Among the latest enhancements in technology it's possible to highlight multi-touch interface as the most widely accepted as innovative. It started a lot of time ago, near the 80's, but it's been through Job's iPhone since it got hit by mainstream public and media. Nowadays every single device, from mobile phones to laptops, is implementing multi-touch interfaces in some way. Is there anything to learn from this, as said by Nintendo, Touch Generation?

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As every year, next week TechEd Developers 2008 will take place, for European audiences, at Barcelona's Convention Center. This event is the Microsoft premier technical education conference just for developers. For five days, more than 4,000 of your peers have countless opportunities to explore about the latest cutting-edge technologies from Microsoft related to embedded devices, web 2.0 and upcoming or existing developer tools. I'm sad they moved the conference from Amsterdam to Barcelona like 3 years ago (being a Spaniard I preferred traveling Amsterdam than Barna) but the same learning opportunities are offered.

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The annual conference about Web technologies in Spain is called Fundamentos Web 2008 and this year, as previous ones, is hosted by the W3C at Gijón, a wonderful city in northern Spain. Topics vary from new standards like ARIA, unobtrusive AJAX or the future of Web 2.0 and I'm really excited about key presenters Jesse James Garret and Eric Fain.

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There's been a lot of buzz around creativity and the process of creation, since Da Vinci people think that creativity is a gift given to some human beings, an special brain full of original ideas previously canned ready to be used. Nowadays, this feeling is extremely increased and promoted by art schools and ad-agencies, who treat art directors as the true kings of the creativity kingdom crowned with originality and freshness. But is it that real? Do we have to be special in order to be creative? Is our brain fated to mundane tasks if not gifted with the seed of creativity?

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Designing a product that connect with users is the cornerstone of the whole User Experience field. It means that features and quality are no longer the only required aspects to succeed, it's more about connecting to underlying emotions and desires, fears and hopes, connecting with the real persona behind. The term product is wide-open used here, so it doesn't only refer to a physical tangible product but also to software, webs, design, brands and even individuals. In this product context, how to arise a higher and deeper connection is, actually, occupying most of my thinking. So, are there any tips to help increase this kind of emotional connection?

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Next week, the Lisbon's International Fair Meeting Centre will host SHiFT'08, an international conference around human factors, interaction design and user experience. This is going to be the second edition of SHiFT, short for Social and Human Ideas For Technology, that, after 230 attendees in 2006, expects to gather around 500 people participating during 3 whole days.

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It's been a while since I switched from an HP to a MacBook Pro to start digging into the iPhone and OSX development. It took me quite an effort to get used to OS X and now I can see there's no point of comparison with Vista, nor good or bad - they are just different things with different purposes. An interesting fact, the MacBook Pro is performing really nice with two partitions and I use BootCamp to boot a Vista partition. Performance is amazing in Vista but energy is less optimized than in Leopard. I love this machine and the unique purpose it serves to me, I would recommend it to anyone. Anyway, not everything is as cool around Apple products as people tend to think; there are lot of issues related to usability, accessibility, design and even development.

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A couple of days ago, I was watching this small Silverlight vs. Flash: Stray Sheep sample and perceived something strange in the rendering. If you pay attention to the Silverlight implementation you'll notice that the sheep gets blurry in one of the frames. So, as many of my clients asked me a lot of times about this issue with bitmaps in Silverlight and WPF applications, I'll try to explain the technology concept behind this "undesired" side-effect of device rendering.

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I'll be on summer holidays for the next four weeks, but this holidays are quite special. During the last months I redefined my personal and professional life so this trip is going to serve as the starting point of my new projects, goals and expectations. I'm not sure about what to expect of it but it's surely a personal experiment mixed with some social component.

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