Ready Summit
A few fine picks from my gallery of pictures taken at Microsoft’s Ready Summit 06 in Melbourne today. I tried not to take too many pictures of slides since they are available online (publically) from the Ready Summit 06 Resources website. These photos come from the keynote, developers keynote and various user experience-oriented sessions.














Expression Blend



I honestly didn’t expect any secrets to come out at Ready Summit, but I guess I was wrong. When Mitch Denny talked about “Building Differentiated User Experiences”, he demoed this application to build an application interface using XAML and Windows Presentation Foundation. It was titled, “Microsoft Expression Blend, Beta 1”. Everyone knows about “Expression”, but no one’s ever heard of “Blend”.
We all know Microsoft Expression is a set of graphics-creation applications for uses of image composition, interface design and website design, with the names of “Graphics Designer”, “Interactive Designer” and “Web Designer” respectively. So what is “Blend”? It was clear from the functionality and tools (e.g. timeline editor), this was is Interactive Designer. Therefore, I speculate “Blend” is the official name crafted by the branding team to make the product ‘hip’. Although I think Interactive Designer makes a lot more sense, but when has common sense ever been marketable, right?
And no, the projection is not black and white (unlike Andrew Coates‘ presentation). The interface is white-on-black, light-on-dark, contrasted, inverted, or blackish. Whatever you want to call it, it’s definitely not bright. This seems to be a trend Microsoft is following with Vista-generation applications, websites and marketing.
I guess you should expect to hear more about Expression Blend, and the Beta 1 release soon!
Jenny Lam
By the way, there was also a nice video with Jenny Lam in it. Not much to see that is new or unfamiliar to anyone reading this blog, except Jenny Lam. “Wooord”.
View: Microsoft User Interface video