Sunday, March 29, 2009
I just got back from the Mix '09 conference in Las Vegas, and it was so much better than I expected! For being a Microsoft sponsored conference mostly focusing on .NET and other MS technologies, there was about 50% Mac users there and most of these people were designers. It was a really nice mix (haha?) of designers and developers. I've got some photos from my trip up here on Flickr.
I think one of the best things they do is put up ALL the session videos online for free! There's some really valuable information in these!
http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09 (also you can view past years MIX sessions at http://videos.visitmix.com )
Here's some highlights I'm going to recommend:
- Web Form Design - absolutely one of the best sessions I attended. Watch this video! He talks about why forms suck and what we as designers can do to help the process along. Very very well done and extremely informative. As soon as this session was over I went and bought the speakers book.
- The Way of the Whiteboard: Persuading with Pictures - Anotehr great session, but not necessarily directly related to web design. It's on how to get ideas out of your head and communicate them properly to people via a whiteboard of napkin.
- Measuring Social Media Marketing - If you or your company does any kind of social media marketing, this is a great one.
The following sessions I did not attend, but they seem great:
And finally, for any other ASP.NET or Visual Studio users, These are somre great previews of what's coming soon!
Friday, March 20, 2009
Wow, this conference has been a lot more involved than I initially thought, and I haven't been able to do the daily blog post that I was hoping to. My initial impression was that I would go back to my hotel around 5, and then be able to chill out and browse the web and write my blog posts. It turns out there’s a lot of great optional Mix ’09 related stuff to do after the official ending time, plus my hotel has no web access!
Day 2
Day 2 opened with an awesome keynote presentation. They really had the atmosphere down to get everyone pumped up. While we waited for the keynote to begin, they had a cool app called running on the big screens which grabbed tweets and Flickr photos tagged with “MIX09" and they all dropped in like tetris blocks. Also, some sweet tunes by the DJ.
Finally they keynote began with a great speech by Bill Buxton where he talked about how important good design is. This was followed up by Scott Guthrie making announcements about ASP.NET 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Silverlight 3. All of which I am thoroughly impressed with.
People from Netlix, NBC, Stack Overflow, Vertigo, and a few others came up and talked about how they use all this technology. I will have to say the most interesting part for me was when the VP of Netflix came up and demoed how their Sliverlight player works with bandwidth throttling and al they debug information. You can watch the entire keynote online here.
Right after this we attended sessions about what’s new in ASP.NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. I’m very excited about the changes coming to both of these technologies. Most notable (for me anyway) in ASP.NET 4.0 is better control over viewstate, and the ability to control client ID’s that get rendered out! You can watch this entire presentation online as well.
Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) presented on what was new in Visual Studio 2010, and there’s so many great changes! Most notably are big speed improvements and a complete interface overhaul. Check out the picture below, it’s a word cloud of the most typed things in Visual Studio. Larger items are typed more frequently. They’ve come up with some great ways to resolve this by adding in custom code snippets. You just type the word “listview" (or “lvw", or whatever you define) and it puts all the code that you need or a listview out there!
Later that night there was a party at an amazing club called Tao. Free drinks and nerds everywhere! We met up with Jeff King (Program Manager for Visual Studio) and Juan Rivera (who’s writing full PHP support for Visual Studio) and got to pick their brains about what they do, the future of Visual Studio, programing conventions, and all kinds of cool stuff. Overall, we had a great time talking with them.
(not my photo)
Then the party moved up to a section of Tao called Tao Beach, which turned out to be on the freaking roof of the Venitian hotel! It was just like you see in the movies, amazing! We met up with Jarrod and Geoff from Stack Overflow, just hung out and talked for a while.
(not my photos)
Day 3
Day 3 opened with another keynote, which we dicided to skip; and this turned out to be a good idea. The only big announcement was that Internet Explorer 8 was released and now available for download. We heard a lot of that that it was a pretty boring presentation other than that.
More sessions with some great content, and some that were just ok. Around lunchtime they had a small Q&A with Scott Guthrie moderated by Scott Hanselman. This seemed to be mostly focused on Silverlight, but it was still a pretty cool thing to attend. Plus, I got a picture with him!
Afterwards, Scott Hanselman hosted a session about how he built NerdDinner.com using ASP.NET MVC. I learned a lot about MVC, which looks great, and Scott presented all the information really well. That was my first time hearing him speak, and he’s really got a way of communicating well with the audience.
Later that night we went to check out a session where Mix ’09 attendees could show off past work they had made. We got there late, but it was still interesting for what we saw. After that we were able to just walk around the city and take some photos.
Posted by Chris Barr on 03/20 at 04:30 PM
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Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Well, my first day is finally coming to an end as I write this post - a really great first day considering how this first looked as I got here...
My flight out of Pensacola was delayed by 2 hours, but I was lucky enough to still make my connection in Atlanta to Vegas. My luggage however, was not so lucky. I had to go back to the hotel that night with only my laptop and camera. No change of clothes, no toothpaste, and being forced to sleep in my contacts. Thank God my bag was brought in on the next flight from Atlanta, so I was able to get it delivered.
Diego and I got up early, took a brief walk around the Venetian for a quick errand. Also, our hotel has no 13th floor.
Initial impression about MIX were not good. Very little signage and no directions. We got the general idea of where the conference might be, but no specific information. Then it occurred to me, what else should I expect from Microsoft organizing a conference? Once you figure it all out, you’re good to go - but that initial learning of where everything is located was the hard part.
