Exciting time for us here!!!!   Here are some things to get you started with MIX fever! :)  Loads of great prizes and goodies to win - so go ahead and do some stuff!

Hear ye, hear ye!  MIX08 to debut the first ever MIX UX Track which is 3 days of solid content dedicated to creatives / designers.  Lou Carbone, David Armano, Dan Roam, Kim Lenox and others will speak.  In conjunction with Adaptive Path, the User Experience track is just one of the many great reasons for all types of designers and creative professionals to attend MIX this year.  http://visitmix.com/2008/mixux.aspx

The deadline for this year’s CSS contest, RESTYLE, has been extended.  Folks can still restyle the MIX08 Homepage and win a pass to MIX08, 3 nights at the Venetian, $$ and more, more, more! http://visitmix.com/2008/restyle/

Have you been listening to The Signal?  Each week a new episode debuts featuring a speaker or MIX crew member talking about some of the upcoming coolness happening at MIX08.  Listen to their interviews with Molly Holzschlag, Kip Kniskern, Jonathan Snook and others as we countdown to Vegas.  Got a question for the show?  Email signalm@microsoft.com or leave a voice-mail message at (425) 703-4650. http://visitmix.com/blogs/TheSignal/

Perhaps you remembered last year’s MIX, in which we featured Flotzam, a WPF screensaver mash-up that showed MIX07 feeds from Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and blogs. Well, we are doing it again this year with a twist: we are running a contest and will feature community created skins of the application on the big screen and on the screensavers of the computers available to attendees at the show.  The best skin will win an XBOX 360.  Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found here http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/News/403/ including links to screencasts and instructions that show how easy it is to do the restyle.  

If you are familiar with WPF development, you will know that one of the most useful features is the ability of WPF UI development is to use Styles and Resources.  Basically, it is a way of creating skins for your controls, like CSS would do for HTML, and then applying those skins.

What this basically means is, like in the CSS scenario, WPF controls can be skinned and re-skinned without having to change any of the code and functionality.  The entire look and feel is well-separated from the presentation layout.

Dax Pandhi and Nukeation have pulled off some fantastic stuff just leveraging that.  This was in the works for a while and I was always excited to know about this project.  Dax has been gracious to give me a full license of the product as well, and it looks wonderful. (Thanks Dax).

In return, I thought I should let everyone know that reuxables is really a smart way to jazz up your WPF applications by leveraging some of the fantastic design that Nukeation churns out.

Check it out at http://reuxables.nukeation.com. 

Way to go Dax!

When I first saw the iPod, what I really liked was the form factor and display that made tons of music and videos really portable.   I don't quite use the iPod - it now serves as an external hard disk for some old data that I once put into it - mostly because I am not really somebody who has a music-player plugged into his ears all the time.

When I saw the iPod, the first thing that struck me was that it would be cool to have this device wirelessly connect to the Internet.  Zune solved that by providing a Wi-Fi capable device.  (I do not own a Zune - at least not yet!). 

The other thing that really would have made it a killer device for me, was ability to browse Wikipedia-like information repositories.  After all, there was a fantastic display with crisp resolution.  I did realize that it would be akin to having something that can connect to the Internet - either through Wi-Fi or through GPRS.

When I started using a Windows Mobile phone (first a Pocket PC, now a SmartPhone) - this wish was granted as well. Pocket IE is really damn good and gives a real close feeling to browsing on the PC.   I browse using my phone a lot!  Real lot!  And more often than not, I am browsing Wikipedia.

Coming back to the original idea - I still thought a portable reading device would be a fantastic idea.  The ideal portable reading device would be able to do the following:

• Connect to the Internet wirelessly - not necessarily to the whole wide Internet, but to an online service akin to the Zune or iTunes music store
• Help search/browse through articles, periodicals, journals, books, blogs and the like - basically online reading material.  Again, note that this is reading material - not like a browser that can do a hundred other things.  The focus remains on reading.
• Pick an article or book to read and download that to an offline cache (could be DRM'ed)
• Provide a fantastic reading experience - with ability to hold and read like a book, a screen that's not harmful to hours of gazing at it, provide hours of battery power and easy recharging, etc.
• Support images and maybe a few limited formats of audio/video

Today, I came across Amazon Kindle, something that is a step in this direction.  It still has miles to go, but I think it is a great step.  Obviously there is way too much thought (and maybe multiple market players) to go into this before this becomes mainstream.