#MIX10 Keynote Day 1 – My Rough Notes

It’s a few minutes before the keynote for Day 1 at MIX. Feels to me like it’s been one of the most highly anticipated for a couple of years. Having been in Vegas for a couple of days prior to today that’s certainly the case for me.

We had an unplugged session with The Gu just a couple of days ago and he seemed hugely upbeat about MIX. Cool. What follows is my notes from the keynote as it happened:

• Pre-show excitement from Sterling Quinn: 16 year-old yoyo-meister. Lots of different yoyos. Plenty of walking the dog.
• Bit of Bing Maps excitement from Blaise. You should watch the video.
• @Scottgu on stage: we’ll be talking IE9 and web services development tomorrow – Silverlight today.
• Gu talking about Silverlight deployments in consumer and business space.
• Silverlight now has 60% penetration.
• Crazy statistics from Vancouver Olympics Silverlight coverage. 76m this. Bazillion that.
• Announce: all code behind the player, editor and ad injection from Olympics is now open-sourced and available for download at http://smf.codeplex.com
• Talking about updates from SL4 beta (DRM, Out-of-browser) and so on.
• SL4 will ship with Pivot control.
• Now a look at Expression 4 – there will be a free upgrade to 4 for Expression 3 users.
• Ebay on stage with their partner Cynergy (who now see 55% of their revenue from Silverlight). They demonstrate a great lister application taking advantage of web cams, OOB etc.
• Cynergy then ran a cool – and real life – Sketchflow demo showing original sketches through to high fidelity demos.
• SL4 RC is now available for download at http://silverlight.net
• Final release will be next month.

And that’s Silverlight. Joe Belfiore (CVP for Windows Phone) is now on stage to talk about Windows Phone. Rock on!

• Initial discussion of the UX for WP7. And we can see a real phone! w00t!
• Joe has a WP7 tattoo on his knuckles (I think…)
• Amazing realtime video projection of use of the WP7 phone device.
• Interesting experience to configure the start page experience for the phone. Feels sharp and progressive.
• Specific examples of UX metaphors include email triage, and are designed to take advantage of ‘muscle memory’ thus providing an intuitive and efficient experience.
• Sweet: an “I’ll be late!” function for diary management.

OK – a quick break in flow because I REALLY WANT ONE. UX and features look excellent.

• Talking about social network/friend management.
• Then a dive into the Music and Video hub.

Hmm – Wifi is on the collapse. Starting to get tweet envy as others around me manage to squeeze out the odd comment. My “typing in the dark” skills are growing strong. I am the master.

• Cute diary application demo from Joe use to illustrate how you might add brand specifics outside of the regular live tile UX.
• AWESOME! A mechanism for integrating separate 3rd party applications by advertising capability. Progression and innovation FTW!
• 3D gaming demo from Joe.

Big applause then back to Scottgu who dives into VS2010 and coding for WP7.

• WYSIWYG surface for default theme for WP7
• Full emulator for phone is actually running the Phone OS (so might thing it’s running out of batteries).
• Now building out a Twitter app (naturally).
• Nice development experience from a developer perspective. Now about to see Expression Blend 4 for the designer experience
• Jon Harris – proud British DPE veteran – demoing on Blend 4.
• Slick demo of tool to tool workflow (Illustrator –> Blend) and usual developer/designer workflow.
• Jon’s right – some of the productivity features in Blend: data binding and behaviours seem like black magic. They’re very cool.
• WP7 Development tools available at http://www.microsoft.com/express/phone
• And now time for a variety of partners talking about WP7 development:
  • Netflix on stage – awesome video experience and integration to the music and video hub UX.
  • Graphic.ly (a Bizspark One partner) demoing their very cool comic experience app. DeepZoom FTW!
  • Location and mapping demo’d courtesy of foursquare.
  • Time for Shazam (I love them!). Demonstration here is about the Microphone access.
  • Major League Soccer (that’s footy to us gang!) being demo’d to show off push notifications combined with video snips.
  • Something called “Marionette” to demo access to the accelerometer. The Gu controlling Steveb like a puppet.
  • Loic from Seesmic talking about their platform and how they are developing a version for WP7 and building a plugin architecture and Mac client.
  • Stand back: it’s time for cannon… Scottgu has weapons… accelerometer controls for handling self-aware robots and weapons platforms.
  • @MajorNelson is then up to talk about the XNA development platform. Access to XBox Live APIs such as gamer points, achievements and the like will be available to WP7 developers. Great example of 3 screens and a cloud multiplayer gamer: PC, XBox and then phone. Sweet.
  • And then a video to demonstrate the marketplace hub for monetizing, discovery and so on. The try and buy features means you only need one set of binaries and then (presumably) some policy control.

And we’re done: http://developer.windowsphone.com