I’m pretty intimidated by the amount of time I’m going to be wired to a microphone at MIX this year: a total of something like 7 hours (even after you account for breaks).  Yikes.  So I’m preparing content early.  Like I mentioned earlier, I’ll be doing two workshops: Design Fundaments for Developers and Hiking Mt. Avalon. 

So, here’s what I’d like to know from you: whether you’ll be at MIX in person or end up watching online, what would you hope to get out of these?  How could I help make this content useful / relevant / interesting / fun / more-like-this-and-less-like-this?

The first workshop, Design Fundamentals for Developers, is a crash course in user experience design.  It’s all of the good parts of design school (inspirational examples, thought-provoking conversation) and none of the bad (homework, textbooks, or a 3 year commitment). 

The second, Hiking Mount Avalon, is really practical approach to getting stuff done with XAML: how to organize a project, how to create assets, approaches to various UI problems, etc.  I’m presenting with Jaime Rodriguez and you can check out the XAML guidelines he’s been putting together. 

So, if you have thoughts, please send them my way.  I’d love the feedback!  Feel free to do so by leaving a comment below or send email to hello@nerdplusart.com.  If Microsoft is going to let me fill up 7 hours of your time at MIX, I’d like to use it well!

I woke up today and realized that I never got my best albums post posted!  I kept waiting, thinking I might discover a last minute fav that would bump somebody else off the list.  Well, it’s 2009 now and time to move on.

Truth is that 2008 was not an easy top 10 to compile.  There were plenty of good albums, but it was hard to find 10 that the kind of game changers that you want to have forever.  I’m pretty confident about the first half of the list but by about number 7, things start to get a little tougher.  Well, without further ado, here’s the list.  Happy New Year and happy listening.

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Honorable Mentions

In spite of having a tough year finding great albums, I found a lot of good ones.  More, in fact, than fit into the top 10.  Here are some other great finds for the year:

Deathcab for Cutie, Narrow Stairs
Neil Halstead, Oh Mighty Engine
Flight of the Conchords, Flight of the Conchords (the album is good but series is GREAT)
Santogold, Santogold
Blind Pilot, 3 Rounds and a Sound
Jenny Lewis, Acid Tongue
Raphael Saadiq, The Way I See It
Cut Copy, In Ghost Colours

Really, after 10 any of these could have probably filled the last three stops.  Some of them are just great listening not necessarily critical successes (like the Neil Halstead album).  The Deatchab album would be a top 5 if it were a first release from them.  Instead, it sounds a little too familiar.  Santogold is great, but not a great album…just a couple of great singles.

I’ll keep the honorable mentions list running.  I’m sure I’ll remember other great listens from the year.  Let me know if you found something you think I’d like!

…and so far the voting results are kind of dismal.  Hmmm.  Maybe not everybody appreciates the chance to digitally apply a sweet ‘stache to the richest man alive.  Or maybe the retro thing doesn’t work for everyone.  Or maybe it’s just kind of confusing. In the end I had to cut a bunch of features and, frankly, this Moustachr is a shell of the app it used to be.  So sad.  The fight from 17K to 10K was hard on both of us. 

At any rate, it was a lot of fun to build and I love this contest.  I already have an idea for next year.  That’s right MIX 10K.  You haven’t beat me yet.  I’ll be back!  (And now I know just how little 10,000 characters of code really is.)

This is the most excited I’ve been about presenting at MIX in the three (nearly four) years I’ve done it.  Don’t get me wrong, MIX is a blast and, in spite of the long nights preceding, I’ve really loved presenting every year.

This year, though, I’m doing something a little different.  I’m helping out with the pre-conference workshops (the "pre-cons" if you’re old school).  I’m signed up to do two.

