My first DevCon was last year so I feel I have very little to compare too. When I came back from last years DevCon I was energized and excited. That is a feeling that continues to get rarer as I get older and I was taken back that a DevCon could excite me like that.
I saw about 80-90% of the DevCon and while I found it all interesting it lacked the excitement and I feel I learned a lot less. In part because I learned a lot from just talking to other people while there but also in part because the panels just seemed less interesting.
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I am excited about Android support but we got no demo and really all we did get is one sentence saying it is being worked on. Well that and it will have most of the same features as FileMaker go witch is big. As a non Apple user it would be amazing to be able to make things I can use on the go. This has been one of the main reasons I have considered developing on a different platform.
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Converting a document/form to fields by dragging a scan could save me some time. Will be interesting to try once it is released.
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I like that they continue to be committed to onsite as well as the cloud. My whole business model requires offline access. I continue to fear that in time onsite will be phased out.
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I did the training sessions last year and missed them this year. The shortness of the classes and the amount of people in them limited my ability to cement what I learned but it still gave me all kinds of ideas that I later dug into more and implemented into my applications.
Over all I feel like they did a decent job with what they had to work with. I am not at all sorry I took the time to participate. I am very happy to see the next DevCon being on the West Coast. Alaska is a long ways away from Florida.