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.
So the largest Microsoft Product launch of this year rolled through hogtown last week and I was there to be part of the spectacle. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, was there to take us through the exciting news. You know there is nothing like a big product launch and I’m sorry but I still find them exciting .
HEROES HAPPEN {HERE} was not only about Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 it was about celebrating the people who keep things running.
It is often easy to forget about the people that maintain the systems we expect to be running (except when the sky falls) when we are so focused on new and shiny technologies and systems.
Microsoft acknowledges that making maintenance simpler and more agile so that IT staff can focus on solving problems and add real value is what everyone wants whether you are an IT professional or the business that hires IT professionals. They call this strategy Dynamic IT.
Kevin told us a story of two heroes.
Now, let me tell you a story. I want to tell you about a couple of heroes, just to bring this theme of this launch to life. And I want to start by telling you imagine it’s November 12th, 1999, and you’re in Istanbul, Turkey. And it’s the middle of the night, and an earthquake hits, 7.2 on the Richter scale. So you get in a doorway with all your family, buildings are shaking and collapsing around you, and all of a sudden all the lights go out and it’s completely dark. After several hours, the shaking and the crumbling stops. You somehow find a way to make it outside. When you finally get outside, you look around and it’s total devastation all around you.
Now, most of us can only imagine this, but this was the reality for Omer Celik. Along with everyone else in the region, they had to live and eat in the streets for five days before help arrived.
This challenging time, that five-day period, sparked an idea, an idea that Omer said, you know what, there’s got to be something we can do with technology.
So, he wanted to create something that could help tell rescue crews what was going on in the areas that they couldn’t reach or get to, somehow create a tool that would allow them to see just what they were facing and where help was needed right away.
So, over the next 24 months he and a friend partnered, and it’s his childhood friend, Oguz they’ve been friends since they were 10 years old, they partnered and using Microsoft Robotics Studio, Visual Studio 2008, which we’re going to talk about, Virtual Earth, Windows Server 2008, with IIS 7.0 and Silverlight, they’ve created something called RoboTurk a robotic helicopter used in disaster situations to fly into areas that are so badly damaged so that you can stream video back to the rescue crews, so that rescue crews can get real time feedback on who and where they need to provide help.
That is so cool. I need to get more info on that soon. I have been doing a bit of research lately into how technology can help in catastrophic situations and there is some fascinating work being done. I know it sounds cheesy but if anyone has ever worked with a government agency or body you know that they can be a little slow sometimes. Work like RoboTurk and projects like JEPRS from Infusion are like very exciting because in an emergency time is of the essence.
Voice is Back!!! I was invited to see the launch of Microsoft Unified Communications. Looks pretty cool, really it does. I think that this is just one of those technologies that will quickly become part of our everyday lives.
As part of the event Meagan Marks from Facebook.com presented “Best Practices around Product Design and Viral Marketing”. It was an excellent presentation that had a lot of great information. The Facebook people asked however that we do not broadcast the presentation. So I won’t but I’ll SHARE it. (at least for now – MP4 98megs)
The MP4 files are on my server and may be sluggish
There were more presentations including:
Updating the Facebook Profile (Colin Smillie, Refresh Partners) Presentation
Demo: .Net Sample Application (Ricardo Covo, Web Nodes)
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Many of you that know me are probably wondering why I didn’t sooner and to those people I say… “Shut Up, I’m not that far gone” ;-)
Ever since I started this blog I have always had a love hate relationship with YouTube and other video distribution methods. YouTube video sucks but the exposure is great. I’m not dedecated enough to encode every format under the sun and host them like the fine folks at CommandN. Also I believe that people don’t care if they can download my video, I wouldn’t. I’ve tried Revver because I thought the video quality was better but honestly they take too long to put up a video, their review process is annoying. Revver’s video time limit or lack-there-of is great though. Facebook video is good quality and has an interesting distribution mechanisim. I wish i could see # of views in Facebook but the fact that I can’t post the video outside of FB doesn’t really matter to me. To my detriment I also don’t care about iTunes (yes that is my bias showing, I should be able to hate sucess/monopolies as well).
I will probably still use YouTube, Revver and Facebook in the future but for placing video on this site, I’m going to use Silverlight.
The Silverlight Streaming service allows me to host 4gigs of video for free and I have control of the encoder which is what I have always wanted. They say the video time limit is 10 minutes but it is actually 22megs, so if I have a video that is only 2 minutes long I can offer it up in HD resolution practically. Right now I am using a minimal player skin while I think about my new site design but this player can be customized to whatever I want (when I get around to it).
I hope that the missing plugin experience gets improved that lame little banner is not good enough :-)
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.
