Last month on 15th March 2012 at New Delhi, W3C India & IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India) had organized an one day conference titled “Mobile Web Initiative in India”. I got invited to participate in one of the panel discussions on the day “Challenges of Indic Adoption on Mobile Web” covering on the Technology for enabling Indian Languages on Mobile Platform & Lack of standard interoperability.
The panel was moderated by Ms.Swaran Latha (W3C India Country Manager & Director & HoD for TDIL Programme of MC & IT of Government of India). The moderator covered in length the challenges in this area, what Govt. of India is doing to get all stakeholders on board in enabling Indian Languages, nudging them into place without any hard legislations. My good friend and the expert on this field Mr.Muthu Nedumaran from Murasu Systems (Malaysia) covered on the technologies that are now available including in iOS, Android (HTC Explorer) and recent BlackBerry OS. Mr.Sridhar of Akruti talked about the path that has been covered in last two decades in this field.
I myself talked on the need for educating and awareness building amongst the users & stakeholders on the possibility & business potential of enabling the Devices, OS and Apps for Indian Languages. India only has 5% of its population (say 40 Million of the 800 Million Mobile users) who know to read & write English, what about the 95% they are not using SMS or even Address book?. There is an urgent need for the industry to educate the users that using Mobile doesn’t mean learning English & poor communication. I have seen that most of the time the Device OEM’s Engineering & Head Office (say in US, Europe, Japan or Taiwan) is ready to do Indian Languages (when they do tens of languages worldwide this is routine to them), it is the Indian Marketing & Operations office that throws the spanner. They sit in their glass offices in Gurgaon & Bangalore and think everyone in India speaks English including Drivers, Maids, Cooks & Factory workers. By doing this they are not only killing our languages (but most of Indian Languages are classical languages surviving over thousands of years of external invasion), but also depriving the productivity & economic advantage that better communication through Mobile enables for common man (Aam Aadmi).
There is no cost reasoning today for not doing Indian Language support today in Mobile Devices (it costs less than 50 US cents per device and falls to zero when you go to millions of units). Today Indian Languages is supported in major Mobile OSes – iOS (Display & input through Apps), Android through OEM software from HTC or Samsung has full support and Blackberry through add-on install. Even Nokia Symbian OS has support enabled in their lost cost devices. Only Microsoft Windows Phone 7.x doesn’t have any kind of Indian Language support, it is sad because Microsoft was the first major OS vendor in PCs to fully support many of the Indian Languages way back from Windows 2000. Hopefully the next version of Windows Phone (WP8) having an unified Kernel with Desktop Windows (Disclaimer: Nothing official yet from Microsoft, but rumoured here) will start supporting Indian Languages.
Finally if the stakeholders can’t be convinced it is time for Parliament (and not individual State Assemblies) to come with laws requiring Indian Language support across the eco-system (Operator, SMS, Devices, OS & Apps) – *YES I said this, which is rare for someone like me who prefers lean and small Government & Compact Laws*.
As always attending a Microsoft technology conference (TechEd India 2012) was fun & educative. You can catch the clips here and other information from here, so I will keep this post to few sessions I managed to attend.
The 3 day conference happened at Hotel Lalit Ashok, a fine hotel but as a conference venue I try to like it but I can’t. The map they give while registering keeps getting less comprehensible year after year, I was pretty sure if I run in circles I could have found the rooms faster than the map or ask the event folks. And this happens even though I am supposed to be familiar with the topography & room names as I have been here for many years now, either as a speaker or as an attendee.
In Windows 8, apart from Metro UI & WinRT there has been incremental improvements to Windows 7 in terms of Boot time, Tast Manager, Explorer file copy & so on. But I learn that there are significant improvements to Windows Server "8" from Windows Server 2008 R2. I attended the Windows Server "8" modern workstyle enabled by Pracheta Budhwar & Windows Server "8" The power of many Servers, the simplicity of one by Kamal Jain. Both were introduction sessions to new features in Windows Server "8", lot of improvements have been made relevant for all use cases, from Single Server to Clusters. DHCP Resiliency, SAN storage copy offloading, unified server manager, Hyper-V dynamic movement of running VMs & many more.
