I just posted all of the materials from my PDC talk here. Feel free to download and play with this stuff. The apps were strictly created as demos and are definitely not full featured apps. They are built to show of styling technologies (styles, templates, triggers, storyboards) and some UI concepts. Check them out and contact me if you have any questions.

Today is the first unofficial day of the PDC and the power was out for about two hours of it. I’m not sure what happened at the conference center, because I’ve been working from the hotel today.

I’ve been pretty focused on getting the demos for my talk cleaned up and ready for Wednesday. This will give you an idea of how focused I’ve been. I discovered that the power was out for the entire city only when I called the front desk to tell them that the lightbulb had burned out in my bathroom. That’s right, I hadn’t noticed traffic backed up along the street or sirens outside of my window.

Well, with that in mind, the PDC should be lots of fun. If you can’t be here, make sure to follow the blogs in the next several days. I know at least a couple people who have cued up some great stuff.

I just added the PDC badge to the sidebar.  I’m giving a talk at the PDC this year called Beautiful Code, Beautiful Design - Applications Your Designers Can Work With.  I’m really not crazy about the name.  Inspiration, however, has been slow on this one.  It may be too late to make changes, but please let me know if you have suggestions. 

The content, on other hand, is super compelling.  That’s important, I suppose, that I find the content of my own talk super compelling.  The talk will be pretty true to the abstract.  I’ll be talking about styling: resources, styles, templates, triggers, storyboards, etc. 

Getting the content together is a lot of work.  I’ve been focusing on the demo first so that the demo drives the rest of the content.  When I’ve done things in reverse order in the past, the demo ends up feeling contrived and hard to talk to.

I’ve also been helping other people on the team with their talks.  Actually, help may imply more than I’ve done.  More like listen.  We do a lot of this—bounce ideas off each other to make sure we’re presenting things in a way that makes sense.  So far the content is really coming together.  Expect compelling content this year and good insight from the speakers.  The platform has really matured since the last PDC two years ago and I’ve been really impressed with the depth and quality of the talks so far.

Other bloggers giving talks are: Kevin, Chris, Henry, Lauren, Nick, Fil, and Rob.