There has been so much happening around that I have been wanting to blog about. After getting used to Windows Live Writer it is pretty much boring to blog in any other way. And since I was upgrading to Vista Ultimate RTM (yeah baby!), I had to wait before I installed Live Writer and then got on to blog again.
Excuses. One always exists.
In fact, here are a few more. I have been a little busy after IndiMIX '06. I was doing a bunch of Web Security sessions for an India Information Security Meet, happening in various cities. I did a couple of sessions at Mumbai and am going to do a couple more at Bangalore. For those who attended the sessions, please hang on - we promise to put the presentations and demos online. Just have a little patience before we finish all the other cities as well.
The same goes for the huge audience we had at IndiMIX and for those who couldn't attend IndiMIX. The recordings are getting ready - editing, quality, testing, etc. and will be up shortly. Keep watching the IndiMIX website - www.indimix06.com. IndiMIX was a huge success - thanks to the huge audience that joined in. We would love to hear your feedback - please tell us what could have been better so we can fix it the next time around. I have been following the blogs of many of you who wrote about your experience at IndiMIX - it was one of a kind for us because of a huge, huge online participation and a simultaneous live broadcast across India - so there could have been hiccups, but a lot of people have still written that they liked what they saw.
I did a session on Microsoft Expression Web - one of the key products of the Expression Suite. If you haven't tried it, give it a shot and you will be amazed by what you see. Honestly, I always preferred typing away HTML because I like getting layouts to be very precise and with no clutter. Expression Web is a one-of-its-kind when it comes to generating the actual markup for stuff that is done in WYSIWYG mode. Very concise, very accurate and no extra tags, misunderstood code, etc. Seriously, you have to try it to believe it.
Talking about UI and usability, people who have seen Microsoft Office 2007 simply fall in love with the new "ribbon toolbar". The ribbon toolbar is one of the coolest UI innovations I have seen for a long time. Office has always been the flagship for trend-setting new UIs. A lot of application developers are bound to follow the principles of the ribbon toolbar and create similar "user-aware" interfaces. To make it easier for such developers, Microsoft has also opened out the Office UI for licensing. Details are available here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/office/aa973809.aspx It is amazing to see how we can take something as cool and innovative and not just go and patent it so nobody else does something similar for the next 10 years, but instead open it out for licensing and encourage people to adopt the path-breaking innovations. That, to me, is the maturity that Microsoft shows in wanting its users to adopt to technology we think is useful.
Finally, I got to meet some really nice people at IndiMIX and one of them was Dax Pandhi. Very interesting character, and you would think so too if you were to read http://www.rediff.com/getahead/2006/nov/01outsource.htm before actually getting to meet the guy in person! Dax was a real cool co-presenter, full of enthusiasm and completely crazy!! Dax's blog, www.nukeation.net has the full story with pictures http://www.nukeation.net/2006/11/11/IndiMIX06.aspx It was also fun to meet Leon Brown and to have Deepak Gulati in the same presentation. Can still remember the previous night when we seemed to be in total disarray and almost got Leon throwing us all out of the window! We did sync up eventually and put on a good show, and I can say that because a lot of my audience got back to me to say so. Thanks again to all of you who watched.