Some minor issues

I’m currently attending the Microsoft Mix conference in Las Vegas. On the kind invitation of Microsoft EMEA, thanks Geert.

It was a hell of a trip, which started Saturday morning in Belgium, and ended Saturday evening in Vegas. Seems ok, but of course there’s the time difference We were on the move for over 24 hours, but till now it’s absolutely worth it.

Yesterday/Sunday (it’s Monday 7 PM local time at this moment) was the pre conference day. They organized a program for EMEA attendees. We saw some previews of expression studio and Silverlight. We also got a present: a Microsoft powered Samsung blackjack phone. Nice! In the afternoon there was an entertainment program.

Brings us to today, the first real day of the conference. It rocked. First time I attended such a large keynote (I believe 1800+ attendees). Very powerful and engaging. We got an official introduction to Silverlight. Have to admit I was a little skeptic on forehand. We’re pretty Adobe orientated in our company, so if it’s for a flash alternative I wasn’t so eager. But it seems the product is more than a flash alternative. The demo’s were amazing, I can assure you that. So anyhow, I really believe in challenging, and Adobe will be challenged.

So, to know what’s it about I suggest you check it out. You’ll have to install the plugin first. You can do so by surfing to a demo page, and click the “get Silverlight” button. The plugin is cross platform from the beginning, so this is really great. I installed it on my macbook in Firefox. It was a little harder than showed in the demo (in internet explorer) where it was extremely swift. But anyhow, it worked out.
I suggest you to check out this demo:

There are some other cool demo’s so check out silverlight.live.com and www.microsoft.com/silverlight

For now the plugin is still a beta, so we need to give it some time. It will take a while anyway before the critical mass is reached and we can do commercial projects into it, but that day will come.

What’s more? There’s the expression studio, aiming to let designers work better together with developers. This is a really great aim, because it’s often a challenge nowadays. You can tell they really thought about this at Microsoft, so I hope it will come trough. If our designers are really willing to use expression in stead of photoshop is still a question mark however . We’ll see. Got a copy of the studio, so we can do some tests.

Together with the products and possibilities Microsoft also announces an update of their live services. As a developer you can use for example live earth in your applications, or messenger services and so on. Really integrated. Best part, you can do so for free if you keep under I think it was about a million unique visitors per month.
There is also Silverlight Streaming, making it possible to host some kind of widgets/applications on the Microsoft portal and use them in your blog (like we’re used to do with youTube for example).

After the keynote there were sessions, I attended 2.

There was a session with Dave Winer, about designing the perfect podcast device. Wasn’t that interesting in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely understand what Dave means for technologies we use everyday (like rss), but it seams he has a little trouble taking distance and look at things from an other viewpoint. No real critic, but it just made the session somewhat less interesting I think.
David Hachez kind of pissed him of. I quote: “You are a technical immigrant whether I’m a native”. Good move David!

The second session I attended was a panel discussion called “User Content Awakens Media Giants – the Next 15 Minutes of Fame”. This was pretty good. It was about whether networks should embrace or fear UGC. How they could diverse. About copyright. About branding.
No clear answers, everybody is searching, but the discussion and point of views are very interested and fun to think about.