First things first - breakfast and then check Twitter. There’s no wifi at the hotel, but there’s gigantic 8 foot wifi repeaters for the conference - making sure you can be connected from anywhere. Very nice touch. Not to mention, the food provided here is stellar!
On to registration, and then our first workshop entitled “Design Fundamentals for Developers” presented by Robby Ingebretsen. Robby did a great job - really well organized slides and information - i took notes until my laptop battery died - which reminds me, i need to take notes by a plug next time...
This workshop was not at all what I expected, and it turned out to be very informative - I feel like I learned plenty right there. I was expecting it to be somewhat technical since it was aimed at developers, but it was quite the opposite, very abstract and all about what art and design is. No code at all. Snacks and drinks provided of course.
haha? Apple juice on a Windows napkin!
Some big points I took away from this workshop:
- The opposite of design is not no design, it’s bad design! The very act of creating anything at all implies a design and therefore must be considered.
- Coding has exact answers to problems, design does not.
- Design has ponies and babies. Everyone loves babies and won’t let go of them, even if they aren’t right for a project. Everyone wants a pony, but you can’t always have them and they may not be practical. A good designer will be able to let go of their babies and let others know they can’t have a pony.
- The triumph of design is when the complex seems simple
- Gradients != design
I also noticed the presenter was presenting from a Mac, and there were way more Macs here than I thought I would see at a mostly Microsoft event.
Next, it’s lunchtime! Again, absolutely amazing meals provided. Veal, ravioli, green tomatoes, potato salad, and an incredible line of deserts.
Off to the next workshop, which started out OK, but we decided to leave after the first hour. The presentation and information provided was not nearly as good as the first one.
I did have a few take-away points here though: Designers tend to design projects for the “10 second wow” - meaning you are immediately impressed visually, but may not come back later for real information (think of any “flash” site you’ve ever seen). Developers tend to make projects that don’t really appeal to you at first, but after a while you learn to like the information and function - the “10 minute wow” (think of Twitter - ever tried to explain it to a new user?). A balance between these is needed.
As you move down the chart from designer to developer, you can compare each step to a character from Lord of the Rings. Also notice how the amount of facial hair increases in a logarithmic fashion.
After this, some other guy got up to speak about Silverlight and how to pay attention to details in your project and he really lost our interest. Not well organized, not prepared, and he started to get technical on some things we weren’t familiar with.
He also really turned me off to wanting to ever use Silverlight. One thing he kept talking about was how hard it is to get text to look good in his Silverlight apps. His solution? Duplicate every single text element, offset it by 1 pixel, and lower the opacity. Thus creating a fake anti-aliased effect. LAME!
That’s the point when we decided to leave and pick out sessions for the rest of the week. I got back on the Twitter, both posting and checking out what was happening on the #MIX09 hashtag. I noticed a picture from @jarrod_dixon that looked like it was only about 10 feet offset to the right of where I was sitting. I sent him a tweet just to say hi - then Diego and I got up to do it for real.
As it turned out, we met two cool people named Jared and Geoff who do a lot of the work for Stack Overflow (A site I use and love, and will now use more)! We had a long talk about code, Vegas, what they do, what we do, photography, etc. I’m very glad we got to meet them.
Microsoft Surface was also here! I’ve been wanting to sit down and play with one of these things since it was first announced! Very very cool technology that I hope comes way down in price and becomes more common.
Overall, the screen is not as high of a resolution as I had first imagined, and it can actually be quite laggy at times depending on what you’re doing - but it runs on some fairly meager hardware (mid range Core2 Duo and an average ATI card), so I can understand that. But for $15,000 I thought it would be top notch hardware in there.
The surface itself is not made of smooth glass as I imagined, it’s actually a diffuse textured plastic, but very easy to slide your hand around on as well. Talking to the Microsoft Reps there, it’s just running Vista under the hood and these are just special Surface apps. with in Visual Studio with WPF.
There’s and entire fully lit stage for Rock band - and there’s a tournament tomorrow. That should be fun to watch!
We were all given the schwag bag of course which mostly contained a bunch of crappy ads, but also had some great stuff in there as well. T-shirt, book, notepad, a sharepoint water bottle and an IE8 coffee thing. I might slip off the IE8 logo and use it that way.
That was a busy day! After some dinner, I walked around a bit at night and snapped some photos. I want to try and do this every night that I’m here.
Posted by Chris Barr on 03/18 at 09:10 AM
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Thursday, March 12, 2009
Once a year my company, AppRiver, allows me to attend one work related conference and my for first year working here I’ll be attending MIX ‘09 in Las Vegas! Until recently, this wasn’t even a conference I’ve heard of, so don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it before either. Mix is an annual conference for web designers and developers with a heavy focus on Microsoft technologies (also sponsored by Microsoft).
So, I’m headed out to Vegas on Monday the 16th and expect to learn a lot and have a blast doing so for about a week. I’m scheduled for a few different sessions that I’m excited about attending, and there’s tons and tons of sessions to attend. Need I even mention this all takes place in Las Vegas? I took a trip out there about 3 years ago with my dad and had a blast, so I fully expect to have a great time when I’m not doing web related stuff. I know the grand canyon and the Hoover Dam are fairly close, and it would just be a dream come true to see either one of these (or both!).
I’ll hopefully be fully armed with my laptop and camera where ever I go, and a goal I’m going to try and set for myself is to do a daily photo-blog of what’s going on at the conference and anything else I can take pictures of. It’s my first conference and I’m usually pretty trigger happy, so expect lots of photos.
More info about Mix here: http://2009.visitmix.com
Posted by Chris Barr on 03/12 at 09:33 PM
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