Shedding Some Light

A couple of announcements about our fall conferences:

• First, registration is now open for both Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++. Registrations have been already been pouring in, which is great news.
• Second, speakers and sessions for Southwest Xbase++ are now available.

Remember, if you register for one conference, you’re free to attend sessions in the other conference as well: it’s BOGO (buy one, get one free). There are some sessions specifically intended for VFP developers, including Project PolarFox: State of the Union and Xbase++ 2.0 from a VFP Developer’s Perspective. Also, some of the Southwest Fox session will appeal to Xbase++ developers, such as Advanced Topics in Mercurial: Taking it to the Next Level, jQuery 101, and Office Automation Without Office.

I personally hope you’ll head right over to the brand new online registration form developed by my team at White Light Computing. You’ll receive an email when you submit your registration confirming we received it. You’ll get a confirmation message with a paid invoice as your receipt after we process the payment.

I also want to make a brief plea to you as well. We encourage you to register as soon as possible. Our final commitment to the conference center is due by July 2. In order to confirm that commitment, we must have a sufficient number of people registered by then to ensure that the conference is financially sound. So please register soon and spread the word about Southwest Fox to all the Visual FoxPro developers you know, and likewise for the Southwest Xbase++ conference.

Thanks for the continued support!

Only 152 days until we gather in Gilbert!

Today is one of those big days here at Geek Gatherings because we officially announce the speakers and sessions for Southwest Fox 2012. All the details can be found on the Speakers page.

We’re glad to welcome back a couple of speakers who haven’t been to Southwest Fox in a long time: Rod Paddock and Kevin McNeish. And of course Cathy Knight, Kevin Cully, and Rick Strahl, who didn’t speak at the conference last year. Returning from last year are Menachem Bazian, Steve Bodnar, Rick Borup, Tamar Granor, Doug Hennig, Rick Schummer, Eric Selje, Tuvia Vinitsky, and Christof Wollenhaupt.

We have a terrific line up of topics that cover a variety of Visual FoxPro, Web, and other technologies too. I believe there is something for everyone. I think our pre-conference sessions are going to interest a lot of developers too.

Stay tuned for announcements about the Southwest Xbase++ 2012 speakers and sessions AND the roll out of the new online registration site we are working on.

I hope to see everyone in October. Only 170 days until we gather in Gilbert!

Each year I look for a new conference to attend. I do this for a couple of reasons. First is to experience a different group of topics and speakers. Second is to look for ideas that are different from the way we put on conferences. This year I decided on KalamazooX. I picked it based on buzz I heard on Twitter the past couple of years. I was not disappointed.

The conference is on “soft skill” topics, not hard technical topics you find at most software conferences. It is very unique in this regard. It is a single-day conference with ten 30-minute sessions with 5 minute breaks in between. I registered for the conference before even knowing the speakers and the topics, purely based on the reputation of the organizers and the good experiences past attendees talked about.

KalamazooX is inexpensive. I registered as an early-bird for $20 (normally $25 for professionals and $15 for students). Add to that a hotel night for $100, a tank of gas for $45, and a couple of meals around $40. Total expenses around $200. I probably could have driven out in the morning and returned the same day, but I wanted to relax a bit so Therese and I went out Friday afternoon.

I arrived a little after 8:00am for registration and found a seat in the back. Nice deep tables and lots of room between attendees. The room was good except for the morning sunlight on the screen which washed out many of the speaker’s slides in the first half of the day. Fruit and continental breakfast style food in the morning, and various beverages available all day. Conference also included a boxed lunch for everyone.

The speakers were good, topics were good, food was good, room was good, and networking/discussions were good. After the conference I noted to the lead organizer that KalamazooX had the same effect on me as the Business of Software (BoS) conference at a fraction of the cost. I walk away with ideas and thoughts I might not have considered without listening to the speakers. I was surprised at the comparison.

If you are interested in the Twitter stream, take a little time to read posts using the conference hashtag  #KalX12.

The thing I noticed throughout the day and probably the reason people kept tweeting it was one good session after another: speakers were prepared, well prepared.

