Mix08 Day 3
Today was the last day at Mix. As with many conferences, attendance is low and the content is not as high of caliber as the rest of the conference. I'll give some quick reviews of the sessions I attended and then some closing thoughts about the conference.
Bring Your Data to Life with Windows Presentation Foundation
This session didn't bring anything new to the table with respect to WPF. Anson Tsao recapped how WPF handles data binding and using templates. He did have an interesting demo that showed off using a 2d interfaces within a 3d application. He had two apps that were fully functional, but would rotate in and out primary focus based upon where the user's focus was.
Nerd + Art: Ten Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist
This presenation was given by Nathan Dunlap and Robby Ingebretsen from Idenity Mine. The goal of the talk was to give designers a few snippets of code that they could use to improve their user experiences The snippets are available here. It is a simple .vsi file that is geared mainly towards designers. The snippets would look pretty familiar to most developers, but it should hopefully empower designers to take a look behind their xaml to better leverage all of WPF and silverlight
Effective User Interfaces in Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight
This is the session that I will remember the most out of the entire conference. This is not because of the content, but because of the scary way in which it ended. it was delivered by a panel of engineers from Innotive The session began with some mildly interesting interesting lessons learned about designing for touch displays. The have built touch screen kiosks for Infiniti and have used the deep zoom technology to work with some large images. Some of the struggles they mentioned were trying to get people to use large touch screens. People see these large flat panel displays and don't readily understand they can touch them. In an interesting tidbit, they mentioned how they solved this by paying a college student to go and touch the display every few minutes. From this point, Peter Chang, Inntive's CTO took over to demo an app that didn't look quite ready. He stumbled through the presentation that had a few bugs. As he was presenting, he slumped forward and lost consciousness and hit the ground like a rag doll. People tried attending to him, but he was completely limp. It scared a lot of people in the session, including myself. I asked if anyone was a doctor. In retrospect, I should have known the answer to my own question... how many doctors would be attending this session. Peter regained consciousness and sat down on a chair on stage. After some encouragement, they brought him off stage and tended to him. It turns out Peter was working very hard on the presentation for the last 3 days. The talk pretty much wrapped up from there. They mentioned he was ok. He sure gave all that stayed around for the last session of the day a good scare. I'm glad he's ok.
Final thoughts
- Where's the new stuff????
When you compare the MIX to previous Mix's, there's really nothing new here... Silverlight 2.0? Yeah, we all like to have new controls and a better model for laying out apps, but this pales in comparison to last year's introduction of Silverlight 1.0.
- WIFI in hotel rooms is a joke
While there was free wifi at the conference, right after the last conference, we lost Internet connectivity. After heading back to the hotel room at the Venetian, I'm still surprised how hotels still find a way to charge $10/day for "high-speed" Internet that is hardly any faster than what I can get from a tethered phone. I'd love to see Hotels go the way that starbucks has with their wifi strategy. If I only want to browse a small amount to check email or check my RSS
feeds, give it to me for free. If I plan on using it as my office for the day, I'll be happy to pay for quality Internet.