Demo Extravaganza by Harish Vaidyanathan & Nahas Mohammed was fun & entertaining. They showed lot of cool stuffs around Windows 8 Keyboard shortcuts, roaming profile and so on. When they were distributing "goodies" like Nokia Lumia 800 or T-Shirts, the stampede like scene near the front rows were scary.
Vinod Kumar demos in Demo Extravaganza on tips for Office 2010 were interesting, I knew the Access email data collection tip but the PowerPoint Photo Editing feature (Remove Background in Format Ribbon) was new to me.
One of the biggest challenges of using BigData is the setup & configuration of something like Hadoop & its relatives (Pig, Mahout, Hive, Hbase, HDFS, Zoo Keeper). Ramkumar demo’ed the upcoming cloud offering from Microsoft Hadoop on Azure (currently in invite only beta), this was exciting to me as it makes Hadoop approachable to every developer out there. You can program MapReduce functions with Java or JavaScript, it is likely Microsoft will add support for .NET Languages in upcoming languages. Out of box you get cool Graphing features to visualize data easily
The next talk I went was a session by MTC (Microsoft Technology Center) team – Vinod Kumar, Govind Kanshi & Anirudda Deswandikar. MTC team rocks with their frank,practical advice on when to use & when not to use hyped technologies like ORM, Cloud, XML & Virtual Machine Platforms (Java, .NET). With all the marketing hype surrounding REST & Cloud, this talk was a bit of fresh air.
In the evening the last session I went to was by my fellow Microsoft Regional Director (RD) Stephen Forte (CSO, Telerik) on Agile Estimation. He was hilarious, putting serious data on why software estimate is always wrong at beginning. You can only improve estimate on iterations after each iteration, it is important you have many smaller iterations and there by improve your estimate. He talked about using "User Stories" & Tracking Backlogs as techniques to capture user requirements & maintain sanity in the project process. You need to insists on having one user story at least for each page if the project is a website, a single line like "Replica of Amazon.com" is not acceptable. Stephen demoed on how you can use PlanningPoker.com for improving Estimations. His same talk made in the TechEd USA is available here, don’t miss to watch it.
He gave following books for further read:
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Roger Fisher
(Disclaimer: Microsoft India had given me a free pass to attend TechEd India as I am one of the Microsoft Regional Directors, a honorary title & partner program)
I was always interested in Photography, but I made little effort to learn it. Just like many others I thought it was about buying a DSLR camera and a good lens for taking great photographs. Which I did few years back when I was visiting Tokyo, I went to Yodobashi Camera store in Akihabara (this is 8 floors of camera paradise) and bought the latest at that time Nikon D80 with a 18-55MM lens. I learnt few tips from asking my friends and reading some articles in magazines that said for a good photograph you need to frame the subject correctly and lighting has to be correct. As you would have noticed seeing photos in this blog that my skills in this area are limited. I bought some books on Digital Photography and a training DVD on how to use Nikon D80 – both are lying unopened in my bookshelf for last 24 months. On top of this the menus in the camera were daunting even for a Software Engineer like me, the minute I came across Shutter Speed or Aperture in the manual I got dizzy, so I put the camera always in Auto and kept complaining why my camera produces lousy pictures and wondered whether I need to buy a TelePhoto lens and so on…
Last week I came across this one-day workshop at Konica Labs in Sterling Road conducted by famous photograph Mr.K.Dhamodharan, who has been a part of the photography industry since 1985. In 2006 Mr. Dhamodharan went for a 9100km, 21 day photography expedition from Chennai – Kashmir – Kanyakumari – Chennai- an expedition that covered the length of the Indian subcontinent. Sounded interesting, so I registered by paying Rs.4000 (plus taxes) online and attended the workshop today.
I was not sure how the program will be, will it be too dry and over my head, who will be the fellow students. But Dhamu (as he is called) put the diverse crowd (which included two retirees, one homeopathy doctor, one animation designer, one Software Tester) at ease. Most of the sample photos he showed were from his own collection. The photos were accompanied by lively commentary of the people in them, their background & a bit of gossip. This made the mostly theory sessions fun and enjoyable, without this I would have gone to sleep. Dhamu covered the basic concepts of camera – Shutter speed, Aperture, ISO in brief, to the extend needed to appreciate them. He went on to cover in detail with lots of examples on framing, lighting, selecting background & foregrounds. Lighting can change the mood and bring in a different emotion to the same subject.
