DemoCamp After-math

Jordan Christensen has a thorough write-up already, no need for me to duplicate his efforts.

The projector situation... For those who were in the audience, it was dicey.

1. First, it seemed to have temporarily killed Anand's laptop. So, the organizers skip to the next presenter while he troubleshoots.
2. When I get up there, I plug in my iBook, it comes up, blinks a few times, then shifts into low-res (800x600) - the kind where it shows a smaller screen inside a screen, not the fuzzy pixel kind. And the projector is black.
3. Joey says, "Sometimes it helps to pull out the dongle..?" So, I try that. That put iBook into weirdo sleepy-land: the screen was black, but there was no "breathing" light. Projector is still black.
4. That puts me out of the running... I retreat to a table for a bit. There's some speculation that the projector won't work with iBooks, but that seems unlikely to me.
5. I'm more worried about li'l Fezzik.Oh, and did I forget to mention that the server hosting the public app died over the weekend? It came back up late Sunday night, but in a weakened, barely functional state. "No problem! I'm running the demo on Fezzik!" Ha.
6. Repeatedly holding down on the power button finally gets Fezzik to reboot. In the meanwhile, the organizers bring up fifth presenter, Sasha Uritsky, whose laptop also fries. I think they also brought up a donor laptop from the crowd, which worked, but was password protected (and the user was no longer in the room!)
7. Fezzik was back up at that point, and seemed to have recovered from the weirdness. So, I went back up to the podium to try again.
8. Again, I got the small screen. This time, we try the "Detect Displays" button in Display Preferences. No luck. By fiat or luck, I decide to try manually setting the resolution... 800x600 got me a fuzzy screen, but still black projector... But, 1024x768 gave me a working projector!

Otherwise, the presentation went pretty well. There was a goof with the iCal export, but it wasn't the app, it was the demoer (me): Earlier in the day, I had forwarded iCal to August so that the event export would "pop right up there", but when Fezzik blacked out, iCal re-set itself to May... and I didn't notice until this morning. Demo jitters, I guess.

For my part in the audience, I thought BlogScope was significantly more impressive than I anticipated, and I thought the crowd gave him a hard time for it not being the "end-all, be-all" of information gathering. BumpTop is extremely slick, and you can get a good sense of it from the video. Somebody needs to get Anand's demo in front of Steve Jobs, I suspect this guy has a lot to offer the HCI field.

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