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I missed this morning’s Microsoft Mobile session on account of a late night and my extremely comfortable hotel bed. Listening to my alarm go off at 6:30am, I made the snap and instantly gratifying decision to stay asleep and wandered into Star City just as today’s  Keynote was about to begin around 9:00am.

Again, like yesterday, the keynote was not given by only one person but was a two hours session spread over 3 speakers, and no-one from Adobe! Not that I don’t like Adobe, but they have a big presence at this conference and I wanted to hear a little more from the others, and that’s what we got. Entitled ‘Meet the Makers’, the session was given representatives of Yahoo, Google and Microsoft and was really high energy and interesting. The three guys they had presenting (more detail in a sec) were all very slick and were obviously used to touting the wares of their respective firms at events just like this. Nevertheless, I was happy that they mostly managed to avoid this turning into a sales pitch and got down to laying some info on us.

Alan Noble, Engineering Director for Google Australia and New Zealand gave a run through of Google’s offerings in the online space. He mentioned the company’s focus, and success, with open source and mentioned that it is the openness of the underlying technology (the internets) that has been the cornerstone of their success. Google certainly have opened up a lot of API’s over the last few years (Maps for Javascript, Maps for Flash, Earth, Search, Docs, Adsense to name the ones I can name off the top of my head) and I for one have sort of taken them a bit for granted - I suppose we should feel lucky that we have a Google to keep giving us nice things. Is there a price? I’m not sure. Being a developer I really like all the stuff they do and I’m not too worried about privacy. One delegate asked the prickly ‘what are you doing with all of my data once it is in the cloud’ question but the response was typically diplomatic - you can opt in or out, and anyway, they would be stupid to misuse user data. What would it do to Google’s reputation if they began using your personal data in an evil way? They would lose the trust that they desperately need to make their services successful and that would be a disaster for them. Alan noted that all Google are trying to do is advance the internet to a better place - to make information more readily and easily accessible, and to make it easier for us to make websites and applications and make some money from ads if we like.

Next up was Neil Wilkinson from Yahoo. Sorry, Wilk. Or something. He didn’t seem that into using his real name. Nice guy. Wilks came to talk about Yahoo’s offerings in terms of online services and APIs. I like the look of the YUI Grid Builder, a CSS layout generator (and I have been really impressed with some of the other YUI stuff, particularly the rich-text editor that I have integrated into Drupal in the past), but he spent most of his talk telling us about and showing us examples of YQL, Yahoo’s new query language for extracting data from APIs. It’s cool in that it allows you to chain together queries that select rows of data out of their search, geolocation service, and flickr. This is is way easier for mashing together data from multiple sources because you can write some very SQL like code and avoid doing a whole bunch of custom Javascript.

The third speaker was Michael Kordahi from Microsoft. What a bundle of energy. This guy puts the ‘enthusiastic’ into ‘he was a really enthusiastic presenter’ (he also provided the he, was, a, really, and presenter). His chat was about user experience from Microsoft’s perspective and he was able to illustrate that with a whole range of their products, notably  Silverlight, Surface and X-Box (and X-Box Live).

I culled a bunch of quotable quotes from Michael’s talk, but I’m not sure of his original sources. Here’s a few anyway:

‘User experience = market differentiation’
‘The speed of your UI != The speed of your connection’
‘it’s not what the software does, it’s what the user does’

Clearly, Microsoft are starting to think a lot more about how their user’s feel about their products not only from the perspective of what they do, but also how they do them and how that feels. I’m certain that they always did care but even moreso now, when they see the effect that Apple’s aesthetic appeal has created in the market, and the way their rich user experience in products like the iPhone and iPod have spun off into lots of sales and successful tie-ins (app store). The new Silverlight is one area where I think this attitude toward user experience will pay off, as it has some great looking features for working with images, video and 3D that will rightly give Flash something to compete against.

It was excellent to hear all this stuff first hand from these three major players.

This morning and this afternoon at WebDU 2009 saw sessions on Flex, Mobile, User Experience, Online/Desktop AIR applications, Information Architecture and perspective Google Maps.

After the keynote I took it easy and soaked in bits and pieces. Last time around I was careful to choose sessions and sit them through from beginning to end. This time, I think that when something is getting a little tiring, I might perhaps quietly sneak into another session so I can get a nice broad experience. With that in mind, I dipped into Dale Rankine’s session on Flash for Mobiles. There are so many different kinds of phones and platforms, I get pretty confused, and it is good that people like Dale exist. He demoed some methods of getting Flash Lite content onto his Nokia phone, and spoke briefly about the open screen project. Surprisingly, it took until the last minute of the session for someone to ask him about Flash for the iPhone but unsurprsingly, he gave us nothing.

