The Wall-Street Journal “All Things Digital” conference is going on, and as part of it the great Steve Jobs and Bill Gates sat down for an unscripted interview.

The dev/design world is so polarized right now between Apple and Microsoft fanboys that it is interesting when the kings of both worlds come together and you learn that they have tremendous respect for each other. Now, if the “Pirates of Silicon Valley” has it right, there is a lot of water under that bridge, but they hide it well. Each of them have contributed in so many ways that it is just impossible not to have respect for both of them for very different reasons.

It is very apparent from these videos that Steve is the charismatic one, and Bill is the nerd…but as I learned in high school…it takes all kinds.

The videos are pretty long, but they are really interesting, so if you have some time, take a look.

Watch the Steve and Bill Interview

So as regular readers know, I love looking ahead and talking about what’s next in the world of the user interface, and more broadly, how people interact with computers.

I have been fascinated with the concept of multi-touch computing for a while. In all honesty, I didn’t think it was going to be a reality for a good while. Watching Jeff Han do his thing, I always get the feeling that the consumer is not going to get their hands dirty for a long time. I still love his stuff, but who needs an 8 foot touch wall? Certainly not the everyday consumer. Also, getting a completely new paradigm (like getting rid of the mouse and keyboard) to take hold, A LOT of different industries have to get together and play nicely. In order to get a lot of companies chatting will take a major player…enter Microsoft.

Microsoft has just unveiled Surface, their take on the multi-touch interface. Now before you read anything else, you owe it to yourself as a geek to go watch the videos on the Surface site. Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you…

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Man it has been a slow couple of days in the ui world…nothin’ too exciting happening, but that’s cool. Guess even the geeks take Memorial day off eh?

Next week is Microsoft’s TechEd event, and I am happy to be going. I have been building my “session list” and am getting really stoked.

Primarily I will be learning about WPF, Silverlight, and AJAX technologies. A few sessions are going to be on the new “Acropolis” stuff which somehow connects with WPF (I will find out more after I get there), so that should be cool.

I hope to be able to post during the event from time to time, but since this is my first time to go, I am not sure what to expect. If I can’t write much in between sessions, then I will definitely report back my findings as soon as I return.

If there are some technologies or doodads that you would like some specific info on, let me know and I will do my best to bring back all the tasty dev goodness you could possible ask for.

Lotsa good articles have been popping up around the ole web so I thought I would pass ‘em along.

CSS
Resizing images with CSS - A cool technique for tackling the problem of images that don’t resize when the user increases their browser’s text-size.

Styling buttons with CSS - Styling form buttons can be a pain in the bootay. The filament group has come up with a shnazzy solution.

Web Design 101: Backgrounds - Digital Web has a nice intro into the CSS background property and how it really works.

WPF, Blend, Silverlight
Karsten Januszewski (say that 5 times fast) has 3 new labs out to get your hands dirty with Expression Blend.

Silverlight Developer Reference Poster - Microsoft is giving these out at conferences and such as a quick reference to the various pieces and parts to Silverlight.

WPF Example with Source - The WPF Blog has created a simple little app to show some of the 3D capabilities of the WPF framework.

Articles
Zen and the Art of IA - Clifton Evans gives a look into the recent book Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr.. Basically it is a study on how to use and why to use design techniques to make a website “obvious”.

Abundance and UX - UX Magazine takes a quick look at a world that is built on the premise of abundance rather than one of scarcity. Kind of a neat idea.

Misc
Freebies!! - Smashing magazine a nice list of free icons and such. Never can have too many icons.

Yesterday, I began talking about the ASP.NET AJAX framework and went over the basics of the UpdatePanel. If you are simply wanting a “no refreshing” website, then that is basically all you need to know.

However, if you are wanting to use some of the cool client enriching doodads like animation, accordions or draggable lists, then you need to employ the Toolkit. That is the subject of today’s article.

Oops
Before I go into the meat of today’s article, I want to correct an oversight from yesterday. I forgot to mention an important piece of the whole ajax.net puzzle and that is the ScriptManager. In order for any of the new ajax enabled .NET controls to work you have to start the page out with this:

<asp :ScriptManager ID="IDGoesHere" runat="server" />

Basically, this is how you tell .NET to load up the javascript files that run things behind the scenes. Simple, but important. Ok…on with the show.

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As readers of the site know, I like to monkey around from time to time with various UI frameworks. Last month I ran a 3 part series on the YUI that was really well received (thanks!), and continues to be some of the most visited articles on the site (I even have a postback from Yahoo!…kinda cool).

To continue with that success, I bring you a series on ASP.NET AJAX. In the next few articles I will be breaking down the framework and provide some examples of how I used it while building a site for a client. Keep in mind, that this series won’t be able to cover everything, but it will give enough detail so you will know how to tackle something that isn’t directly covered here.

So lets get started shall we?

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My older brother is one of the biggest Star Wars fans on the planet. He has all 6 movies memorized, is a member of several fan clubs, and is a collector…he literally owns just about every toy known to man and even has 2 or 3 high-end lightsaber replicas.

Being I am the younger brother, guess who also is a Star Wars fan? While no where close to the level of my brother, I am definitely a fan I liked the originals better, of course, but I am not completely against the new trilogy like some (although Jar Jar deserves a swift beating).

With that said, I love Star Wars t-shirts. There are a lot of them out there. Some (like the double dose below) are funny…some are kinda dumb. Not sure what differentiates the two, but there is a fine line there somewhere.

The first shirt is from splitreason.com. It doesn’t make a whole lotta sense, but I have always believed that half of the bleeps and bloops R2-D2 was spouting were expletives of some sort. So this shirt just kinda goes with that theme.

The second t-shirt of the day (I couldn’t help myself) was originally a submission on Threadless, but apparently was never sold there. However, you can find it at Lucky Threadz.

The art style of this shirt is great…just kinda iconic. It just works on so many levels that I think it is one of the better Star Wars shirts out there.

So earlier this week, Microsoft dropped the a couple of Fat Boys on open source software companies saying that they are violating 235 of their patents. If they decide to detonate that nuke by actually suing someone, then the effects could be far reaching. IBM is the 40,000 pound gorilla in the patent world, so it begs the question. If Microsoft throws the first volley, does IBM fire back? I would bet good money the Microsoft is violating at least a few of Big Blue’s patents.

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Silverlight…WPF…you have heard the names, you have read a little about them, and now you are ready to take the plunge and build your first “next generation” app.

Getting started in a new technology is always a bit rough. So to help all of you who are itchin’ to get buildin’, here is a list of tutorials, videos, and other resources for both WPF and Silverlight.

This list will grow and change as more resources are uncovered. If you know of a site or article that I missed, please let me know!

*UPDATE - 5/24/07* - Gettin’ close to 40 now…keep ‘em coming.
*Update - 6/12/07 - Added some links to the Silverlight demos shown at TechEd.

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Ok, so not everything I do and read has to do with user-interfaces. Surprising…but true.

From time to time I run across things that I find interesting for one reason or another, but are not associated with the main purpose of the site. I call these “tangents”.

So the first official tangent is “The Last Question”, which is a short story by Isaac Asimov. Now I have never read any of his work; I have meant to, but I haven’t worked it in as of yet. Today I ran into and read “The Last Question” for the second time, and even after rereading it I still find it fascinating. It makes me think and wonder, which is the point of all good sci-fi is it not?

So if you have about 10 - 15 minutes to kill, take a gander. You can find it all over the net, but here is a quick link for you. Enjoy.

The Last Question