Here are some thoughts on the best-of-the-best sessions (all five out of five stars):

• Best session of the day content-wise was Joe O’Brien’s People Patterns. Smooth speaker who packed my notes. Best idea from this session is the concept of a “Conversation Rolodex”, which means you prepare discussion topics so you do not go down the route of “so how about them Red Wings…”  This is one thing that seriously expands the conference after-hours sessions and likely has the biggest return on investment for a conference attendee. It works in business as well with your customers. I also liked his point about “Assume the positive”, which really rings home as business owners often worry about what happens if things go wrong. Thinking and believing good things result from your decision making helps drive success.
• Best  session of the day to listen to was Justin Searls’ The Mythical Team-Month. Noticeably the most nervous speaker, but his ideas and slides flowed well. All common sense and reaffirming concepts. He was a high energy speaker. His point about there not being any place to hide in small teams is something I really believe in as it forces no-fat productivity. I am glad the organizers went with their gut and picked this one.
• Best surprise session of the day was Suzan Bond’s Intuition. Past the basic business skills, successful business owners rely on their gut and intuition, sprinkled in with a little luck. Most people avoid talking about this. My favorite point: Good decisions get better, bad decisions get worse. This is so true. I have lived through both. This session had to be the softest of the “soft skills” presented and was the session I looked forward to the most before the conference started. Suzan hit home a couple of points that made my day.
• Best stab in the neck came during Jeff Blankenburg’s session How to Learn session. His point about not having enough time to learn everything you want or need to learn is an excuse. Watch a little less TV, sleep a little less, just do what it takes to learn. Time is the thing I cannot buy or create more of, and have always struggled on balance and optimizing my use of time. But he was right, I need to use time better for learning. I disagree with his point on not reading books as did several speakers who followed him, but I know people learn differently. I wish he would have had more concrete examples, but as I learned more and more through the day, it was a day more about inspiration than hard take-aways.
• And Alan Stevens did not push me over the edge once during his Making a Difference talk. Shocking. Although he did push at least one other person’s buttons on a religious argument so his session was deemed a success.  {g}

Strangely, a couple of the sessions actually spawned ideas for the approach I am going to take for my sessions at Southwest Fox and German DevCon later this year. I was not expecting that to happen.

One thing to note, from the get go, each of the speakers were fairly liberal with the use of swearing. If this bothers you the day probably would have been a bit frustrating. Some of it was humorous, and some of it was unnecessary. It definitely did not add to the conference experience.

As is normal for any conference I attend, I added a book to my Kindle and a couple more to the wish list. You are welcome Amazon. If you are interested, the book I added is The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson, Ph.D.

I wondered how the 30-minute sessions were going to work. Most conference sessions are 60-75 minute. For a technical topic that seems to work. Someone proposed making some of the session slots for our conference to include some two 30-minute sessions with a 15 minute break inside a normal 75-minute slot. I am skeptical on how well this might work, but plan to give it more thought based on how well these sessions worked at KalamazooX. Shorter sessions kept my attention better. What I am not sure of is if this is better for the soft skill or business topics, or if technical topics can benefit from this format too.

I expect to be back for KalamazooX 2013 and return as a sponsor too. A terrific way to spend my Saturday.

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a developer to the Southwest Fox conference in the United States as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient’s country. For more information on the Ambassador Fund or to learn how to contribute to it, please see http://www.swfox.net/ambassador.aspx.

The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, Bernard Bout, and Borislav Borissov, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt and Rick Bean.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2012 recipient. To nominate someone you think is deserving to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund@swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than April 30, 2012.

The FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award honors those individuals who have contributed a great deal to the FoxPro community over the years. See the Visual FoxPro Wiki topic for previous award recipients. These recipients wish to continue the award and have created a committee to select a recipient for 2012. The committee consists of all 11 living previous recipients, Alan Griver (yag) of EC:Wise (formerly of Microsoft), and one person from the FoxPro community.

If you wish to be considered for inclusion on the committee, please email Doug Hennig (dhennig@stonefield.com) by April 30, 2012. The existing committee will select the community member and announce their selection in early May. The committee will then issue a call for nominations for the 2012 recipient and will make their selection from the nominees.

Before you read this, I want you to know I really have been interested in Windows 8 and thought Microsoft was showing some serious chutzpah by messing with the Windows bread and butter revenue generator. I find it an interesting exercise to bring one OS to the three major computing platforms. In general I don’t think the Metro UI really works for business desktops. I also believe the tablet and phone OS are used differently than a desktop and laptop machine so they should be different. Still I do not want to discount it completely without trying it. I went into this with a completely open mind, and even after venting some complaints below, I feel Windows 8 has some interesting aspects.

I recently installed Windows 8 on a spare netbook computer. Nothing fancy, but up until a couple of months ago this was my wife’s primary computer running Windows 7 Ultimate (upgraded from the initial Starter edition). I am mostly interested in seeing if some legacy apps still run on the Windows 8, but it is a good opportunity to kick the tires on the new operating system.

I have already run into my first problem. It apparently is not a problem most of the world is going to hit, but the small percentage of people it might bother the most are important nonetheless.

