• Nigel Parker, from Microsoft (a sponsor), showed some deep zooming examples using Silverlight (from Seadragon technology, a company MS acquired in 2006), such as the Te Papa pounamu wall and the MSN Fashion Shows 2009. Also demoed was a World Cup Pivot, a data visualization piece using MS Pivot technology. Also mentioned was the preview of IE 9, which is available to be test driven.
• Ludwig Wendzich and Vicky Teinaki gave a talk about natural user interfaces (touchless gesture-based interactions). Despite some technical difficulties while attempting to demo a natural gesture interaction on the webzine he curates, WeeklyRetrospect.com (which, by the way, has an interface worth checking out!), the idea of touchless interactions was conveyed. This was followed by an engaging talk on the future of interface interactions. Mentioned were Adam Greenfield’s book Everyware, Eric Zimmerman, and the Wired magazine’s iPad app. As was often the case over the course of the event, Apple was discussed, and how the Apple model of design was “deceptively” simple, in that it is superficially simple, but (at least in the case of the computer OS) scales to become more complex the further the user digs.
• Rob Coup and Glen Barnes showed a number of open data related resources in NZ, such as open.org.nz, openstreetmap.org, and the upcoming fixmystreet.org.nz.
• Mike Dickison provided the link Wikiteach.info during his talk on the benefits and issues of using wikipedia in academia. Mike also humored the whole event during his reading from 24 Unplugged, about student responses to going 24 hours without being connected to digital communications.
• Lastly, Phonegap – “PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building cross-platform mobile apps. Build apps in HTML and JavaScript”

Two things that may be of note for a Flash developer are the Auckland Interface Model, a universal table widget, and Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii projects, which demonstrate methods of using the wiimote to achieve various types of motion tracking. Check out of the video for head tracking, for instance.

Following the conference, I attended the Northshore .Net User Group meeting that happened to be happening after the conference. Keith Patton gave a great presentation on the upcoming Windows 7 Phone platform. He presented an overview of the platform advantages and limitations and gave a live demo of an app in the phone emulator. And winning Windows 7 Ultimate at the end wasn’t bad either, thanks guys! Visit the MS Windows Phone developer site for more information and the developer tools.