Design Fundamentals for Developers

The first is Design Fundamentals for Developers.  You, like me, have probably noticed a really intense interesting in design from the WPF/Silverlgiht (can we just say XAML?) community. At this point, we pretty much all agree that design matters, right?  I think we’ve made it through that one.  Now we need to start the meaningful discussions about how design works.  So, you should come to this workshop if any of these apply:

1. You’re interested in design but haven’t had any formal exposure to it.
2. You would like a framework for evaluating and discussing design.
3. You secretly want to be a designer but don’t know where to start.
4. You secretly want to a date a designer but don’t know where to start.

I’m very excited about this session.  It’s the convergence of my passions (nerd+art).  I’m so excited, in fact, that in conjunction with the session I’m writing a book for Sam’s publishing about the same topic (more on that later, it deserves its own post). 

Hiking Mt. Avalon

The other session, Hiking Mt. Avalon, is with Jaime Rodriguez.   Frankly, it can be hard to get started with a new technology of any kind.  Usually your first couple of projects are spent making and recovering from mistakes.  Nothing can truly replace that process.  It’s the inevitable way to build your confidence with a technology.  That said, our hope here is to speed it up, share whatever we can after having gone through much of that ourselves.  This will be the "no right answers" session, just a lot of friendly advice and good ideas.  Our hope, by the way, is to involve a handful of other old school WPF/Silverlight folks so that we get a diversity of opinions and a lot of cumulative hours of experience.

Sign up Now

So here’s the thing about the workshops: they’re an add-on.  You have to opt-in to that extra day of conference.  For me this is a no-brainer.  It’s probably an easier decision for me since I’ll be presenting (very awkward if I don’t show up), but it definitely makes sense for anyone.  You’ve already paid to get there, convinced your boss to give you the time off, etc.  The extra day is the most "hands on" of all of them.  It may be the day where you’ll get the most practical (as in "use it right now") content of the whole conference.  Plus, getting there a day before everyone else makes you cool: you’ll already know where the snacks are while everyone else is figuring out where to register.  Sweet!

Seriously, Sign up Now

Here’s the reason that you should really sign up now as in right now: For a limited time (not sure how limited, but probably not past January 15th since that’s when the general price goes up) you get 40% off!  The coupon code is on the site, but here it is just in case: MIXspecial1.

This should be a great event.  One more thing: if you’re coming to my design session, stay tuned because there will be a contest leading up to it that you’ll want to hear about!

“If it comes easy, you’re not doing it right.”

Great advice from Malcom Gladwell in this presentation about the process of creative synthesis that results in genius and creativity.  He touches on a point that became a bit of revelation for me when I first came across it: that great ideas rarely (if ever) appear fully realized out of thin air but are instead the result of dedication and hard work. 

This insight came to me in full force during my last months at Microsoft when I was doing a design firm tour, going from firm to firm to get insight into how different groups approach the creative process.  Prior to that, I had underestimated not just the time but also the meticulous process that was required to, eventually, generate the best ideas and best designs.

It’s tempting to see the work of a great designer and think that it was always that way and the better the design, the more effortless it might appear.  Great designs, great experiences and even great code (e.g. a great object model) are susceptible to a kind of under-estimation.  Mr. Gladwell’s welcome point, however, is that great works require great effort. 

Phew!  There’s hope for the rest of us!

I’m headed to Brazil tomorrow. I can’t wait. It’s no secret that Brazil is my favorite place on the earth, a superlative I’m not afraid of backing up.  So, if you’re in Rio next week, let me know. I’d love to grab a suco with you somewhere and conversar um pouquinho sobre o estado das coisas tecnologicas. Deixe me saber!

In the meantime, I’ll leave with you some Caetano Veloso, which is about as close as you can get to the awesomeness of Brazil without actually being there. These songs are both from his album Tropicalia, a pioneering record and one of the first to define the Tropicalia genre of Brazilian music (which, admittedly, has its hits and misses but know this: David Byrne approves and apparently so does Kurt Cobain). Incidentally, the title of the second song, Superbacana, means "Super Awesome" so there you go.

