As you might have noticed ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage was in Las Vegas for Microsoft's Mix 2009 conference. The experience of a conference on this scale was impressive, but the talks even more impressive. Luckily we didn't have to run around with a camera and tripod. Instead Microsoft filmed every talk and put it on-line for everyone to see a few days later.
He's our picks for videos which you shouldn't miss. You will need Silverlight to watch them on the site or you can download them in Windows Media and other formats.
- Jeff Atwood () and (Microsoft DPE get down and intimate with a load of questions from Twitter.
- Bill Buxton is Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and has a 30 year involvement in research, design and commentary around human aspects of technology, and digital tools for creative endeavour, including music, film and industrial design, in particular.
- Johnny Lee covers several interaction techniques enabled by the Wii remote and explains how you can develop your own applications
- How Microsoft go about evolving pieces of UI that haven't seen major change since 1995? This video shows the design process and see the evolution of the design through sketches and prototypes
- panel discussion about aggregating social feeds and services from leading people and companies in this rapidly evolving area
- Dan Roam talks about persuading people with pictures. Whether convincing leadership to back a project, getting a VC to fund a business, building consensus on a project team, or selling a new technology platform within an organization
- early lessons from applied knowledge of touch applications, devices, and design methods
- about the essential concepts of Windows Azure, including what's new
The ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News Sidebar Gadget and ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Weather Sidebar Gadget are hopefully the last ever gadgets that you will need to view news and weather on your desktop, according to .
Today 1600+ people will write about an influential woman in technology, thanks to who setup the idea via . But why? Well ...
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women's contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.
Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That's a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let's come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let's create new role models and make sure that whenever the question "Who are the leading women in tech?" is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.
The best way to get a feel for all the blog posts currently is via a
But who was Ada Lovelace?
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was born on 10th December 1815, the only child of Lord Byron and his wife, Annabella. Born Augusta Ada Byron, but now known simply as Ada Lovelace, she wrote the world's first computer programmes for the Analytical Engine, a general-purpose machine that Charles Babbage had invented.
Ada Lovelace, 1838
Ada had been taught mathematics from a very young age by her mother and met Babbage in 1833. Ten years later she translated Luigi Menabrea's memoir on Babbage's Analytical Engine, appending notes that included a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with the machine - the first computer programme. The calculations were never carried out, as the machine was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.
Understanding that computers could do a lot more than just crunch numbers, Ada suggested that the Analytical Engine "might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent." She never had the chance to fully explore the possibilities of either Babbage's inventions or her own understanding of computing. She died, aged only 36, on 27th November 1852, of cancer and bloodletting by her physicians.
You meet all types of people at conferences but meeting Mr Cashmore after his move down under was unexpected. Lonely Planet had been working on a translation tool for travelers which uses the new Microsoft Translator service and API.
There is the , a , some kind of and most useful to which is invite only. Of course Backstage won't leave you hanging, we secured about 10 invite codes which you can ask for via the .
Internet Explorer 8 was launched today at . There was much talk about webstandards and some debunking about noticeable speed difference to the end user. Then all the other features which have been seen in the previous betas such as per window crash handling (as Chrome made a big deal about too) But then there was some brand new features too. seemed to use specially formatted tags (aka simular format to microformats) to build special features in the new browser. also take the ability to use specially formatted html tags to identify parts of the data on the page and offer context sensitive features. So its like the operator plugin for Firefox, but built directly into IE8. Interestingly enough 10 years ago Internet Explorer 5 was launched and you can now get IE8 from the .
Since the keynote there has been lots of talk about the general experience of Internet Explorer, for example when users upgrade from IE6 - IE8, will there toolbars and activex extras drag down the experience of the new browser? There was also a lot of people asking why Silverlight was not bundled with IE8? The response was to talk about the which it seemed most of the developers were almost unaware of.
Its also worth noting also launched on the same day but most of us are still waiting for Mac and Linux versions of chrome.
³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage was happy to be part of the Thinking Digital: The next generation conference. The conference was setup by the thinking digital team and Gateshead Council to get young people into the Digital workplace. The line up of speakers was very well chosen and the day flew by at a brisk pace due to the mix of talks, questions and music. Actually the day started with lots of talk about dating and hooking up then became dominated by music. even made a joke about the amount of sex, music and rock/roll there was in the conference. got everyone to but Mike Southon blew everyone away with his talk where he compared .
It was a excellent conference and a lot of students got a new lease of energy.
All this week, we're at the Microsoft's enlighten conference . We're going to use the tag #mix09 when ever possible. We'll be twittering under the account if your interested in following us.
Although Backstage really wanted to attend Rewired State, we couldn't get there, so we asked Libby Miller to guest blog her thoughts and experiences - thanks Libby!
I was at last Saturday and Ian's asked me to write a quick post about it for Backstage. Developer-orientated days like this are about letting developers work on something that obsesses them. My obsessions lie in particular directions and this will be reflected in what I did and didn't notice in such a hectic day, so I hope you'll forgive my omissions. It's well worth watching all the .
Rewired State was a bar-camp style gathering - around 70 people attending, and more than three times oversubscribed according to the organisers. The aim was to 'hack the government' - to use a single day to create positive demonstrations showing reuse of government information. It culminated in a series of two-minute talks (superbly managed to minimise faffing) in front of government people and 4IP as well as the rest of the developers.
On the 26th February, Backstage sponsored of the at ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Media Village, London. It was a day of workshops for programmers, looking specifically at how to develop good working practices, through discipline and good habits.
Jason Gorman kindly gave us an overview of the event.
"This is a conference about building it right."
Apart from meeting some great programmers, I attended workshops on a variety of subjects, such as: Mapping Personal Practices, Ruby and Kata, Responsibility-driven Design with Mock Objects and My Defining Moments.
It was a really inspiring and very educational day, and attendees certainly seemed to get a lot out of it. When organiser Jason Gorman asked everyone at the close of conference if they would like to do it again next year, there was a resounding 'YES'!
Last Saturday, Backstage was a sponsor of , a simultaneous event to Makers and Hackers North, mentioned by Ian in his previous post below. It was a one-day competition for hackers, electronics tinkerers, designers, artists and hobbyists to create 'a household item of the future' in collaboration with the other attendees who met and formed teams on the day.
As people arrived it was great to see kit such as a sewing machine, felt, beads and ribbon appearing alongside arduinos, resistors, servos and boxes of electronics. After introductions, we split up into groups with people we had just met and discussed our ideas, thinking about how we could collaborate.
³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Backstage was proud to sponsor the pre-event to the which happens next week in Newcastle. Makers and Hackers was a chance to experiment with ideas and prototypes before going to the main event.
We caught a range of people at the event and asked them what attracted them to the event and what they were building.
After all the making and hacking in the day, came the presentations of the work. As you'd expect not everything was totally working but there were some very interesting prototypes including the overall winner, which , a aid to dance to the music which is playing. Very cool and funky stuff. You can see .
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