MIX '08 Keynotes

I realize much (internet) time has passed since the MIX'08 conference. But I wanted to bring up some of the things I found interesting after watching the online videos of the keynotes. For those of you not familiar, the MIX conference is Microsoft's web development conference where they show off upcoming technologies and discuss ideas.

The MIX site itself is fairly impressive this year and has videos from virtually the whole conference in addition to the key notes. It's very nice for those who can't really afford to fly out to Las Vegas for a week of geek oriented meetings.


Keynote 1 - for Windows Media Player ... or ... for Quicktime

The IE8 demonstration
The demo is a little technical (aimed at developers) but there were a couple of new features worth noting with obvious consumer benefit:

• (00:37:00) - Ajax integration of the HTML5.0 specs. While that sounds really technical, the primary reason this will benefit consumers is they can more easily tie live events into the browser back buttons and other features.
  
• (00:38:30) - Connection detection from the browser with DOM storage for offline submissions. In effect this can give a page the ability to detect if you are online or offline and if you submit a form in situations like posting to a blog or whatever, the page will hold that data until a connection is reestablished.

There were lots of cool stuff in the IE 8 Demonstration like the much talked about standards support in IE8 and how they have apparently submitted a lot of work to the standards body in the interest of further solidifying standards in vague areas specs. If you have the time just go ahead and watch the entire keynote.

The Silverlight Demonstration

• (01:18:00) - The NBC 2008 Olympic coverage looks like it will be the flagship application for Silverlight 2 features. Seriously when this comes online in time for the summer Olympics it will be like nothing ever done before. Unless you just want to wait for the Olympics (on August 8th) then check out this demonstration. It looks seriously impressive.
  
• (01:41:00) - The Hardrock Memorabilia demonstration site contains images of all the Hardrock memorabilia displays across all the stores and merges them into a seamless interface. It uses the Deep Zoom technology from Microsoft's experimental SeaDragon project with high resolution photos and the ability to zoom into or out of the image without a noticeable wait or page change. It's really amazing.
  

Keynote 2 - for Windows Media Player ... or ... for Quicktime

The second keynote doesn't have as much technology demonstrations, but it does contain an interview session with Steve Ballmer that gives an idea of strategies and goals at Microsoft. If you want to get a feel for Steve's personality this is worth the time. It was really cool to see a more informal view of these guys just relaxing and answering questions instead of standing up giving a speech that someone wrote and tweaked.

Overall the MIX'08 conference was a nice little glimpse at what Microsoft plans are for the world of the web and where they plan to push things forward in technology.

Psychology of Communication

I realize this doesn't really have anything to do with pixels, but I just love discussion of psychology and of communication trends in this day and age of internet technology. So a recent article on instant messaging and introverted personalities was right up my alley.

Instant Messaging for Introverts by Joe Kissel
http://db.tidbits.com/article/9544

Being an introvert myself, it was nice to know that I'm not the only one out there who doesn't answer the phone just because it rings. One comment I found interesting was near the end as Joe was discussing how introverts and extroverts should develop a method to meet each other half way instead of requiring the other side to simply adopt what they feel is easiest.

... Several people I discussed this issue with expressed dismay at having had relationships deteriorate due to an unwillingness on another person's part to adapt to changing technology. For example, people who don't use email don't get evites, and so they end up being excluded from parties. Once someone has adapted to a new mode of communication, it becomes harder to communicate with people who use the previous standard, so more often than not, we won't make the effort...

I guess that's the challenge most of the world faces to some degree or another (probably every since the tower of babel). How do we communicate to various types of people across different cultures and different languages. Personality type is another characteristic we can start keeping in mind.