My second day at the JAOO conference has ended. I had no duties as a crew, so I could spend the entire day going to sessions. I attended 4 sessions today. I had planned to go to a 5th session, however I was almost about to fall asleep in the last two sessions I attended. Not because the sessions where boring, but due to lack of sleep the last few days. When 30 odd helpers sleep in the same room, the majority being in young and drinking beer, the noise level has been too high for me to sleep properly.

How Cool do Users Feel When Interacting with Your Software

When entering this session i thought it was about how users feel when interacting with various pieces of software, and tips for what to do in order to get users to like ones application. Boy was i wrong! The session was more about how you could enhance the physically world around you with IT. As an example was shown a beanbag that you could use to display images on a wall. The more you messed around in the bag, the more pictures was displayed. Try to do that with a business application! The presenter was a researcher at Århus University with HCI as her research area, and she falls into the same category as some of the work i have been presented to at Aalborg University during my own studies: Research for the sake of research. Or atleast that is my opinion,

Identifying your Client's Needs

This talk centered around the issues of customers not knowing what they want. I liked the talk. It gave some good examples of what to be aware of when trying to identify a client's needs.

Architecture of a RIA

This talk was a joint effort by Josh Holmes from Microsoft and James Ward from Adobe. They gave  a talk about the background of Rich Internet Applications (RIA) and what kinds of patterns are behind them (Model-View-Controller). They gave 10 best practice advices and 10 worst practice advices. All of them based on their own experiences. It was a very good talk, and it was cool to see that two RIA competitors (Microsoft with Silverlight and Adobe with Flex) joined forces inorder to spread the message about RIA.

RIAs using Adobe AIR & Flex

This talk was a continuation of the RIA introduction. This time with the focus on Adobe Flex and AIR, and with demonstrations of what you can do with those technologies. This was demonstrated by James Ward from Adobe. Again it was a good presentation, but unfortunately it was also the time when the lack of sleep really started to kick in.