Off to Vegas
Tomorrow I’m leaving for Vegas to present at MIX06. My session covers the Sidebar, one of the projects that I’ve been working on for the last year at Microsoft.
Out of all the products I’ve worked on over my 11 years at Microsoft, Sidebar is my favorite. We have designed a feature set which I think is visually stunning and which will benefit users and businesses alike. End users will have instant access to targeted information on their desktops. And it will be information that they choose. We will build a huge ecosystem around gadgets, so I expect there to be thousands of gadgets to choose from after Vista ships. For businesses, the Sidebar represents an opportunity to extend their reach beyond the browser or application. FOX Sports has already created a cool football gadget that allows me to monitor football games in real time. If I want additional statistics on the game, I can click in the gadget and be taken to the FOX website. There’s a similar value with applications. You’ll be able to monitor high level data in a gadget instead of having to run the full blown application. When something catches my eye and I want the full set of data, I can click inside the gadget and instantiate the full application. The scenarios are only limited by your imagination.
Sidebar is also a platform in that you can easily (if you know basic HTML, XML and script) build gadgets, which are single purpose mini-applications that are hosted in the Sidebar. If you want to stay abreast of the the platform and possibly build your own gadgets, you can follow our progress on our gadget website.
MIX06 should be a great experience. The conference is going to attract web developers, designers and business decision makers. Sidebar should be pretty interesting to all three types of folks. I can’t wait to see what professional designers can do in terms of building and designing Sidebar gadgets.
Anyhow, wish me luck and I’ll let you know how it goes!
-David