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This talk by Kevin Larson at the MIX10 conference (applicable part starts at ~ 69:00) has some great stuff about the cognitive and emotional impact of good typography.

You might be familiar with the 'candle test' -- high monetary incentives induce better performance on mechanical tasks but significantly *worse* performance on creative tasks. Using a variant of that experiment they found that reading speed and comprehension were unaffected by type and layout, but people's mood and cognitive reserve were noticeably improved by the good typography.

I suspect this doesn't say as much about type as it does about school -- that the bad typography, by slowing down reading, improves rote mechanical recall; and that if they tested for synthesis and creativity, good typography would out-perform bad.

This was announced on the 16th of March:

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/KEY02

Microsoft are VERY explicit that the free VS Express CANNOT be used to develop for the mobile platforms though.

//Microsoft Employee Here//

You can bet this will change with the release of Visual Studio 2010 express and Windows Phone 7. Microsoft is very aware of the importance of being able to develop mobile apps with affordable and free tools. More annoucements will be made at MIX this month.

http://live.visitmix.com/

There will be an official application store ("Marketplace").

As for development tools, this will be detailed at MIX 2010.

It would be so nice to be able to use Ruby instead of Javascript

The article had a couple links to Gestalt, which does just that (for both Ruby and Python), for browsers that have Silverlight or Moonlight installed.

Here is a video of the presentation at Microsoft's MIX 2008 conference where the Microsoft Office 2007 lead explains the research that went into the creation of the concept of the ribbon as well as the process of designing it. It's actually a pretty fascinating watch if you are interested in user interface design.

I know everyone hates Microsoft and its eeevil proprietary technologies but still, it can achieve nice things. A javascript library which parses python script-tags via Silverlight. Check it out: http://visitmix.com/labs/gestalt/

I meant to link this in my previous comment:

http://videos.visitmix.com/page8

The relevant part is about 17:30 into the talk.

Unfortunately, having re-viewed it, I can't find any mention of support for getting browser shots/doms from browsers running on Linux, so maybe that's not supported after all :-(

There's a video demo of SuperPreview in the keynote from last week's MIX09 conference in Las Vegas. Jump to 28:50.

Ballmer playing with the Air (nearly throwing it): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYcxvEfUikg

If you have silverlight, go here and search for "ballmer" and you can see him interviewed by Guy Kawasaki: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

at least the Deep Zoom technology Microsoft has baked into Silverlight looks pretty cool - and it's already PC and Mac cross platform with Linux (via Moonlight) promised. I couldn't work out from the mobile announcements if it would be available on WinMo and S60 straight away, and I guess we'll have to waiting on the iPhone until Jobs gets his act together.

Watching the demo at the MIX conference for http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ I was amazed how easy it was to zoom in and out through what would have been pages of data in a traditional sense, and hard to handle even with Ajax.

The live site is pretty cool, but the video at http://www.visitmix.com/blogs/News/Mix-Keynote-Hard-Rock-Demo/ shows that there is even more cool stuff waiting in the wings.... now we can design in the X, Y and Z planes with fractal page layouts. My head is already starting to spin!

MS has multiple conferences aimed at developers. MIX just recently gave developers a chance to learn about Silverlight. TechEd has hundreds of sessions for developers, and there's a dedicated European version of TechEd in Barcelona. PDC is always focused on showing off future technology (~2 years down the road), and not training on the stuff available today. Given that Vista has only recently shipped, and that the new versions of Server, SQL and VisualStudio aren't shipping til next year, it's not surprising that no one wants to talk about the _next_ versions of those things yet.

Microsoft also offers iPod downloads on the MIX07 site: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

What's wrong with them supporting their own device too?