Caetano Veloso: Eles

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Caetano Veloso: Superbacana

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A Presidential election is, of course, an epicenter for data visualization.  It is, after all, the data that gets the last word and it’s the data that, ultimately, we’ve all been watching and discussing for the last 6, 12 or 18 months.  For the Numerati, this is good times (“high five for that chi square extrapolation!”).  It’s also good times for finding cool ways to look at data.  Here are some favorites I’ve jotted down.

My top pick for pure aesthetics has got to be the news tracker at everymomentnow.com.  It’s instantly understandable, clean and useful.  Each bar represents a day and the width of the bar represents the number of article references in that day for the candidate, providing information about media trends between the two candidates.

Another, and perhaps the ambitious, is the New York Times’ Visualization Lab.  The Times teamed up with IBM’s Many Eyes (and Wordle) to allow you to visualize all kinds of sources (including articles in the Times itself).  Construct your own visualization of Sarah Palin’s speech at the RNC or check out a Wordle of Obama’s acceptance speech.

For a general purpose and up-to-the minute perspective on the online coverage of the election, check out Perspctv.  This one also meets a high bar for aesthetics which makes the data feel highly accessible.  Yahoo has also put together a really nice dashboard, which includes a cool bit of interaction where you can play out your own electoral scenarios.

Of course with all this data being thrown at us, we’re becoming more savvy about how we interpret it.  Takeaway.org has picked up on that, I guess, and gives us a poll of the polls.  A visualization of how the different pollsters predictions stack up (literally) against one another. 

This idea (and others) has been incorporated into the “new” approach to polling that we see at fivethirtyeight.com.  I first heard about those guys in an interview on the Colbert Report.  I guess they started off by predicting sports scores and were able to do so with a significantly better track record than others.  We’ll see if their prowess holds out for the election, but right now they’re giving McCain a 3.3% chance of winning.  Sorry Red States.

Last of all, Saturday Night Live has done a very nice job of putting this all in perspective.  The skit it is brilliant.  The technology is pretty great too.

I’ll be speaking about Silverlight this afternoon at the <head> conference. It’s a really new kind of conference, organized by the venerable Aral Balkan.  He’s arranged for an impressive speaker list (including Tim O’Reilly and Lynda Weinman).  The “new” bit is that it’s online only (with hubs in select cities).  It brings folks together digitally rather than physically. 

I’ve been surprised by how well this works so far!  There have been a handful of technical snafus (as you might expect for the first round of something like this), but the community feeling is intense.  Arguably as good, albeit different, as a real conference.

It’s late notice, but I have a handful of tickets (3?) that I can give away (to the conference, not just my talk!).  If you’re interested in attending, let me know.  Happy to share, just drop me an email at robby@nerdplusart.com.

Alright, well wish me luck at my first ever online-only conference!

I haven’t had a lot of time in the last week to get things updated.  I guess it’s good to be busy!  I did finally update the particle generator and the homepage though.  Other stuff (AnimatingPanelBase, Kaxaml and the VS code snippets) are coming soon. 

Incidentally, converting my frame-based animations from the DispatcherTimer approach I was using to CompositionTarget.Rendering makes a bigger difference than I expected.  Nice one team!  Things are noticeably smoother (but I had a bit of scare before I disabled the UseLayoutRounding property, which was causing the animations to snap at pixel boundaries and get pretty jerky).

By the way, if there is any interest in the code for the homepage, I’m happy to share it.  I’ve been meaning to do a walkthrough of how I created the blurring effect for a while and I was going to give out the code with that.  Happy to share soon with anyone wants it, though.

The Incredible Book Eating Boy is my new favorite bed time story (for reading to my two and four year old sons).  I looked up the illustrator (Oliver Jeffers) the other day to discover that he, like me, could appreciate a little nerd with his art as evidenced by his uninhibited use of math (that’s right, math) as a design element in his illustrations and paintings.  Sweet!  I really loved his portfolio for the content, but the site itself also stands on its own.  It’s simple, but really effective.  Shows how sometimes less == more (a little more math for you).