Mix 08 seems to be much more mature than ever before. In previous years there were a lot of ideas being spoken about; this year there are much more implementations of those ideas available to look at. It seems like a lot of people have been working on the new technologies over the past year or so. Hopefully that will lead to the ripening of many technologies (especially WPF) to a point where we can actually use them.

As an example, there is a scheduling application available for Mix. Unfortunately it only runs on Vista, but I captured a video and made a few screenshots for you.

This is the opening screen, with an agenda for the 4 days of the event:

(Click the image to make it larger.)

If you click on a session slot, the agenda zooms out, and the various sessions available for that slot are displayed:

The sessions zoom out again to go back to the agenda.

The app runs very smoothly with my 3GHz Core Duo and 4GB RAM, but I’m not sure it would look so nice on a slower machine. The background is partly transparent (I can see my Vista video wallpaper running at the back of it) and has a video running sideways through it. It looks very nice.

I’m not sure if you’ll be able to see the smoothness of the animation on this video. In real life, it’s quite good.

As a side-note, the transparent background isn’t for everyone. My wife took one look at it and said it made her feel stressed. (One of those days, I think. )

The download of the app was with ClickOnce, and ran very smoothly. I didn’t really have to do more than click a link on a web-page to install the app and get it running.

Overall, a simple app, but a good experience. I like it a lot. It gives me some good inspiration.

My favorite conference is about to start: MIX 08.

It’s a great conference for Microsoft developers with an interest in the web. Last year they had some great talks about user experience and architecture. There’s always something interesting to learn.

Unfortunately I can’t be there (as usual), but all the sessions will be online. Tim Sneath just posted details of where and when you can watch them:

• The keynote with Ray Ozzie, Scott Guthrie will be available live at 9:30am Pacific / 5:30pm GMT on three streams: 750kbps, 300kbps, 100kbps.
• The breakout sessions and panels will be online within 24 hours of each session at MIX08 sessions.