Microsoft ReMixSEA07 (part 1)

Meeting Minutes! Ain’t blogs great? Btw, about Remix.

remix1.jpg

Saw Ken Wye

Art house – chamber: place where Internet was liberalized, where chewing gum was banned… (he didn’t mention that this is the place Hossan Leong told the Singapore story recently as well)

Brian Goldberg

User Experience (UX)
UX Defines Market Category, for example, experience drinking Starbucks coffee is different from another coffee house.

However, it’s the Consistency of UX that allows Starbucks to charge a premium for this differentiation.

MS: Vista, Office 2007, Photosynth, Xbox 360 – all consistent experience. Case in point: in Office – 90% of the features were there, but users couldn’t find it, pointing to a UX problem. The introduction of the ribbon allow people to discover the many functionalities that they never knew was there.

Today, the Web is the primary channel we connect with our customers.
Craft (you) + Platform (MS) + Tools (MS & friends) = UX (I thought this was a good slide)

Reach vs Rich
(Wide) Reach: e.g. browsers; Rich (Experience): e.g. TV, PC, Mobile, XBox
We have to make a trade-off between reach and rich. In other words, if you have a rich platform, then the reach is typically limited to a selected few. Something that’s commodity and have a wide reach might not have as rich a capability. But think about Rich Internet Application 🙂

The Star Online: Serm Teck Choon

Newsreader: Offline viewing of newspaper, with interactive features.
It’s in Beta – not released yet (aih.. Serm, when?). It has all the capability of an offline reader, galleries, annotations, bookmarks, etc.

To me it is more like a replica of the online version plus offline-ing capability and able to add state to personalize the UX. But good. Silverlight is still lacking in the text stack (more later)

Want information contextualized in that scenario. e.g. spend too much time in Outlook, want the info in Outlook. (This reminds me of the not-selling-very-well Duet for bringing SAP back-end data to users through Outlook)

The old world there’s a clear disconnect between the Web (IIS, ASP.NET) applications and the Desktop (Office, WPF) application. It will be merged when media and RIA (Silverlight) applications take center stage. It’s all about convergence now.

Skills we already have, the technology already exists, it’s more important now to provide CONSISTENCY in the development. Think “I can reuse my content”, “I can reuse my skill”, “I develop something it can be reused everywhere”. (A bit of a BS here…)

Also bringing .NET to the Mac. (How about Linux!?)

Changi General Hospital CEO: TK Udairam

Portal for patients to maintain their health, anywhere anytime (to quote: “the usual IT stuff”), something that they will actually want to stick to and keep using.

Today’s experience is firstly slow, and secondly not sticky: people spend 5 minutes of their time on the system and then give up. User’s short attention span is a challenge. Currently CGH is working with MS and NCS to make portal that links Gyms, IHL, Individuals, Hospital Specialist, GPs, MOH, HPB together (thus the WPF practise in NCS). Also unlaunched. (SCS hiring managers, get ready)

@WWW: Nicholas Ratsey

(He presented on a Mac! to show that it actually works) Worked on a project in Discovery, going live next week across SEA. Make reminders for programs, trailer online etc. about this particularly interesting show. Phase 2 maybe SMS / IM alerts.

Why? Silverlight makes programming easy. Flash cannot do native full screen video. Download easy. Coding for download easy. (He can’t really think of reasons…)

Thank Discover for their “leap of faith”. (ehm..)

For those who cannot afford to host videos, there’s a free service: 4GB of free hosting on silverlight.live.com. This global “cloud” will scale automatically should your video become popular.

Product Manager: Rashish Pandey

Build color swatch for coloring the bathroom. Using Blend. Total # of line of code: 0. Everyone who says this gets a free upgrade of Expression Web to full function Expression Studio. (stupid gimmick… ok la, since it’s your first)

Blend feels weird – it has most of the photoshop stuff, some of the animation stuff (time lines and stuff like that), but it has these .NET controls (like list-boxes) that VS developers are used to. So as you work on it, the data can actually come from XML files…

Why do .NET in the browser? (Salesman, please memorize…)

1. Multi-language support
2. High Performance Runtime (really?)
3. Rich UI Controls, Graphics, Media & Interactivity
4. HTML DOM Integration
5. Robust Networking (well… more like bugs are ironed out, security exists)
6. Flexible Data Support (REST, Web-Services etc.)

Laurence Moroney

Build a full fledge video player in 10 minutes. Showed more Blend. He did it with talking lots of BS in 7 minutes. Blend has a media library available, there’s no need to write anything to be able to play video. Create 3 button control and coded in Javascript.

(I just noticed that Orcas will work with all the versions of .NET framework!)

Did Na Hou Ma world (你好吗 instead of Hello World). Also Ni She Dia Bun Dan Loh! (你是大笨蛋咯)

Also showed us that 10 mandays is enough to build an Airlines simulation portal (where you get nice GUI for choosing flights). Also, a Chess game where C# wins Javascript in terms of number of nodes to look ahead is 1000 fold (running natively), something like 600,000 node in the game tree search versus 600.

Metaliq: Beau Ambur

Did the same thing as he did in Geek Terminal the day before – but now I know it’s called “Top Banana” 🙂

Web based video editing tool, with library pre-built, join, drag out etc. Showcases the performance.

Dynamic Languages with .NET: Python, Javascript, Dynamic VB, Ruby. All “shared source”, not the same as open source? But I think it makes sense since it will never be MS’s core focus – let the people who complain that they are left out in the cold solve their own problem.

Panel Discussion

Chin Chau (MDA), Ram (CGH), Pierre (VC), Rodderick (Game).

I need power plug! brb

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