The spare netbook runs at 1024×600 resolution. Not a great form factor for an 8 hour day, but it worked well as a Windows 7 machine for my wife. Also a perfect travel machine for trips where you might want to connect to email or an occasional Web search. The process of upgrading from Win 7 Ultimate to the Win 8 Consumer Preview was a little slow, but a painless experience. I blame the slowness on the Atom processor and low memory config, not the update process.

The first thing I did was click on a Metro tile and get presented with the message of not being able to run in this low resolution. In fact every tile specific to Windows 8 gives me the same message. During the install it warned about not being able to run the Windows Store, but I figured I could live without the experience on this box for this pass at testing the OS.

Just to let you know, the OS is working fine on the netbook. It runs Office on the desktop just peachy. IE10 works too in classic mode. I can read all the tiles on the Start screen. I can work with the OS through the charms and settings. So the Metro UI partially works. But when I click on things like Weather and People and just about everything else on the Start screen I get the message that the resolution is just too small to run the app.

Metro requires 1024×768 or higher. This wipes out the netbook form factor or platform for Windows 8. Maybe Microsoft thinks it is dead, and this might be true. I am not sure this is the case, but it definitely wipes out any potential upgrade revenue, and if people install it and get the experience I am getting they are going to be support trouble for the Microsoft Product Support Services (PSS).

But it got me thinking. I have developed apps for 800×600 for some of our customers because of visually handicapped people. I know one person who has a family member that has macular degeneration and runs to a 24” or 30” monitor at 800×600 to see the screen. It is ugly, ugly for you and me. He literally will not be able to run Windows 8 Metro UI and see it. That seems bizarre to me considering the UI works on something as small as a Windows 7 Phone.

I don’t see the point where Microsoft cannot make the tiles scroll or adjust to the 800×600 screen. Windows 7 Phone scrolls. Scrolling is not hard and for visually impaired people, it is an acceptable tradeoff to run the latest and greatest. I am sure the engineers have considered this, but I am just not grasping why this would be a design decision and limitation.

Another question I have is the tablet market. Obviously Apple upped the ante with the Retina display, but there is still room for 7” tablet platform. If my netbook is a 10” what is the 7” platform going to run at resolution wise.

One other question I have is the colors of the tiles. I have not spent a lot of time poking around, but can the tile colors be customized? I saw the theme selection, but I thought that was just the background color. Again, I played with the OS for about an hour on Sunday so I am not sure. Red tiles are going to be a problem for 10% of the male population with red/green color blindness.

Note: If you want to understand Microsoft’s side of this discussion, check out their Building Windows 8 Blog on this topic. This blog entry is well written and well thought out and covers a lot of interesting material. However, I point to one particular reason sited several times:

“We chose a minimum screen resolution of 1024×768 in order to make it as simple as possible for developers to create great apps that work on all the different screens that are available now and in the future.”

This is hogwash. Developers can easily build metro apps that run on scrollable screens. Don’t put this on the developers. Developers don’t need “easy”, users need usable, regardless of the computer or their physical ability to use the computer.

And don’t even get me started on scrapping the Start button. Argh. This easily will slow the adoption of Windows 8 in businesses. Change the core way people access shortcuts to their apps. Especially after introducing the search box on the start button in recent versions of Windows. This is easily the  biggest bad design decision of Windows 8. I am hoping people will scream loudly and this gets added back in before release.

One of these days I will be invited to the usability labs at Microsoft, but until then I will be happy to provide feedback through my contacts at Microsoft (some of whom actually listen), via the Windows 8 blog in the comments, and this blog.

Anyone else enjoying the Windows 8 experience so far?

Just a reminder that session proposals for Southwest Fox 2012 are due by 8 AM EDT this Friday, March 23. If you’re interested in speaking, please download the Call for Speakers and the proposal application from http://www.swfox.net/CallForSpeakers.aspx. We look forward to hearing from you.

Save the dates for Southwest Fox and Southwest Xbase++ 2012! The conferences take place October 18-21, 2012.

This year we have two conferences as one great event at the same location. Southwest Fox has always served Visual FoxPro developers an opportunity to learn and extend their skills, and network with fellow developers. Alaska Software is working on PolarFox, a product that keeps the Visual FoxPro language alive in their next generation tool. You get two conferences for the price of one!

The conferences take place at the San Tan Elegante Conference and Reception Center, the same great location as last year.

If you’re interested in presenting at Southwest Fox 2012, please visit http://www.swfox.net/callforspeakers.aspx, read the complete Call for Speakers document (linked from that page), and download the proposal submission application. Session proposals are due by March 23.

Finally, if there are any topics you hope will be covered this year, please send them to info@swfox.net, right away.