Desktop Matters: Final Wrap-up

I take away a number of great memories from Desktop Matters 2007. Among them:

• Seeing many attendees work directly with members of the Swing team to show off their stuff and get help.
• Watching Richard Bair of SwingLabs and Mike Swingler of Apple’s Swing team sitting together to work on some OS X / Swing related project during the show.
• Hearing a number of people say, “Wow, nice to finally meet you” or, “Hey, there is a real person at the end of that blog after all…”
• The looks on so many faces when they saw what WPF and Flex/Apollo are capable of. The community faces a number of challenges moving into the future…

Best of all has been the universally positive feedback from the event, like:

Thank you for putting on the best conference I have been to in a long time!

and:

Wow! Great Conference! We’ve been talking about the stuff we saw with our team. It also gave us some ideas for some things that we are considering making open source (validation framework for example).

I’m grateful that so many members of Sun’s Swing team and Mike Swingler from Apple’s Swing team made it out to the event, sat amongst the attendees, mingled, presented, gathered feedback, and helped make the event such a success.

And to the speakers, thanks for preparing and delivering a great set of talks and lending your charisma to the group, and big thanks to Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff Just Stuff for his excellent services in handling the conference logistics.

Finally, thank you to all who attended and made the event possible. Based on the positive reaction of the attendees, I’ll be seriously considering putting on a Desktop Matters 2008.