Siddharth Parwatay

Discuss on thinkdigit forum

Posted on 29-05-2010

Comment on article

Tweet

Two of the biggest tech giants in the world were having competing events in the city today. One was Google's Creative Sandbox event while the other was Microsoft's IndiMIX 2010. Team Digit managed to split up and be present for both the events. Still, when it came to choosing who wanted to go for which event, IndiMIX trumped Google event. And that was solely because the keynote address was to be given by none other than Steve Ballmer - CEO of Microsoft Corp. Besides listening to the speech itself there was hope that we'd be able to witness Ballmer's rather energetic stage antics.

• Use the latest Windows Phone 7 dev tools to play around with...
• Microsoft demos latest build of Windows Phone 7 on new LG...
• Microsoft cancels the much-awaited Courier tablet; HP might...

Jokes aside, IndiMIX 2010 was total developer utopia - an exclusive Conference for Web Developers and Designers - who were shown new opportunities to create compelling experiences. The day long event followed two parallel tracks - one a Web Developer Track and the other a Designer Track - that converged for Steve Ballmer's mid day keynote. There were loads of speakers who spoke on varied topics such as migrating ASP.NET applications to the cloud, or making Web Applications Shine with ASP.NET, jQuery and AJAX Control Toolkit etc. On the designer track one talk particularly piqued our interest and that was a talk on Windows Phone User Interface and Design Language by Michael Smuga, Studio Director for Windows Phone. The talk was aimed at helping developers align their apps with the design philosophy of Metro - code name for Windows Phone 7. From some of the demos we saw - and it may be a little preemptive to say this - but Windows 7 might've actually got some things right this time around. For instance the whole design philosophy revolves around Colour, Typography, Iconography, and Touch. Windows Mobile had till now not really paid much attention to Typography and Touch, while colour - to represent hierarchy is a good idea. The most unique design element however was Motion. As we saw on the demo piece Smuga was carrying with him, motion, when used decisively, adds a new dimension to UI design. The way one panel transitions into the next was truly unique in some cases.

Coming to the main attraction - Steve Ballmer.
Ballmer was certainly his energetic self sans the antics. He started off his keynote address by announcing that he is fast approaching his 30th anniversary with Microsoft. To get things rolling he showcased a two minute futuristic video of Microsoft's vision of next generation Devices, Connectivity and Interaction. The video showed people holding screens of all shapes and sizes. Heck, some devices featured screens that can fold, and a device in one frame looked suspiciously like an iPad. In terms of interaction and connectivity the video had instances of guys shopping with digital shopping lists and automatic maps. There were also children talking to each other across the globe - one child writing on a touch screen in Hindi and it getting translated over the air in English for the foreign kid (Steve strangely thought the language was Thai!). Impressive. He then went on to describe some of Microsoft's push focuses going forward.

Client and browser: Windows7, Office 2010, Internet Explorer 8, Windows Phone
Server and cloud: App deployment and distribution via SQL Azure, Windows Server, SharePoint Server, SQL Server, Windows Azure
Runtime and tools: HTML 5, .Net, Silverlight, Visual Studio, Expression Studio

The event wound up with a "Demo Extravaganza" that showcased some of Bing's capabilities and a couple of Applications from Microsoft Research. Strangely, simple things like the street view equivalent of Google on Bing and things like transliteration drew oohs and aahs from the audience. Though an app that was particularly interesting was SongSmith. Worth keeping an eye on that one.