Kathy Sierra’s presentation was incredible. She is such a great speaker. I took some notes on her keynote but honestly couldn’t keep up with everything she said. Her speech was mostly on the idea of interacting with users like they are human. Her books all follow these same lines. Her Head First series taught me Java, and did so in a way that I actually enjoyed, which is a rare quality for a technical book.

A few things in her presentation caught my attention. She had a very good slideshow to compliment her talking points and always had something interesting on screen. She occasionally threw in gratuitous pictures of puppydogs, I think, to make the following slide sink in more with the audience. The actual content of her speech was making your apps more human, and not doing so in the way most marketers think. In absence of being able to have the computer interpret human-interactive things like facial expressions and gestures, she says, your app should have ways to let users become passionate, not just proficient, at using it.

Thats her keynote in a nutshell. I probably didn’t do it justice; it was the best speech I’ve heard so far.