Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. & the future of multi touch experiences

Even though the Microsoft Surface has been around from conference hall to conference hall showing up how cool their technology is for several years, I haven’t been able to see one single implementation in a large scale, where this really interesting interaction medium is at the front of the experience.

Now, I know the piece only went live last October at PDC and that it’s near $12000 ain’t a really accessible price, but… remembering the day I first lay hands on one in Schematic’s LA office back in 2007, there were a myriad of opportunities flashing thru me mind on stuff that would be possible once this toy hit mainstream; yet I’m still waiting.

Now, what if there could be a way were we could take these experiences a little bit further. I know my friends at Identity Mine, VectorForm and my buddy of whacks Rick Barraza at Cynergy Systems, have been able to take it a little further creating really cool demos on their own… but what if we could all make it into something engaging, something that will make us still interested in using after 10min… something that transcend the feeling of “just a demo”.

We as experience designers are as responsible for engaging our audiences as the medium we use to deliver them is. The Nintendo Wii showed us that you don’t need fancy graphics and 3D life-like experiences to entertain us for hours. The iPhone and iPod Touch brought gestures and natural  interaction to regular non-tech savvy people, lacking features even the cheapest phones had at the time.

Today I saw Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. teaser, and that’s when I saw there is a compelling future for table top experiences out there. It might not be available today… but it serves as inspiration for the stuff we have to ship tomorrow.

Enjoy!

G.

Happy April Fools Everyone!

So technically it’s been April Fools for me for a few hours now, given that now that I live in Seoul I most of the time stay ahead in the future for most of my readers.

But it’s not until midnight in the western side of the world that all April Fools pranks start to show up… think otherwise?  Well lets take a look at You Tube’s new viewing layout ;-)

Other have joined the party as well including Microsoft’s Channel 9 and the all cool Q&A site Stackoverflow.com with a new shiny gif animation on their logo.

 

So let’s get our feeds and twitter ready to see what fake news this year will bring.

Happy April Fools everyone!

G.

Update: here is already a list flowing with April Fool’s news from the Tech Crunch, check it out here.

The Universal Desktop is Out

Today Ryan Stewart wrote his last post over at ZDNet and with that the Universal Desktop, the all-things-RIA from ZDNet, stops it’s publishing.

Sad!

I am sad of this happening, with the RIA space sparkling in its foundations, rather than loosing spaces for covering their experiences, they should be evolving and growing with the industry.

On the other hand, I know that since Ryan joined Adobe, a couple of years ago, it has been difficult for him to keep his blog up to what it used to be, even when he did his best at it - When you are traveling around the world evangelizing one of the many technologies you’d to cover, time is at its best not your friend. But buddy, you will be missed!

Heck I even started this thing blogging after reading his blog and getting all hipped from this new cool thing named RIAs and after I meet him, I found on him a really cool buddy and an awesome professional.

Now RIAs are going at its mainstream, and as Ryan says new niches have been created base on the different front empowering them. Guys like the ones at O’Reilly’s InsideRIA even when trying their best, are still kind of an Inside-Adobe, as most of what they cover are Adobe based techs. We are missing a broader view.

We are missing one person or group of persons who can help the rest of the world see the RIA space for what it is. For their players as kind competitors trying to do their best with faults and gains. At analyzing upfront for all those companies and persons looking for their next rich platform to build upon.

I remember talking about this with both softies and adobe’s in several occasions, still no one has step out to this world.

Hopefully ZDNet will be able to help close the void Ryan leaves, and rather than empowering pissing contests on what platform is better at it, we could get true insight to the world of RIA, which now more than ever before, this game is truly getting Universal.

Good luck buddy and keep up the great work at Adobe ;-)

Cheers,

G.

MIX 09 Sessions Video Podcast RSS for iPod & Zune Available Here

Even though I couldn’t assist to MIX this year - I’m stocked in South Korea pursuing my Master’s in HCI - I have been watching on-line some of the sessions that caught my attention from the conference, specially those on User Experience.

Just as previous years, Microsoft did a terrific job at making most of this year’s sessions available on the web within the first 24 hours from them happening, and for people like me between that and twitter It felt almost like been there – of course, if staying late at night in the Lab with no beers IS it like been there, but you get what I mean - .

