So the keynote at Mix08 was awesome. The demos always impress. Ray Ozzie is kinda dull. Sorry. Dull.
Watch the keynote from the Visit Mix site. It is a great show.
Now for my concerns… :-)
While I really appreciate the desire to enhance the designer’s toolkit with controls that can be used as building blocks in the foundations of our applications I am concerned about potential to abuse. I truly believe that Microsoft is doing it’s best to embrace designers but I wonder if developers will inadvertently take this work and corrupt or commoditize the value that good design can bring to a project.
I am a little fearful of carousel controls and Deep Zoom (Sea Dragon) everywhere when the effort to do these types of interfaces becomes effectively none. They say God is in the details so while I applaud the desire to have people do less grunt work and focus on adding value to a project. Do not lose sight of the details . Developers you can’t always do it all, consult a designer, Business Owners your developers can’t always do it all, consult a designer.
Good design is not a feature it is a pillar of the success of your product.
Oh and here is a picture by Betsy of Bryce singing on the RockBand Stage, sober to boot.
2 Comments
I agree with your concerns. I think there will be a period of adolescence while developers figure out the best applications of these new tools. Kinda like when .Net first came out and everyone was using DataGrids everywhere, and gradually the better developers have returned to favouring Repeaters. But that’s what design *is*, in part - knowing how to use the tools you have at hand to express your intentions.
That is good insight Andrew. As much as I hate the term that they used in the keynote “Dev-igners” it is a nice idea of the renaissance designer / developer.