The CFUNITED Recordings: A Pragmatist's Perspective

by Ryan Hartwich

Earlier in the year I reviewed CFUnited 2006 for both Fusion Authority and the ColdFusion Developer's Journal (CFDJ). I covered my impressions of the conference as a whole and the issues one should consider when thinking about attending a similar conference. I will now extend my review of the conference by focusing entirely on the recording of the sessions offered by Teratech, the conference organizer.

Teratech is making the audio recordings, PowerPoints and code examples available to all attendees free of charge. For the first time, they are also offering video of the sessions, for $200 to attendees and $649 to non-attendees. What does a video recording entail, and should you pay the premium for this feature?

To access the recordings and other conference materials you log in to the conference site, where a simple though not very elegant HTML interface allows access to the files. Recordings are only available online in a streaming format and are not being made available for mass download or DVD. This doesn't bother me since ColdFusion programmers are obviously well connected to the Internet and are used to streaming. Most of the roughly 60 sessions have links to download the PowerPoint presentations, demo code and MP3 audio files, which are 50+ MB. Only about three-quarters of the presentations are available as video, probably due to technical difficulties. Fortunately, all but five presentations have either audio or video/audio available.

Access to the supporting materials is good, the PowerPoints appear to be those used in the actual presentations, rather than early betas, and the supporting code supplied by the presenters will be useful to many.

The videos are actually presented as part of a Captivate-based presentation with the majority of the screen displaying the PowerPoint presentations used by the speakers. The outline of the slides and a relatively small window for the speaker's video are on the left-hand side of the Captivate window. The video is fairly good quality showing the lectern, laptop and speaker.

What becomes eminently clear to the viewer however, is that a large number of the presenters use their laptops to demonstrate code, debugging and browser output. Sadly, the videos do NOT show what is happening on the laptop and being projected to the screen.

Let me repeat that. The videos do NOT show the actual demonstrations that the audience is seeing.

Unless the speaker included quality screen shots of their code in Dreamweaver, the file running in the browser, and the nifty animations of Flex running as screen shots, you won't see it either and few, if any, did this.

The video of the speaker doesn't dramatically benefit the educational aspects of the recording; I'd rather have screen sharing from the laptops. Which is more important, a talking head, or the screen sharing of code, Dreamweaver, CF output and debugging?

Hearing the presenter make statements like, Field 1 is this, field 6 is a multidimensional array... if I click on it... and not actually seeing anything but a static and unrelated PowerPoint on the screen and the speaker at a lectern doesn't particularly help. It is natural to want to see how dragging an item into a Flex window responds or making a CSS alteration affects the HTML output.

With the increasing focus on ColdFusion's ability to generate user interfaces, connect with Flex 2, and manage a user's interaction with a website, the inclusion of screen sharing in the videos is imperative. Teratech made a concerted effort to augment their CFUnited offerings in 2006 and it shows, in this professionally built video archive. I can only hope that the 2007 conference includes screen sharing/demonstration capabilities. I would be willing to lose the talking head/camera feature to gain screen sharing.

Should you buy the videos for the conference? No. Attendees receive the audio and supporting PowerPoints and code and this is ample for the now six-month old content. Non-attendees can probably garner sufficient materials online to compensate for the lack of video of a talking head, particularly since the most important aspect of the presentation, the demonstrations are not available.

If Teratech offers screen sharing/demo capability in future conference recordings, then this may very well be a worthwhile purchase. I would also like to recommend that a tiered payment offering be made. Many potential purchasers may want to buy five to ten videos, rather than the whole conference, which is more than sixty videos. While the videos are intended as a supplement to attendees, the audio is both sufficient and free.

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