Sadly, though, just as last year, there is no friendly way to get access to ALL of the session’s videos in batch (alas RSS) - and no the RSS feed from the sessions page doesn’t give access to ALL of videos – or if on the other hand, a way existed where there were an RSS feed who aggregated all, iTunes (my preferred way to Podcasts) only displays the latest 50 episodes of a show, which is nowhere convenient either.

So thanks to Mike Swanson who posted a friendly list to click and choose videos from the sessions, a few minutes with Excel, LINQ and C#. Here I give you the RSS feeds (divided in chunks of 50 items per feed) to the MIX videos that have been made available until now.

So, now got get your preferred Podcast software to point to this babies, lay back, relax and wait for your videos to download.

Now who said there were not a convenient way to get the Mix conference with you on your device?!

Enjoy!

Zune*:

RSS for the first 50, second 50, and the remained 19.

iPod*:

RSS for the first 50 and the rest 11.

*Disclaimer: As per Mike’s post there are 119 videos available in Zune format and 61 in MP4 format, so be aware of that when looking for your session of choice and you don’t find it, it might be because it’s not in the list yet. Cheers!

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Technorati Tags: mix09,mix,microsoft,sessions

Life from Seoul it’s MIX: Keynote Day

editorial comment: wow! this dudes rocked the world of interaction today… looking forward to play with all this goods!

11.23: And this is it.

11.22: Silverlight 3 is out in beta and will have a single beta before release later this year.

11.21: Silverlight 3 is 40K smaller than Silverlight 2.

11.19: Installation happens straight away with no glitch to the user experience.

11.13: First out of the browser experience demoed: radio station with support for offline access. Really neat.

11.09: Silverlight out of the browser support running on a sandbox environment and support for online capabilities.

11.08: Silverlight is a full compatible sub-set of WPF allowing for scaling up to full desktop experience with ease.

11.04: Data form coming to Silverlight 3. Creating LOB application is great and easy.

11.00: Data push support to the client, binary xml to reduce payloads and support to multi-tier data services… lots of data improvements.

10.59: Eclipse support for Silverlight comes to the mac.

editorial comment: Blend is rocking the house!!!

10.55: demoing sample data to be used in design time from local sources or remote source with drag and drop support.

10.52: support for behaviors, transitions and state wire framing for low-fi interaction prototyping.

10.50: document generation for the experience design right from within blend.

10.49: demoing Sketchflow player running on safari on a mac with feedback support for wireframes.

10.45: hmmm wireframe support right within Blend, this is getting better and better. Controls can be as real or conceptual as needed for the moment at hand.

10.44: The application that was in the sketches of bill earlier is now live on the stage.

10.43: First public preview of Blend 3 by John Harris.

10.42: Expression Blend 3: Sketch Flow, similar to the prototype Bill Buxton showed earlier, for low-fi prototyping (I want to get my hands in this)

10.41: The egg slides just made it’s appearance he he… who has not used those slides.

10.40: playboyarchive.com is going live with this user experience and 15 issues made available free.

10.40: Official release on Bondi for Rolling Stones will be in November this year.

10.38: Demoing touch support in Silverlight.

10.35: Vertigo showing a deep zoom application for The Rolling Stone Magazine. – got to say this guys are amazing at it. 

10.34: Bondi Digital Publishing & Vertigo in the house.

10.32: Clear type support both in mac and windows. Multi touch support. Supports library caching. Deep linking WOW 

10.31: Support for monetization

10.29: This new features should be used to do good no evil. True!

10.28: Perspective 3D support. bitmap and pixel API. pixel shader effects. deep zoom improvements including Hardware Acceleration.

10.24: next Olympics will be delivered using Silverlight. with DVR experience. providing the experience customer expect after the Beijing Olympics. (hope Schematic is also part of the renewal)

10.22: Going over statistics from Beijing 08. A phenomenal partner success (a great work from my mates at Schematic too).

10.22: NBC Sports is in the house.

10.20: Live content can also take advantage of smooth streaming but also pause live video with  a tivo-like experience and replay.

10.19: Instant seek in streaming thru a hack on bit-rate to minimize stop playing.

10.17: Demo time for expression encoder multi bit-rate support with smooth streaming and automatic publishing to the web server.

10.15: Akamai now offering smooth streaming thru their services.