Speaking of which, you just wouldn’t believe how many iPhones I saw this morning.*

After that I dipped into Carly Gooch’s session on skinning Flex components. Now, I’m not really into Flex and some time into the session I decided to check out twitter and noticed the groundswell of positive tweets eminating from Simon Reid’s session entitled ‘The Digital Art of Pencil and Paper’. I love the title and Simon was a great speaker. He was speaking about methods for designing end user experiences without computers. Sketching was an obvious one but it wasn’t so much Simon’s suggestion that we eschew the laptop in favour of the pencil that made his talk worthwhile, it was his ‘out of the box’ suggestions for capturing and generating ideas to design experiences. For example, he suggested sitting behind end user’s while they worked to capture subtleties in their workflow, and also staring at media such as newspapers and magazines and attempting to fit an interface idea to the content (‘force fit’ I think was his term). I’m probably not doing his talk justice with these comments, but it was just really great to hear a voice from somewhere outside of the norm in terms of designing these experiences sharing his ideas and I gained a lot from it. Should’ve gotten in there from the start. Bugger.

After (delicious) lunch (with card tricks, see picture) I caught Michael Plank’s discussion on simultaneous development of online and desktop apps using Flash and AIR. I was pleasantly surprised at his simple technique of using conditional compilation with the command line compiler and the rest of his talk was considered and practical.

Probably my favourite session for the day was by Google’s Mike Jones. Mike spoke about some new innovations in the Google Maps API for Flash. I don’t know why, we’ve seen Google Maps before and the FLash API has been around for a while but Mike was a very knowledgeable speaker and the features he demoed - most notable 3D rotations of the map - were very exciting and my mind was ticking over long after. I’m not sure why more games haven’t been made using the maps Flash API so maybe that’s a job for someone out there.

Time for a beer and some food!

*lots.

Thanks to Jesse at actionscript.org I am once again attending the WebDU web technology conference in Sydney. I was here in 2008 and was very excited about returning to see and hear from people in the industry about the latest products, techniques and projects currently happening in the field.

I arrived at Star City this morning a little bleary eyed but a quick cup of outrageously strong catering-style coffee gave me the kick in the pants I needed to enjoy the keynote presented by Mike Chambers from Adobe, the chief Evangelist for the Flash Platform. Mike focussed mainly on AIR and web-based Flash and showed us some examples of people doing interesting things with the Flash Platform. Notably, he demoed some Augmented Reality examples using PaperVision 3D and the AR Toolkit (I think). These were real candy-type applications, the kind of thing a company might use as interactive bait to attract people to their site - the GE SmartGrid and another one that lets you create and animate a 3D sasquatch, all online and creating rich experiences using the webcam.

Mike also demoed two projects from the New York Times - the first a photojournalism blog which was a really slick online experience. I wish newspapers in Australia gave this kind of first-class treatment to their photojournalism because it is a really engaging and intuitive way to digest news and events online.  The second a desktop application using AIR called the New York Times Reader, that was basically a digital version of the newspaper that utilised the new text rendering engine in Flash Player 10 to create a better reader experience for the paper than can be represented on the traditional webpage. To complement this, Andrew Spaulding from Adobe demoed an online/desktop app created (by one guy) with Adobe AIR. This was a music service (sponsored by Sony) that used a slick tie-in between the online service and the desktop app by allowing users to buy songs and videos online and have them available for playing on their desktop or in the browser.

These are great demos, however I reckon there is a bit of a problem with the proprietary players being used in the two AIR examples in that, if I get a digital subscription to the NY Times or buy songs and videos from the aforementioned online service, can I view that media on anything else other than the supplied applications? For the newspaper, not so bad because once news is read once, it is rarely revisited (although they do cache it all in the app, which is great). But in the case of the desktop media player, well, I generally consume my music and videos on my laptop using iTunes, and I’m pretty happy with it. Do I really want or need another media player on my computer? I will need to chase down Andrew and find out if those videos and mp3’s are available for use across any app I choose, because for me and suspect a few others, that’s a bit of a deal breaker.

Steven Heintz from Adobe was the third speaker for the keynote (I think this keynote should’ve been credited as being delivered by Adobe, because Mike Chambers was only a small part of the show!) and he gave us a demo and first preview of Flash Catalyst for Windows. It was a slick demo and the workflow for creating interactive experiences quickly from artwork (PS, AI) looked really attractive for lots of users. He showed us how to make an application using just Flash Catalyst with data entered directly into the IDE, and then he also took the same app and hooked up the components to web services using Flash Builder. This would be great for designer friends of mine who would like a better way of creating simple apps from their artwork with a better workflow than is currently available using the Flash IDE and artwork tools, but also allows nerds to get in there and hook up dynamic data if need be. Excellent.

Terry Ryan was the fourth speaker from Adobe, and he was talking about Cold Fusion but I have absolutely no right to comment on that! I know nothing about Cold Fusion, I’ve always been a PHP guy and I’m comfortable with that. Terry mentioned some new features for the upcoming new release of Cold Fusion and a new Eclipse-based IDE called Bolt (those Abode people loves the Eclipse don’t they...) which looked good. Someone behind was gasping like it was 1967 and she had just seen John Lennon every time he mentioned a new feature. I like John Lennon, he is my favorite Beatle. Maybe I should use Cold Fusion...

So that was it for this year’s Keynote. Not quite as spectacular as last year (where they were showing off new apps from the unreleased-at-that-time CS4 package) but still interesting and exciting enough to keep me happy and eager to try some of that stuff out! Alas though, no superhero intros...