{"id":1245,"date":"2016-12-11T01:05:55","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T01:05:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/?p=1245"},"modified":"2016-12-11T03:03:12","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T03:03:12","slug":"on-createworld-and-conferences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/funwithstuff.com\/blog\/on-createworld-and-conferences\/","title":{"rendered":"On CreateWorld and conferences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conferences are terrific, but not only for the explicitly planned sessions. It\u2019s the chats between sessions, it\u2019s the chance conversations in corridors, it\u2019s the random exchanges over a drink. Workshops can be great to open minds, and so can a good panel session. It\u2019s not every day you get to introduce one of the custodians of Scratch<\/a> to a new programming language, or hear how a new school is able to inspire its students<\/a>, or build a robot and then program it<\/a> \u2014 but I got to do them all over a couple of days.<\/p>\n

Opening your mind is always a good thing. If you spend a lot of time teaching something, you\u2019re an expert, often with a razor-focus, and that\u2019s not great for your ego. A great antidote to “knowing it all”\u00a0is coming to a conference like CreateWorld<\/a>, because it reminds you that there\u2019s a whole heap of stuff out there that you don\u2019t know. Scratch<\/a> is something I should know better. Building robots is something I should do more of, though I suspect I\u2019ll remain a software fan. And interactive visual art\u00a0can be\u00a0built on all kinds of apps I don\u2019t have my head quite around just yet.<\/p>\n

For example, TouchDesigner<\/a>, which I attended a workshop on, is a pretty amazing piece of software, and in the hands of an expert it can produce magic. It\u2019s node-based and superficially similar to Quartz Composer (which I know pretty well) but I could still fall off the deep end in Touch Designer. While I appreciate its power, I found it like driving without a seatbelt or a windscreen. Too many ways to break it irrevocably, no safety net, and I\u2019m just about curmudgeonly enough that some questionable UI decisions can put me right off. Still, others who have spent much more time in Unreal (or Unity, I guess) don\u2019t have the same resistance.<\/p>\n

(An aside: Certainly, I\u2019m glad that there\u2019s a wider world out there that isn\u2019t all following the Adobe-Apple UI model, but I don\u2019t want to completely re-learn the wheel every time, and I wish they wouldn\u2019t reinvent the basics of selecting and moving. No, I don\u2019t want to right-click and drag just to select something. No, I don\u2019t think I should be able to create a situation where all my different elements are such different sizes I can\u2019t see them all together. And yes, I do expect Undo to work reliably. Software that\u2019s effectively pulled up from its own bootstraps has a certain appeal, yet\u00a0for me it\u2019s too fragile. But anyway.)<\/p>\n

So why CreateWorld? I was invited to present a talk on FCP X. The talk itself will be online in the next few weeks, though I might re-record a presentation of it before then. In case I don’t, here are the slides, though the CoreMelt<\/a> giveaway was of course for attendees only.<\/p>\n