Dhamu stressed the importance of cultivating a third eye to visualize and to learn from disassembling professional photographs we see in magazines & Internet. A photo should always kindle some emotions on the viewer. Then it was about how to take Portraits, Couple and so on in brief. He also covered (surprise, surprise) on how to pose for photographs – the trick is to have a full mouth smile almost showing your teeth. Dhamu kept saying that Photography is one hobby that improves your self confidence a lot, you can also enjoy the attention and the privileges that it brings with it from people around you.
Though it was advertised as a workshop, the practical was limited to the last hour of the program, which is understandable in a 1 day schedule. Overall, if you can afford to spend Rs.4000 and have interest on photography I will recommend this program.
Now that I understand the basics, I have started shooting lots of photos and I think I need to buy a new camera with a Telephoto lens :- )
Below are first photographs I took during the practise session, yes it needs lot of improvement!
World over Microsoft conducts lots and lots of events every year. Their flagship events are two – Professional Developer Conference a.k.a. PDC (this is where they announce the next big thing like .NET, Windows 2000, Longhorn, Windows Azure and so on) and Tech Ed (this is more hands-on current technologies for IT Professionals with some Developer content) happening almost every year in USA and then replicated across the world. About five years back in 2006, they announced a new event by name “Mix” which for the first time tried to bring 3 stakeholders into one event – Business Managers, Designers & Developers. It was started to promote Web development and Microsoft’s new designer tools family MicrosoftExpression. This was the first Microsoft event where you got to hear Microsoft’s competitors like Yahoo! & Amazon (Microsoft wasn’t in cloud yet in 2006), which I found to be quite useful to get a sense of where Web technologies are going in general. And the lunch-table discussions I had with such a variety of audience were very interesting.
As a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and as a Microsoft Partner for many years, these events have become annual fixtures in my calendar.With the new “Build” event that happened last year (instead of a PDC) where they announced Windows 8, it was clear the existing Microsoft events landscape was changing. And indeed it has changed. First casualty was PDC and today they officially acknowledged that there will be no Mix in 2012. Though I feel sad for an event that offered variety and fun, in the last few years unfortunately Mix was made into yet another Developer event by Microsoft. So it was time the event got killed and merged into a unified better event.
In this moment of our prayers for “Mix” and for its soul to R.I.P I I will like to look back at some of the moments I have experienced around this event.
Mix ‘06
Bill Gates announced and kicked off the very first Mix at the Venetian, Las Vegas. The big announcement was WPF/E (which became Silverlight later) and demonstration of it on a Nokia phone which never got released.
Mix06 was my second or third trip to Vegas so I didn’t understand well on how lodging in Vegas works. I ended up blowing money (literally) by booking a $400/Night (concessional rate for attendees!) room at the venue itself (Venetian).
Mix ‘07
This event was all about Silverlight!. I am sure most of us .NET enthusiasts remember the demo where Silverlight in a browser with C# code-behind winning over Java Script in a game of chess. Looking back (from a world of Node.JS & Chakra) I was not sure on what we were smoking back then in May 2007.
I found the BBC Radio 1 and Windows Live Messenger social co-browsing (called Messenger activity then) & sharing to be quite cool. Unfortunately it never got released outside UK (just like most of the good stuffs from BBC which are available only to UK Residents due to a antiquated theory of UK Tax payer funding).
What got me thinking was a quote made by “The Economist” Publisher Mr.Andrew Rashbass on a panel discussion (which alone was worth my travel to the US from India). The quote was on how Portable Reader devices replacing paper. Andrew said “itwill not happen in short-term, not in mid-term and definitely not in long-term and that BillG can use one, but no one else will use it”
I think this year Microsoft started to highlight that Mix was a “72 Hour conversation”, a tag line I liked & which I consider to have captured the essence of what Mix ‘06 and Mix ‘07 were. The evening party on one of the days was fun and colourful.
After blowing my money staying in Venetian, I realized how lodging works in Vegas – you can get rooms from $40 to $1 Million per night, it all depends on what you are looking for. From this year, I was booking myself a room at $40 in the Stratosphere Hotel. Although it is on the other end of the Strip, it was a good 30 minutes walk in the evening after you finish your dinner near by to Venetian like in the Food court at The Capital Grille.