10.14: IIS Media Services. Available for free (now here is hard on Flash… how much is Flash Media Server?)

10.13: SL3 will have hardware based acceleration. New codec support (H264), raw bit stream support. Improve logging support for media analytics.

10.13: Silverlight 3 is in the house.

10.11: Netflix: Because of the experience they got from Silverlight they now have made Silverlight their main platform for web deployment. An a great way to test things to be used later in their device-based experiences.

10.09: Netflix: user benefits from progressive delivery of experiences. every 2 weeks there is a release of an improved video player.

10.08: Netflix: Adaptive Streaming => more bits = better video.

10.06: Netflix: installer experience is awesome and took complexity out of the ways with support out of the box for content protection and a great platforms (ouch Flash)

10.05: Netflix: With Silverlight the cross platform is real.

10.04: Kevin Mc Entee from Netflix is on stage talking about their experience using Silverlight to deliver Nextflix streaming to the Mac.

10:00: Virtual Earth SDK and World Wide Telescope now available thru Silverlight.

9.55: Now it’s Joel Spolsky, from joelonsoftware.com and Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror; on stage talking about stackoverflow.com an amazing service running in ASP.NET MVC.

9.54: Talking about Bizspark, a great opportunity for startups.

9.53: New .NET services available thru Azure and made available this year. Azure is still in preview mode but will be made available full later this year.

9.52: Azure will support not only .NET application but also PHP.

9.52: Azure is now making it into the scene.

9.47: A demo of Web Platform Installer is done.

9.44: Scott is announcing the Web Platform Installer and the Web Application Gallery to help the provision of new and free web tools and applications to help with the development and distribution of web apps under the Windows platform.

9.42: With .NET 4 and VS10 there will be support for url routing and web caching thru velocity, just as well support for multiple web.config files depending on the stage where they are been used.

9.41: Scott is going thru Visual Studio features made available with VS10, got to say it is a really big list of features and features into authoring, deployment and testing.

9.37: SuperPreview will be available as part of Expression Web 3 as well as a standalone application which will be made available for free.

9.36: Expression Web SuperPreview supports side by side preview of different browsers including IE6.

9.33: Erick Saltwell, PM of Expression Web, is on stage talking about a new feature called SuperPreview. Letting you test your websites on multiple browsers, life.

9.32: Expression Web 3 is announced with support for both ASP.NET and PHP development.

9.32: the mission is to make Windows the best platform.

9.32: the Gu starts introducing the tools and web server technologies that will allow to create great experiences.

9.31: Scott makes a rock star entrance.

9.30: funny Brian Goldfrab just appear as a buddy guard. I will swear he is like that even in real life.

9.29: a video shows back of the stage on the Gu dancing disco. in an indian haha. hilarious.

9.28: now bill buxton is introducing the gu where he is gonna talk about how microsoft will enable us developers and designers deliver.

9.27: six degrees of separation between technologies. all connected all between by design. all singing the same song: how to help developer thru a unified way to return on experience thru their work.

9.26: and the shortest demo of a win 7 hp touch pc. gone.

9.24: 3 years ago only 1 design. Now 10. significant grow in hiring. double of the tech hiring's are in design fields.

9.23: we are in an industry with a lack of tools for experience design. we are doing magic with out the right tools but be careful not get biased on your design.

9.21:  bill buxton is showing the sketches of a tool he dreams of to take sketches and start adding transitions… movement… still in low fidelity.

9.20: if can’t characterize the interaction then something is wrong. states are just as important as the transitions. they need to be design as there is some much ways to do them and a high chance get them wrong.

9.19: if you are a developer don’t start design programming. get away from it.

9.18: use post-it notes to do low-fidelity prototyping (wireframes). it is fun and easy… better than touching technology artifacts.

9.16: if we cannot come up with 5 different ways to do something and not to be emotionally tied to one of them then we are doing something wrong.

9.15: our job is not to come out with answers but creating the correct question that will get us to the right answer.

9.13: designing objects is different from designing experiences. anyone can draw objects. experiences? we are use to not think of it.

9.10: experience designers are about creating stories with our product. not the product itself but shaping the experience to get the desired return.

9.09: learn from the past is key. kodak made their first model colorful after the first iteration. apple did the same. ivy didn’t copied he learned from experience of others.

