The user experience of watching WWDC session videos on the iPad has always been a thorn in my side.
Back when the 2011 videos were new, I downloaded them all to my computer (in Standard Definition) and synced them all to my iPad so that I would have immediate offline access to them all should I find myself with a free hour to spend.
Sadly, the Videos application has one horrible UX problem: the names of each session video was very long, but the label in Videos is too short, and so they all endup being truncated, like "Session 205 - Introducing Collection Vi...". Even in landscape, mind you! Half of the screen was wasted with a graphic that added no useful information.
Halfway through the year, things got a lot better when the "iTunes U" app was released, and browsing the 2011 videos immediately became much better. The Videos app still has the same usability issue (and I think they should still fix it), but the iTunes U app is better so at least I can avoid the bad app.
Well, last night I downloaded the 2012 session videos and synced them over to my iPad, and now iTunes U has a horrible UX, because the videos from 2011 and 2012 are all mixed in the same list, and there's no way to tell from the session title which year it came from.
It's as if no one at Apple dogfoods their own applications with their own content.
Edit: just to be clear, none of my complaint here is about iTunes or the iTunes store. Those applications (though I admit the former is a bloated dumping-ground of features) have always behaved perfectly for me. Rather, I'm specifically refering to the "iTunes U" mobile app (see link below) and the "Videos" app that is bundled on the iPad.
I've always found iTunes and iTunes Store UI's to be deficient in many ways. My theory is that the continuous overloading of iTunes with a wide range of functionalities is creating a mess. What makes sense for music files doesn't necessarily make sense for videos, books or apps.
Searching the iTunes store is horrible, particularly on an iPad or iPhone. More often than not it is easier to use Google on a browser to search the iTunes store.
Importing content into iTunes is equally fraught with issues. I had to import a library of hundreds of music CDs from Windows Media. Thousands of songs. iTunes refused to maintain the grouping of songs per album (as they show-up in Windows Media) and required manually editing and sorting of thousands of songs in order to clean-up the mess. I understand that it has to do with metadata issues, but if MS can do it iTunes ought to be far more intelligent and do it right and offer to auto-magically fix the issues during import.
This is very similar to what happened with XCode 4. Before XC4 browsing documentation was a good experience. Now they chose to overload the iTunes-ish Organizer with all manner of things, including documentation. Now browsing the docs is ugly and difficult. It sucks.
What I'd like to see is for iTunes to return to being the best app for managing your music while new specialized apps are introduced to manage your iPhone and other content.
Totally agree with all you say. The current philosophy of just adding more and more disjoint functionality to existing apps is simply creating one hell of a mess. A mess to use, and (I strongly suspect) a mess to maintain.
Remember the old UNIX philosophy: Write programs that do ONE thing and do it well. Whoever is in charge of overall software development at Apple (both apps and dev tools) needs to have this drummed into him. Preferably with a large hammer. ;-)
Any recommendations for what sessions to watch first? What are the most substantial new features, one should pay close attention to with respect to iOS?
Now I know why they've been this fast: The other years you always got to see the presenter, this year you just see the slides and get the audio. So they simply had to join the audio source with the slides. Works fine though and having them earlier is certainly nice.
For the last few years, at least, the 'kickoff' overview videos include the presenters, while most (all?) of the session videos are just the slides and audio.
For several years at least, only the biggest room, Presidio, has had actual video cameras. I think this is the first year that they didn't use the video cameras even in that room, though.
Try this link to see all the developer videos available in iTunes (you have to be logged in to apple dev first) in order to have a choice of HD or SD for big or small video sizes:
Wow they're quick.
Does anybody else have issues downloading them via iTunes?
I'm on Windows here at work and as soon as the download finishes it is deleted, nowhere to be found on disk or iTunes. The machine is even activated in the iTunes store. Guess I'll have to keep streaming until I can download them tonight on my Mac...
Yes I do. I also see the videos I added from the store in iTunes U. They all have the "get" button. When I click it the video is downloaded. Once the download finishes however, the "get" button reappears and that's it. The Video also isn't in the iTunes folder on disk...
EDIT: Nevermind, I watched the videos on the iPad and will download the others tonight on my iMac.
