A Trip to the Space Needle

I made it to the top of the Space Needle ten minutes before sunset. It had been clear and bright all day (something of a rarity for Seattle) and I thought I might be able to grab some good pictures.

I was right.

I was there for quite a while taking pictures. It was very cold out on the observation deck, but there was a nice warm cafe where I could grab a coffee and wait until I could feel my fingers again.

This was a very fitting end to what has been one of the best MVP Summits I’ve ever attended. The depth of the content, the quality of the engagement and the scale of the developments coming down the tracks were all mightily impressive. I’m never quite sure just what I’ve done to deserve to get an inside track like this, but I’m very pleased that I have. Thanks to all at Microsoft for setting it all up.

Secret Agent Watch Secrets at the MVP Summit

Actually there are no secrets here really. It was rather nice to go to a session and hear the presenter say “You can blog all you want about this.”. So I am doing. Chris Walker, Founder of Secret Labs had come along to tell us about the new Secret Agent watch that his company launched on Kickstarter a while back. He’d brought along some hardware samples and the latest version of the software that lets you use the accelerometer in the device via a funky new emulator. I had a play with this and one of the demos shows how to make a big font watch face.

The code is very simple, each of the letters is a gif image that is just drawn on the watch screen.

If you fancy having a play with this you can download the software from the Agent Watches web site.Above you can see the emulator.The hardware looks very nice. Two processors, one a low power device, ground breaking power monitoring and new display technology. Great stuff.

This is the watch.

This is the hardware inside, with the display.

Chris was telling us that there have been some delays on the hardware (this is nothing particularly surprising when you are making stuff) but that it should be available after Christmas.

MVP Summit Day 2–Beer and Bicycles

Today was the time for more and more stuff. But then it was time for another in the series of World Famous MVP Summit pub crawls. Or in this case, pedal

This is the only bicycle with a bar that I’ve ever seen, let alone been on. The principles is simple enough..

It is a bicycle powered by MVPs. Powered by beer. We pedalled down the road to bar number one,

The first bar was great, although the duck shooting game was obviously broken as I was comprehensively beaten when we were playing it. /when moving on we switched to “stagger power” and went off to the next one.

The streets are very pretty round here

The second bar had a great name, amazing artwork inside (since it was for sale I’m not posting pictures)..

..and superb live music. And pizza. And beer.

And pretzels.

It was a great night. Thanks to Desiree and Sharon for setting up everything and making it such a wonderful occasion.

MVP Summit Day 1

When you go to the MVP Summit they essentially open up your head and pour a ton of stuff into it. Unfortunately I’m not in a position to say what the stuff was. I can’t tell you how many Non-Disclosure screens we saw. Actually, that’s not because the number is a secret, it is because I lost count. All I can write about the Windows Phone sessions is “Blimey, this all looks very nice”.

After our “reverse brain dump” we headed outside for a walk around. It has been cold, damp and raining since I got here, so of course I feel right at home.

Flying with Bad User Interfaces

So today I was lucky enough to get to fly out to Seattle for the MVP Summit. That’s twice in one year. Lovely. We took off and before long I was playing with the in-flight entertainment. As you do. The picture quality and sound were excellent. The range of movies and TV shows as wide. But the user interface was horrible.

Take the screen above. The user interface is touch driven, so you are reaching out with your fat fingers on the end of your wobbly arm to hit one of the two buttons, which do fairly critical things. Get the wrong button and you will be upset. So why are the buttons so close together, so small, and why is the text on them so hard to read?

And then there’s this:

This is how you pick the films. The screen is pretty enough but it is filled up with useless information. The titles of the films themselves are impossible to discern on the artwork and the scroll targets are tiny tiny.  If they had thought about it they could have put the name of every film, in text, on one screen and saved us the hassle of grinding through the pages.

Add to this a very unresponsive and inaccurate input and you have a recipe for an unhappy user. And the annoying thing for me is that the service, once you started watching, was very good indeed. It was just that someone really didn’t think how the user interface was supposed to work.