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Mix 06 Unmixed
June 11th, 2006
Even though it’s been almost three months since Microsoft’s Mix 06 conference, I finally had the time recently to go through the show’s sessions archive. Here are some things I found particularly interesting about what Microsoft is doing.
Channel 9 and Mix
The theme of the show was ‘a 72 hour discussion’ and was not only for developers but designers as well. To get people interested, there were videos released on Channel 9 that showed different discussions we were to expect from the conference. The videos didn’t show anything new that wasn’t already shown through previous Channel 9 videos, but I thought the goal of the videos was to use the Channel 9 brand at Mix 06 as part of the discussion idea. I was dissapointed when that wasn’t the case. Mix 06 obviously came from the success of the Channel 9 website, so why wasn’t it tied in at all? And why wasn’t Robert Scoble a part of the keynote or a host of some kind?
Thinga-ma-jigs
Ways to clutter up your desktop are back… with Windows Gadgets. Apple wasn’t the first to come up with the idea… They’ve been a part of both OS’s since the beginning. In fact, the way Gadgets work reminds me of when Internet Explorer 4 first came out with its own dynamic desktop mini-apps. They were basically small web page windows embedded on your desktop using the latest in web technology, DHTML. Now they use the latest in web technology, AJAX, which is… pretty much the same thing.
These doo-hickies haven’t worked in the past, mainly because of taking up too much system resources and people eventually got tired of them. Will they work this time around?
Not just for developers
Microsoft made a pretty impressive push for designers with its Expression set of design tools.
Graphic Designer
Since Adobe has been able to control the market for so many years, they didn’t need to come up with what seems like an obvious step for design… merging pixel graphics with vector graphics. Graphic Designer does this quite nicely and offers a few other innovative tools.
Interactive Designer
Using the Windows Presentation Foundation, Interactive Designer seems like the ultimate tool for designing apps for Windows. It also works cross platform although a plugin similar to the Flash plugin, would be required. The control over the design of an interface beats Flash in my opinion. However, I’m not so sure about its animation capabilites. And it seems like the only way to fully develop an application would be to use Visual Studio.
Web Designer
Web Designer has some interesting set of features which makes it a little easier to maintain entire websites following web standards. Although, everyone’s favorite Microsoft application Notepad, also works.
Tags: design, expression, microsoft, windows
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