Chris Barr

MIX ’09 - Day 1

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.