Does anyone else have problems with the sound? I've had two videos stop the sound at some point while the slides still continue. Reloading doesn't seem to help, it still stops at the same point.
edit: Nevermind, I think it was my SSD running out of space. Still waiting for that damn retina macbook ;).
I had this issue as well with the web streaming versions and plenty of free disk space. I ended up just pulling them up in iTunes which downloaded the whole thing and then it played fine. Something to do with the adaptive HTTP streaming I would guess.
I have the sample code for 2010 and 2011. 2010 was neatly packaged up in one big zip file. The 2011 samples are mixed in with the rest of the Library sample code. But you can tell what was used at WWDC because the timestamp will be updated to June.
So to view these videos, I need to be running Safari for the streaming version, or have iTunes installed to download the videos?
Can someone explain what's the benefit of doing it that way? I'm on Windows (Ubuntu also, in a VM) running Chrome. Sure, I could install Safari or iTunes, but why do I have to? (And don't say "So you can watch the videos.")
It's not specifically Safari; it's the Quicktime codec library which is bundled with Safari (and iTunes). You can just download Quicktime standalone and anything NPAPI-supporting will gain the ability to play the videos.
That would make sense, except that I have Quicktime installed, and it works fine on Apple's movie trailers site.
It's fine, I'm barking up the wrong tree here TBH. Apple makes it clear that they want you to use their products to view this developer stuff. It's the same type of lock-in that others try to do, so they're not the only guilty party. Just unfortunate when companies do that.
+1 and thanks for all the positive-toned posts and comments you have added recently (I didn't look beyond the first page). This seems to be lacking among us nowadays.
>It's fine, I'm barking up the wrong tree here TBH. Apple makes it clear that they want you to use their products to view this developer stuff.
It's also probably more convenient to them: they have this huge system for content delivery through iTunes, so they might as well use it.
That said, from a promotional aspect, it would make more sense to have the videos readily available for Windows/Linux users also, so they can lust over the development options for Cocoa/iOS.
It's not like they wont have to buy a Mac to program for it anyway, so it would do Apple no harm to lure them with openly available videos.
Apple developers need to sign a NDA with the creation of an developer account. These videos are under NDA cause it is beta software and confidential. This is the reason why you need an account to watch those videos.
BUT even if they weren't under NDA this is totally ok! Going to the conference would have cost you minimum 1 week time and >1500$. You get all of this for free after only four days the conference happened. The only thing they ask for is an account and you are complaining about this? I will never understand such attitude!
Neither have any of those. Just because everybody does it (require registration), does not automatically make it good and ok. Sorry, you can downvote me if you like.
Yeah, RIM has the same requirement when you try to view content from their developer conferences (DevCon, Jam, World, etc.). It is an issue that BB developers have clamoured for the removal of too.
However, the actual documentation and tools don't require an account to access. Just conference content.
You'd be surprised. They might have some videos and material for free (as does Apple, btw), but lots of other development stuff from them requires an MS/Google account.
Back when the 2011 videos were new, I downloaded them all to my computer (in Standard Definition) and synced them all to my iPad so that I would have immediate offline access to them all should I find myself with a free hour to spend.
Sadly, the Videos application has one horrible UX problem: the names of each session video was very long, but the label in Videos is too short, and so they all endup being truncated, like "Session 205 - Introducing Collection Vi...". Even in landscape, mind you! Half of the screen was wasted with a graphic that added no useful information.
Halfway through the year, things got a lot better when the "iTunes U" app was released, and browsing the 2011 videos immediately became much better. The Videos app still has the same usability issue (and I think they should still fix it), but the iTunes U app is better so at least I can avoid the bad app.
Well, last night I downloaded the 2012 session videos and synced them over to my iPad, and now iTunes U has a horrible UX, because the videos from 2011 and 2012 are all mixed in the same list, and there's no way to tell from the session title which year it came from.
It's as if no one at Apple dogfoods their own applications with their own content.
Edit: just to be clear, none of my complaint here is about iTunes or the iTunes store. Those applications (though I admit the former is a bloated dumping-ground of features) have always behaved perfectly for me. Rather, I'm specifically refering to the "iTunes U" mobile app (see link below) and the "Videos" app that is bundled on the iPad.
http://www.apple.com/education/itunes-u/