IT Bytes

Computing power, screens, and networks: Impact on authored content – Tim Regan
Tim
was, by his own admission, a little nervous presenting but he shouldn’t
be. I would group the mobile part of the presentation in the, ‘ways to
visualize data’ presentations with a specific focus on analysing
literature. I found it very interesting but since I don’t have a need
to analyse patterns in literature the specifics are of much to use to
me directly. But again it re-enforced my interest in thinking about
different ways to present data. Good presentation but some difficult
for me to use in my every-day role – 7/10

Beauty & the Geek – The Perfect blend of left & right brain – Conchango
Following
in the MS Expression wave of designers & developers working
together Conchango shared their experiences. I’ve worked in this area a
bit and it was interesting to hear how they were getting around some of
the problems, e.g. no version control for the designer. I thought it
was interesting to make someone the owner of the xaml. I was a little
surprised to hear that the developer spent so much time in Blend. I
think that the separation of Blend and Visual Studio is a great way to
ring-fence the responsibility. I agree that Visual Studio does need
better basic handling of xaml in the design, at least to be able to
navigate around the visual tree and highlight the xaml, but apart from
that leave Blend well alone unless you really are a designer! It was
also interesting to hear the pair-programming style of working (even
more reason for the dev to leave Blend alone) as in my experience there
is usually a fair amount of delay between the developer and the
designer re-synchronizing their efforts. Interesting presentation and
it’s nice to hear the experience of others. I think the developer vs.
designer jokes are a little weak these days but I can forgive
that…oooh get me 😉 8/10

Behind Every Great Site There is Great Data – Eric Nelson
I’ve
had the good fortune to attend a number of Microsoft seminars hosted by
Eric over the years, yes I do remember him joining (good grief).
Although obviously Eric works for Microsoft but I’ve always thought his
presentations are from the point of view of their customers, i.e.
telling us as it is rather than as it should be. To be honest I nearly
didn’t attend this as I’ve had some exposure to these technologies and
had written some of them as too imature, but I thought it would be good
to hear Eric’s impression. In this presentation Eric did a good job on
untangling the differences between Linq to SQL and Linq to Entities (he
has a great diagram for this on his blog) and although I still remain sceptical about the EDM I certainly feel more comfortable understand
how keep the path to it open. I would have liked a few min’s about
where this fits into a n-tier design, e..g where to put the business
rules but overall I’m glad I attended. 9/10

Mobile User Experience – Inspiring new ways of design & development – Antony Ribot
Antony
talked about the issues of providing a quality and clear interface for
the various mobile devices out there. I felt the content was fine but,
for me, the presentation wasn’t as slick. This resulting in a slightly
muddled message, however Antony is clearly a smart person, perhaps a
bit of nerves. 6/10

Sneak Peak and end – Paul Foster
A few little demos and adverts and a Balmer-like burst from Paul 😉 He did re-enforce the importance of letting people have the time to be creative, something I yearn for in my current post.

For Day 1…

Day 1
Keynote: Bill Buxton & Scott Guthrie (and others)
Great start from Bill who gave a passionate talk about the importance of design and user experience, including his personal mantra of, Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design
are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender,
and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name. He backed that up with a great advert from a mountain bike company showing a rider have an exciting ride through a stream but you cannot see the make (or model) of the bike he’s on.

Bill talked about Jonathan Ive the designer behind Apple’s IMac & Ipod. He explained that he was at Apple during the bad years and it was only when Steve Jobs took over was he given the chance. The important points I took from that are (well it was obvious)  a) the company needs to put design at equal importance as any other part of developing & releasing a product b) you need to free employees’ from the n+1 release treadmill and allow them to fulfil their potential. I really enjoyed Bill presentation.

Scott’s presentation didn’t excite me quite as much, to be fair there wasn’t a lot of stuff that was new to me. He introduced folks from ITV and (InnerAthlete???). Again the ITV presentation was all about streaming…again. Ok I can see that it’s important to application developers because it helps to increase the Silverlight user-base but for me streaming video is not where the value of Silverlight is. So it was good to see the application side represented by the Athletic training software. Although the application design wasn’t my cup of tea.

Overall I would have preferred to leave after the first part of the keynote, but I’m sure for members of the audience who haven’t been exposed to Silverlight before then it would have been a great keynote. 7/10

It’s not necessary to be understood – Brendan Dawes
As a developer these are exactly the sort of sessions that I attend Mix for. Brendan showed lots of interesting ways to visualize data, although I doubt I could actually use any of them directly it helps me approach showing data in a different way. It also encouraged me to play more with development rather than only create things with a specific business purpose. 9/10

Designing for the Wild: Sketching Experiences – Bill Buxton
More of the same from Bill, with some interesting views about how much detail you put into your early designs and how many proposed solutions you deliver early on. It certainly struck a cord with all too many prototypes making it into a product because they were the only choice rather than necessarily being the best solution. I did feel that Bill didn’t offer advice for smaller companies working on much tighter budgets where even if you provide the roughest sketches to a client you’ll have burnt too much money and time. For that reason it’s not a perfect score. 9/10.

ADO.NET Data Services for the Web – Mike Flasko
Although I tend to avoid the development track I felt I needed to hear a good presentation on ADO.NET Data Services because I felt very suspicious about the use of this. Mike did a good job of explaining it even though it was very similar to previous presentations. I feel I have a much better appreciation of how and when to use it. I still would like more to be said about the relationship with WCF, i.e. I want to switch to a faster protocol than http, how would I do that?  8/10.

Becoming human; smiling like you mean it, & learning to say hello – Denise Wilton
A nice presentation from the Denise Wilton (Graphic Designer & Creative Director of moo) talking about fostering a friendly atmosphere for a site. By actively participating in a "community" the whole experience from the user to the staff fielding calls is improved. I lot of the talk was around community and public sites and was very interesting, perhaps a bit too long a session for the content but Denise is a very good presenter – I liked the humour and the accidental use of some…stronger language as it was heart felt rather than scripted. 8/10
[Edit] Forgot to mention the "canyon of despair" (smells too much like marketing speak for me 😉 ) which was a nice way of depicting the difference between a hold-you-hand easy application and an advanced bells-and-whistles application or rather that bit in-between the two where a lot of application want to live.

Day 2…