Finished up attending Supernova today. It was a different mix then some of the other more blogging focused ones that I've been to-- definitely older and more suitish. But definitely a good experience. Enjoyed the second day more than the first though I spent most of the time on irc in order to take part in the discussion (i see why people harp on the unconference thing). In fact the backchannel was worthwhile after all, debunking one panel member's assertion that lemonade stands are not to be found in San Francisco-- the collaborative #supernova effort hooked up an SD card reader to the camera with said picture on it in order to get it on flickr and shown to the room before the talk was done. Oh yeah, and there was some collaborative Mac-only concurrent note taking system that some were using together that was interesting. It allows people to take notes together at the same time, though is, as mentioned, just mac only. Worse, the name of it alludes me completely with no luck from google either. But an app whose time has come for sure.

Also had an interesting conversation about improving the UI in Prodigem. When I suggested that I was thinking about including a one-form wizard to add a more streamlined way to make a torrent, Kevin Marks from Technorati gave me the comparison that was sure to stop me in my tracks-- "thats the way Microsoft would solve the problem". Dead on. Why make a complex interface and then be forced to make a 2nd interface?

So a bit of brainstorming and the idea that I'm really starting to like is to make it so that uploaded files automatically create and get placed in a folder which is named the same as the file (perhaps I'll lop off the file extension for the folder name though). So for the first time user there's no folder creation, just an upload and the torrent form where they select the folder that was auto-created. This default behavior will be initially set on all accounts, but I'll add a setting switch to turn it off to get the traditional behavior. Thus an experienced user can just enable the more powerful behavior when they've got the hang of things. This is good. Hopefully I'll get to this soon.

By Gary Lerhaupt, 12:11 AM in prodigem | Comments (0)