So…as you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been posting as aggressively today as I did yesterday…(Well…it wasn’t actually yesterday… I started writing this post when it was yesterday, but got sidetracked and had to continue today, Wednesday). There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I have meet WAY too many people I knew to just sit in a corner and write blog posts. Second, I went to the official party last night…which was interesting with about 4000 people attending and only about 50 girls except for the staff…
But anyhow, the yesterday progressed as it should, a great keynote and lots of interesting sessions about the WP7. And even though I have found some gaps in the platform, I still find it VERY interesting. Not to mention that the UI is the cleanest looking UI I have ever seen on a phone. I guess I want to try it before saying it is the best UI, but it looks very promising…
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After my last session, which was about designing applications so that it fits in to Microsoft’s Metro layout, somebody asked why the tiles on the home page of the phone was off center with a gutter at the top and right. The answer was awesome and shows how much thought the design team has put into the layout. Or the guy on stage knows how to bullshit convincingly without any preparation. The answer was simply that the gutters where there for the touch gestures. By having a gutter the user won’t unintentionally start an application when it was supposed to be a drag to move around the screen. The right gutter simplifies scrolling vertically while the top one simplifies horizontal scrolling… As I said, either VERY well thought through or really good BS…
I have just attended the 2nd WP7 session. This was another 100 level, which means that it just just another run through of the vision and platform and stuff. No dev stuff yet. It did produce some new information though. First, the Silverlight environment on the phone will be a superset of Silverlight 3. That is SL 3 with some SL 4 features and some “custom” stuff. This first surprised me, but it is pretty obvious to be honest. A lot of the new features in v4 extended the offline feature of SL, which won’t be available on the phone anyway.
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As some of you might now, I have left Wellington and gone to Las Vegas for the MIX10 conference. I just saw an interesting keynote. However, I felt it being somewhat boring. There were no big surprises. A lot of Windows Phone 7 Series talk, which was to be expected. One of the news that did come up however, is that the dev platform will be made available for free. This is an awesome step. It will enable a lot of devs to try it out without having to commit too much. This will in turn hopefully give us a lot of interesting applications and maybe even lure some non .NET devs into the Microsoft space. One can at least hope…
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