I travelled back from London yesterday after a great couple of days at the BETT show. Last year was the first time we’d really shown off any of our applications, demonstrating our Silverlight and SharePoint based VLE, but this year we were launching our new brand OPENHIVE and releasing our full suite of products to the world.
there were a number of other stands I wanted to visit during my time there having heard a lot of chat on twitter (#BETT2010) in the days before and at the start of the event. So here are a few of my personal highlights…
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The voting on session submissions for the MIX 10 conference in Las Vegas on March 15th-17th has opened! I have submitted one entry around Designer – Developer collaboration, focussing on best practices with the aim to provide an overview of how to keep designers happy and achieve the best possible outcome for your Silverlight applications.
It’s my intention that this would be supported with demos of our real world, existing Silverlight (2 and 3) applications, and the content comes from the experience we’ve gained at i2Q/Synetrix over the last two years we’ve spent working with Silverlight.
Please cast your vote here and help me spread the word on…
“Baking a great Silverlight UX: the recipe for successful designer-developer collaboration”
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Compelled to write this after having had an unexpectedly good user experience with all of the above last night. The main thing is that it wasn’t each one in isolation, but the combination and how well they worked together that made it a good experience.
The fundamental elements of win…
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After speaking at Saturday’s Multipack event and catching Bruce Lawson’s HTML 5 talk for the second time in a couple of weeks, I had some time to ponder on my walk home through the city.
By the time HTML 5 is prevalent across all major browsers, say maybe up to two years away (and I suspect still to be largely reliant on how long the fully HTML 5 supporting version of IE has been available), Silverlight should be up to version 5, going on 6 – by the current rate of progress.
The talks given by Bruce (of Opera, opinions his own :), and also Aza Raskin (of Mozilla) at FOWA point towards the future of HTML web applications and their integration with the browser. By adding more application oriented standards to the markup, and increasing the intelligence of the browser, they are becoming a more powerful tool in themselves, devolving some of the control from the applications within.
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Or “Getting R.A.D. with Silverlight and Expression Blend”!
The idea behind this set of talks was to take a look at the options currently available, or on their way for creating Rich Internet Applications. Unfortunately we couldn’t get representation from the Flash community, but Bruce Lawson was there to give his popular talk from FOWA on HTML5, and I offered an insight into the features of Silverlight and Expression Blend 3.
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More notes, mostly for my own benefit – if you want any more info, just drop me a line. Good day today, despite being shattered after a long week and good party last night. Shame I have to leave early, sure the remaining talks will have as much quality content as the rest. Good job from Carsonified team – feel shame they got let down by the WiFi, but doesn’t seem to have affected the conference too much.
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A few notes from Day One of the Future of Web Apps conference (#FOWA) in London. My first FOWA after not being able to attend last year, but having been to a couple of FOWD events in previous years I was interested to see how this alternative event might be more relevant to the work I’m doing these days.
The notes were mainly written during the talks, and may include some thoughts of my own around the potential applications of the technologies and approaches mentioned.
First up after the introduction was Kevin Rose – founder of DIGG.com…
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This is the first of a series of short blogs documenting some of the little features and improvements that have been making me smile since starting our latest Silverlight project at Synetrix, using Microsoft Expression Blend 3.
On the whole it’s been a good first couple of weeks getting to know version 3. I would have got stuck in sooner but we still had Silverlight 2 development and bug fixing to do, and i didn’t have a spare machine… or the time!
First impressions overall are that it’s a much better tool for the job. There are fewer hiccups in the workflow, and everything just seems more robust and fit for purpose. Another tell-tale sign of its maturity is the number of choices now available in the Options menu. It seems a much more malleable application, easier to fit to the users’ needs and preferences.
As part of this improved user experience I’ve been compelled to document some of the neat features I’ve come across – partly by way of record, partly to share, and partly to get me back into the blogging habit I’ve fallen out of.
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Had an enjoyable afternoon out at Birmingham University yesterday. Was there to give a talk on our ‘Real World Experience’ at Synetrix over the last 12 months. The theme was to follow our progress along the Learning curve of our journey in adopting Silverlight – from first principles, to our current level of expertise; titled “The Learning Curve in Action”.
Was a small crowd of academics and educators who had spent the day getting (for the most part) a first look at Silverlight. The day was intended to describe what Silverlight is, what it isn’t, and via a couple of hands-on workshops – give an experience of how one might go about developing for it.
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I received this email from a good friend and former colleague yesterday; a very experienced senior web designer who’s been away travelling for the last 8 months or so.
My old boss sent me this as way to get working again when I get back but it looks a bit like you do loads of graft to submit treatments for free along with lots of other hopefuls, then the project originator takes the one he likes best and pays for it and can then incorporate the best of the rest for free.
http://www.crowdspring.com/
Am i being overly cynical?
I wouldn’t say cynical – I’d tend to agree. Spec work is the bane (…well ok, one of many banes) of an experienced designer’s life… You don’t get 15 plumbers round to do the work in various different ways, and you don’t ask for 25 developers to write 25 different pieces of code before you choose the one that you think works best.
You pick one, based on their quote, experience, portfolio and any number of other variables - and you work together with them, rather than picking them like one of many lobsters from a grubby fish tank. (No, I’m not sure this metaphor works - but I’m sticking with it because I like the photo…)
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