Remix UK 2008 - Day 1
I often feel I’m out of step with what the general consensus of opinion is about any particular subject and sitting through the keynote of Remix UK 08 just validated it for me. I put it down to the ingrained desire to question everything, a desire to truly understand a problem domain in order to resolve it and the ability to realize the difference between passion and plain old bug-eyed ranting.
Today Bill Buxton was just ranting. 30 minutes of ranting about design. I love a good rant as much as the next man, but if you are going to hector me about design for any prolonged period, make sure you are not doing it in front of the worst designed powerpoint I’ve seen for a long time. 
Do not tell me ‘Lawyers saved Apple’ or ‘Design saved Apple’. Thanks for stating the bleeding obvious. Instead of telling me who saved Apple, tell me who is going to save Microsoft.
Microsoft Expression Suite is LIGHTYEARS behind the fluidity of use that Adobe provides in Flash or Photoshop. Expression Web is no better than Dreamweaver 3 and that must be nearly ten years old. There is a reason why most designers will not touch Silverlight and its because the tools are not good enough.
Bill’s main thrust was to “design for the experience”. Cool, well start with your own experience and tools first before telling me what is wrong with mine and everyone else’s.
Add in technical hitches, disjointed jumps of narrative and logic and several ‘haha you English drink cups of tea’ jokes, I was ready to get my coat. I’ve no doubt that many people in the audience thought it was ‘passionate’ and ‘brave’, bah - get over yourself.
Enter Scott Guthrie who gives a great talk filled with solutions not problems. I stick around all morning for his Silverlight sessions and although at least 50 percent of the content was exactly the same as last year ( even some of his slides had ‘Mix07′ in the bottom right corner! ) there was much to learn and enjoy.
Lunch is a brief affair and then it’s back in for a Session on ADO.NET Data Services with Mike Flasko. Mike’s presentation was simply amazing and delivered at such breakneck speed you couldn’t fail to take on his obvious enthusiasm for the technology. It was so good that your brain fizzed as it struggled to multitask between imagining the fantastic possibilities or scenarios for use, and being scared to miss something. Startlingly good stuff.
There is not much good stuff to choose from for the last session, and I cant imagine that the Visual Studio 2008 IDE Tips session consists of more than 1 powerpoint slide with the words ‘BUY RESHARPER’ on it, so try out the XNA programming session instead. It was good and delivered with passion and enthusiasm by Paul Foster but not really my bag. Everyone else enjoyed it though.
So thats day 1 in a nutshell, patchy. The freebie count is a little low right now so I will be putting in extra effort on day 2 to resolve it.
September 19th, 2008 at 8:58 am
[...] it turns out that even with my sceptics hat on, my views on Bill were good compared with others. Take a read of this very well written counterpoint to my take on the keynote. Thanks to Jon Paul Davies for linking to this article and so drawing my attention to his [...]