9.08: bill goes around successful stories about products that made it thru design. bell labs. kodak.

9.06: people need stories, it is the best way to get viral marketing. As experience designer we help our clients make it. our companies.

9.05: ux is the best position to be ever, it’s not about luck it is about been able to influence the next wave of experiences to make it in the return of experience.

9.04: cool video plays and Bill Buxton takes on the stage. Feeling lucky? and making fun of the economy and experience design :-) so much power.

9.02: keynote is starting, the screens are full with this event’s sponsors. announcements go on about the party and events. MIX 09 has officially started!

8.53: here I’m seating and waiting for the keynote to start. live feed from the Venetian couldn’t bee best. music is really lame though.

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It’s just minutes before one of the coolest conferences will start. Microsoft MIX is about to start with Bill Buxton and the Gu as keynote presenters, and I’m exited.

This year I have gone back to the life of an student and happen to be in Seoul where I’m taking my masters, yet there is no reason to be missing all the fun. So here I’m live blogging the keynote.

Bookmark this page as I will be updating it live as it goes.

Cheers.

G.

Come get the bits from this year’s MIX

Microsoft’s MIX has not even started and the new bits are already in the wild and waiting for you to come and get them…

The good bag of candies is open, come get what you like:

Silverlight 3 Beta SDK: The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 3 applications. Usage of the SDK is subject to the SDK License (included in the package).

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio: This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 3. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

Expression Blend 3 Mix Preview: announced during the keynote and after blown away demos of all the new features, Blend 3 is shaping its way to become the tool for experience designers, as Bill Buxton stated, that has been always needed and never existed.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Final: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime.

And all new and fresh out of the oven things no one new of before:

Microsoft .NET RIA Services March '09 Preview: Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Which have to say it’s the first product offering from Microsoft using the noun RIA as part of it’s name, guess this is a good step towards making RIA into the mainstream, specially nowadays where the competency in this field is somewhat growing with JavaFx joining the party a few months ago.

So go on and play… and make sure you keep coming back for more news.

Update 1: And the goodies keep coming now in the form of a configurable UI controls for Live Messenger, just as a JS Library to integrate with your properties. This means you can add support for you live messenger right in your web properties.

The following is a video that shows how the new toolkit from the Liver Services team works:

Update 2: Just also out of the presses is Expression Web SuperPreview, a companion tool for Expression Web to help you with multi-browser targeting development. Super Preview supports preview from both local as from remote browser, kind of call in the multi platform world that we live on today. Get the bits here and go here to learn more about this release.

Update 3: Web Platform Installer 2 has also been updated and set out free as a beta. From the website it says:

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

Now yours for download here.

#MIX09 and #NotAtMIX09

In just a couple of hours the Venetian Hotel in Vegas will give place to one of the coolest conferences there are for Web Developers and Web Designers a like.

Microsoft MIX is one of my favorites conferences to attend, not only because of the introduction to new stuff from Microsoft for the Web, but because the variety of minds that you get access to. From Interactive Designers to Hackers, Creative, Futurist… to even artists of the napkin drawing. Mix is a great way to inspire yourself, and different from Adobe Max, Mix goes farther than just been a tech showcase of Microsoft technology. It’s a vehicle to the next generation experiences… it’s a way to get to know new cool people. Oh! and don’t forget it’s VEGAS, baby!

This year will be no different and the list of speakers is amazing, I am looking forward to Bill Buxton’s keynote just as well to see what’s in the stake for Microsoft this year relating to Web, Cloud and Silverlight.

Unfortunately this year I won’t be there in Vegas, I will be sleeping while most of you are enjoying the many talks you have in schedule and will be catching up while you party… after all not all in pink in the life of an student.

Fortunately, though, Microsoft will be making available most of the session on line within the next 24 hours of their presentation, meaning for you and me not attending, or for those of you hangover, that it will not be all lost… we will enjoy it in some way or another.

So for all of you out there be happy, relax and enjoy the show that #mix09 and #notatmix09 is just about to start! As my body Mike Brown just twit:

Man...I feel like a parent watching his kids open their presents on Christmas hopefully #mix09 has some surprises in store for me too

Oh btw… if you didn’t saw my twit on Monday, here is my hacked approach to a homepage to #notatmix09… my tribute to all of us not attending this year’s conference. Cheers!