Mix ‘08
This year the keynote was by Ray Ozzie who outlined Microsoft’s investment in IE and Silverlight, Web Slices and more. Lots of demos this year.
Then it was Dean Hachamovitch talking about how great IE 8.0 was (do you remember this IE?)
Lot of coverage about live streaming capabilities of Silverlight during the then upcoming Beijing Olympics
My fellow RD Scott Stanfield’s company Vertigo demoing the “Hard Rock” app they have build using Silverlight and Deep-Zoom technology.
Coca-Cola sponsored UEFA Euro 2008 & Windows Live Messenger community (what was that I don’t remember other than the photograph below?)
Due to the onslaught of recession, travel budget constraints and thanks to great live streaming of the Keynotes by Microsoft, the next three years I decided to watch it from Home, only trouble being the need to have loads of coffee to keep me awake through the Night in India. I didn’t miss out the individual talks either – all the session videos were made available from Channel9 for download in few days of the event getting over.
Wish you all a Happy Deepavali 2011 – the festival of lights. Today I had enjoyed my Deepavali celebrations with lots of crackers & sweets (yes, but I didn’t eat them all). Sharing a video below of a Multishot firecracker we fired from our house terrace today. Enjoy & play safe with crackers – remember there is no such thing as being overcautious when it comes to firecrackers.
This is something that I saw two and half years back during Microsoft Mix ‘09 conference. I wanted to blog about it then but somehow seemed to have missed it. Today I was reminded of it when I was talking to my Yoga master about my experience of going to a Doctor in USA and buying medicines there few years back when I fell sick during a trip to Houston. Unlike India where prescription drugs are sold in sealed aluminium foil strips, in USA I found many of the medicines are packaged in bottles.
There was this talk in Mix ‘09 conference following IE 8.0 keynote on User Experience by Deborah Adler, Ms.Adler was an attractive young UX designer whose prescription packaging system simplified the design of Pill bottles & information presented in that. It also reduced the chances of wrong usage of pills and resulting complications. The design was adopted by Target Pharmacies and is marketed under their ClearRX brand. I found the idea of improving on an everyday problem to be quite impressive & encouraging. Check out the video here (skip to 30.30 Minute to get to this section directly).
The default templates shipping in Visual Studio whether it is for C++ or C# or JavaScript, they all do a great job in handling all the layout complexities and do the heavy lifting for building Metro UI
Microsoft has done lot of user study to see the most ideal and convenient position in the screen where user’s thumb can reach and they are in the edges. As a result it is good practise to put frequently used interaction surfaces near the edges
When you are porting your existing Windows Apps UI to Metro, best is to start from scratch, when you can’t even simple things make a lot of improvement (like removing the lines and borders, more spaced out, large icons and so on). See in these four steps from left to right:
Touch is direct, so performance issues are felt more directly and viscerally. Animations when content is appearing of changing helps a lot in the feeling of fluid to the users. Metro Apps require assets in 3 sizes (100%, 140% and 180%) and better still you can provide them in vector formats (SVG) or CSS primitives or XAML.
Your content needs to adapt to multiple screen sizes and orientations:
Contracts are the glue that bind Metro style apps together and to the system UI. There are many contracts, but the three of the most fundamental are Share, Search and Picker.
There are many styles of Live tiles. You can choose the one that suits your app. Live Tiles are updated using your “Local” logic, Scheduled or Push using Windows Push Notification Service (WNS)
In-box controls that ship in Windows 8 for Metro style apps are shown below:
Metro style apps when making calls to WinRT those calls go directly to Core OS or though a broker (only on select cases). All running Metro apps are suspended by the OS when the user switches away from it, this is done to preserve the battery live and give maximum performance to the foreground application. This means Apps get about 5 seconds to save their state before the OS puts them on Suspend. Apps when in Suspend are still in memory but no CPU cycles are spent and Windows kernel never schedules those threads. Apps are also terminated when there are low resources, in those cases Apps never notified at all.
Five main design principles of Metro style apps are
Let me begin by saying this first, I am blown away. What got announced in the Keynote today morning by Steven Sinofsky, makes it absolutely clear that Windows8 is a big bold step by Microsoft and as been repeated many times it is an OS that is definitely “reimagined”. You can download the Developer Preview bits of Windows 8 and SDK for free from here.
