Post VSLive! New York City Report
I have just returned from speaking at VSLive! in New York City. The conference was far smaller than I expected. I would have thought there would be about twice as many attendees, but it was a very smooth-running, low-key conference. Although the conference hotel was in Brooklyn, it was only a ten-minute commute to get to lower Manhattan.
This was the first speaking engagement at which I used my MacBook Pro for my presentations instead of a Windows-based laptop, so this was the "big test". Murphy's Law states that whatever can go wrong, will. Well the my MacBook Pro made Murphy its ***, and I'm happy to say that the presentations (given in Keynote instead of PowerPoint) went off without a hitch and were absolutely gorgeous. After my first talk, the A/V guy stopped me on my way out of the room to show me how much more crisp the recording looked as compared to the previous presenter who used PowerPoint on Windows. He was right. the PowerPoint presentation looked very pixellated and blurry, while the Keynote presentation was clearly more ... well ... clear.
Parallels performed like a champ, not crashing once. In fact, as I look back, Parallels hasn't crashed since I installed it. There are many rumors about the recently-released beta of a new Parallels version being quite buggy, but I was using the latest released version. Both of my talks went off without a hitch.
It was great to see my friends and to see some on New York. There are always lots of great sessions at these industry conferences, so to those who have never attended, I highly recommend them.