Russell Beattie

I've been blogging for crap lately. I'm getting back into it now. One of the things I forgot to mention a week or so ago is that I ended up paying the $100 and signing up for JavaOne Online, where you can view many of the presentations from both this year's and last year's conference.

Well, it was sort of a waste of money right now. Only the first few presentations from each category are ready at the moment, with a little red "coming soon" tagged at the bottom of all the other presentations. In total, there's probably only 40 or so live presentations ready from JavaOne 2003. It's been a couple weeks and I've slowly seen other presentations come online, but they've got quite a few left to go.

The presentations are *not* video streams. They are Flash-based presentations that combine the recorded voice of the presenter plus the slides from the presentation. This is only "okay" in my mind, since many of the presentations include demos, which you can only hear. I don't particularly like the Flash presentation app either - I've seen others that are *a lot* better, and more flexible.

I think it's still worth the price, since when everything's up and running, there'll be *a lot* of presentations to see, but it's definitely not as good as you'd think at first and right now, it's missing quite a lot. Give it time to cook before signing up.

-Russ