Steven Sinofsky in his keynote mentioned some interesting facts about Windows 7:
Approaching 450 million copies of Windows 7 sold
Windows7 consumer usage greater than Windows XP
1502 non security product changes delivered since Windows 7 shipped
542 Million people signing into Windows Live services every month
Everything that runs in Windows 7 runs on Windows 8. Sinofsky demoed a 3 year old Atom Netbook running Windows 8 just fine, same machine actually used less CPU, Memory and Number of processor than Windows 7. Windows 8 now has great Multi Monitor support (finally) even when you are remoting, Task Manager Application improvement, Windows Explorer improvement (long due).
In the keynote he demoed several apps built for Metro UI. Interestingly these were build by college interns. There were 17 groups of them, 2-3 people in each team and worked over 10 weeks time.Quite impressive considering most of them were new to Windows and were working on moving builds of Windows8.
Steven Sinofsky pulled a good one on competition (Google Chrome) when he said “Chrome”less content when he was showing off that Metro apps are full screen with no Titlebar or Windows. Obviously he didn’t say “Window”less that would have minimized Window brand.
There are lot of great stuff shown here, instead of repeating everything I will just cover few highlights:
Metro UI, the new UI in Windows8 is fresh, innovative & futuristic. I liked the Semantic Zoom feature (that shows a reduced view of tiles when you pinch in) that makes it easy to quickly navigate the start screens. Windows8 touch language is certainly a new thinking brought by Microsoft into this space, shows they are not simply copying from others. By being late to the game Microsoft has benefitted from preceding works and learning from them.
Windows 8 has a new App Model that is restrictive (Windows Store distribution only, no app side loading) but one that ensures security for users preventing rogue apps. What I liked in the Windows Store it supports trial mode. Store manages (as now common with iTunes, Android App store and so on) all the security, authentication, payment, delivery, rating and so on. Current Windows Apps (Win32, .NET) say like Quicken you can still list them in Store, but it will only show a link to your website, you will not get any of the features of Store for that app.
Windows 8 has a new Runtime called WinRT (common runtime available for C++, C# or VB, JavaScript) that is a sibling to aging Win32. This is not a layer on top of Win32, but a first class native runtime
Metro Style Windows Live applications like Mail & Photo Gallery are all in development and not made available now but was previewed. What I liked was the Skydrive powered access to drives & folders in remote PCs, a super cool feature through which you can get the files in your office/home PC remotely from any Windows8 PC without syncing or anything.
As a side note I couldn’t help noticing a difference between Apple’s Launch Keynotes (yes I know, Steve Jobs is a legend here) & Microsoft’s launches. Apple focus on lifestyle & experience and technology takes an important but back stage, but Microsoft keynotes are more about technology. Though Windows8 is about touch and new form factors there was no mention on Music, Movies, Games (except one demo) and communication.
I am here this week in Anaheim, CA for Build Windows conference. Weather is just fine and Disneyland near-by but I am here doing this post .
Last few years Microsoft has been criticized for not doing enough in embracing “touch” and modern OS concepts pioneered by likes of Mac OS/iOS and Android. There is lot of anticipation on Windows8 leading up to Build Conference today.
I have been a Microsoft Regional Director from 1999 and I cherish the opportunity to get to know the legends of IT Industry especially in Microsoft Technologies. Regional Directors aren’t Microsoft employees–they’re independent developers, architects, trainers, and other professionals who provide a vital link between Microsoft and the developer community.
Today the day before Microsoft Build conference, we all had a party in Carlsbad, CA at one of our fellow RD’s mansion (OK, not really a mansion but a Track home). I have been to Carlsbad, CA few times before it is a lovely city in San Diego county and is popular for its lovely beaches, Golf courses visited by celebrities and of course Legoland.
The party was held at the house belonging to Tim Huckaby, Founder of Interknowlogy & well known technology speaker. TimH is popular in Microsoft circles for throwing the parties which are exceptionally fun to attend and this one was no exception. We had tasty Mexican catering with snacks, drinks and juices on plenty. At the end of the party with burdened hearts & tons of fond memories we all bid farewell to our RD Manager at Microsoft – Kevin Schuler.
The content of this site are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in anyway. In addition, my thoughts and opinions often change, and as a weblog is intended to provide a semi-permanent point in time snapshot you should not consider out of date posts to reflect my current thoughts and opinions.
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