word processor. It's got amazing typography, pagination, resizing and reflowing, all in Flash... It may well just be the slickest word processor I've seen anywhere." Robert Scoble introduces the keyclick metric. (For info on different Boards of Directors, see below.)

Continuing session notes by Jeff Barr and Ryan Stewart.

Tim O'Reilly discusses how medical technology is showing early uses for the new technologies.

Richard Ziade reflects on the new issues for endusers, developers, designers, and the project-requirements process.

Links from 8am-3pm PST:

Richard MacManus, like me, is not present at the event. He summarizes the morning's reading he has done of first-person reports.

Dion Almaer comments on the use of a Greasemonkey extension during an Apollo demo. (If memory serves, that use is to examine or change specific parts of the page during this demo, and is not intrinsic to the Apollo runtime itself.

Ryan Stewart had a guest post at TechCrunch, with lengthier summary of audience discussion during the morning sessions. "A lot of the basic information on Apollo has been covered pretty extensively, including here on TechCrunch, so I'll focus on the things that got the most discussion amongst the bloggers here."

Robert Scoble offers a general sense of the morning, with special emphasis on how these technologies compare with Microsoft and clientside Java. "Adobe's Kevin Lynch says they try to extend the Web where Microsoft looks, he says, to extend Windows."

David Berlind has an analysis of the Brightcove presentation, with photos of the screen. Sample:

What really sets Aftermix apart from other social video sites are two features. First, the ability to record video directly to the Web. Second, none of the tools to create or edit the videos come from locally loaded software. In terms of recording directly to the Web, Allaire showed how with a very basic Web cam, he can record a video clip that can immediately be uploaded to Brightcove's servers where it becomes instantly available for inclusion in whatever video you're editing (I can see this coming in really handy for doing quick voice overs).

Cote has a lengthy essay on Apollo and other technology, coming from a skeptical point of view... good reading.

James Governor has a great description of the user-experience requirements of the Acesis medical app.

A Techmeme cluster, which could surface more articles throughout the day.

Jeff Barr talks more about Brightcove's Aftermix, and offers a mindmap of Kevin's session. He later offers descriptions of other sessions too: keep scrolling.

David Berlind: A lengthy overview of the ideas behind Kevin Lynch's presentation.

Tim O'Reilly gives an overview of the early sessions, ties them together with user experience and Web 2.0 principles. I particularly like this paragraph:

Is what's easiest for the producer of content (asset reuse and the ability to create integrated experiences across platforms) really what's best for the user? Only if content developers use that power wisely. Kathy Sierra reminds us that success in the social media era is about creating "I rule" moments for users. So when I hear a software vendor talking about creating "I rule" moments for content suppliers, I worry that they're on the wrong track, unless they work to offset the natural tendency towards "efficiency" for the provider rather than great experiences for the user.

Ryan Stewart describes a Jeremy Allaire presentation on Brightcove's Flex-based video editor. (I suspect Ryan will be posting session descriptions to both his ZDNet and personal blogs throughout the day, and so I won't post further individual links here.)

James Governor: "The idea behind the event is to unveil a bunch of cool apps based on Adobe's latest technologies, and to bring some smart people together to talk about them."

Chafic Kazoun: Multiple entries. Timeline screenshot (Apollo, Flex, CS3, media). Also discusses his SimCube project, a learning tool for medical professionals.

Ryan Stewart: On Kevin Lynch keynote, diverse audience interests, timeline.