Comments

@BRENDA CUMBERLIDGE: Hey Brenda, I'm sorry but you've found the wrong Channel 9. We are *not* a TV station or channel, we are a technology focused website.

@Brian:  @CameronPike: @hkwoelf: Hey folks, let me apologize for the lack of a Blackberry app. I won't get into an argument about market share or anything like that, but essentially you know that is the type of decision that gets made in a situation like this.

If my team (the Channel 9 dev team) had been responsible for developing their own app, we likely would have made it for only one platform due to time constraints. We decided that by partnering with a 3rd party event app company (the folks behind EventBoard) we could get *more* device coverage than we ever would have been able to manage on our own. And it worked, we have an app across 4 platforms, but we don't have anything for your platform and I know that is frustrating. I know our web experience isn't really great on a small screen, but hopefully you'll be able to access the info you need while you are at the event.

We do have APIs available though, and if you are a crack Blackberry dev, just contact me at duncanma@microsoft.com and I'll help you get ahold of all of our session data.

Thanks

@Arjang: Above the video, on the right

@Giedrius: What format/player were you watching? HTML 5 or Silverlight? And what browser? For reasons outside our control, all of those different scenarios end up getting different files and the resolution can vary. I just watched in Silverlight and the quality was great, so it would be very helpful to know what your experience was based on.

@Joseph: Hey Joseph, I'm the video guy here on Channel 9... and I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Stream Manager? Are you having trouble watching the video?

@Ladewig: I suspect you have two different Live IDs (Microsoft Accounts), since this user:

http://channel9.msdn.com/niners/LadewigHotmail/achievements/TechEdNorthAmerica2013

has the achievement, but you do not...

Oh... and I just noticed, it is still in the 2011 list of top web design mistakes

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/top-10-mistakes-web-design/

@Dark_Halmut: so... while I get the experience you two are after, as a general rule... making our hrefs open in a new tab is very rude and disruptive to the user.

http://www.trilithium.com/johan/2005/03/target-blank/ 

http://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-top-ten-web-design-mistakes-of-1999/ (see #1 and #2)

(yep those references are old... because this was identified as a problem a long time ago)

I believe it should stay as it is, so then you can *choose* to open in a new tab instead of having that choice made for you.

@RobHouston: The plan is to record all breakout sessions. Sometimes there are issues and something doesn't get recorded or an issue comes up with copyright and we have to hold a session back... but generally we try to hit 100% of content goes online.

@cedricmi: Completely understand about the reduced functionality, we made some choices about what was important in the app experience and we decided it was all about watching videos. We will be adding in more features as we move forward. As far as poor navigation, I don't agree personally, I find navigating in the app to be super easy... perhaps if you gave some examples of where you found it difficult that would help us to plan future changes.

As far as the general comment about reduced feature sets in other apps, I can't speak to the general case, but I can imagine that if you have been developing a web application like Amazon over many years, the depth of features would exceed a new UI that you just created. Also, just like we did, I expect that each company is trying to optimize for certain use cases for their Windows 8 app, instead of just handling everything. I think this is true for app development across multiple platforms, reducing the scope of a touch-focused app to make it easier and simpler to use. Over time I'm sure that some of these apps will get to parity with their existing web experiences.