Microsoft WPF/E – Truly UNRevolutionary Technology

Ok, no long-winded Microsoft-bashing on this post, I’ll just cut right to it – Microsoft is developing a competitor to Flash. The technology has a beautifully ambiguous name: WPF/E.
For more info read ScottGu’s entry on it (found via Sitepoint).
If you’d like to bore yourself, you can watch a video of Joe Stegman from Microsoft describing this truly breakthrough technology.
In the video they say the word ‘XAML’ about a trillion times (pronounced “ZAMYL”). It gets annoying real quick. I Iove how he explains plug-in technology, with terms like “object and embed tags” and what a browser does went it’s presented with an unknown plug-in. I understand all this, it’s almost 2007 and over 95% of people have Flash Player 7 You don’t need to tell me about plug-in technology.
Guys, it’s not ZAML, it’s XML. Microsoft is basically going head-to-head with Adobe Flex/Flash (view samples of Flex apps here), providing a framework for developers to work within when developing online applications.
Microsoft, what would be a compelling reason for me to start working with WPF/E when I and millions of other people can do it in Flash? Not only that, but Flash is constantly evolving and making improvements with each new version.
Microsoft is coming on to the scene late with an average product the same way it’s doing with Zune.

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1st Generations

Sony, Nintendo Announce ‘Fixes’ For Their Consoles – this is why you should never get 1st generation anything. First gen Macs, first gen software, game systems, cars.
Always let a good handful of bleeding edge nerds break some stuff before you dive in. Then you can buy your fully functioning product, look at them and say, “Haha, thanks fools, hope mugging that person was worth it for your broken PS3.”

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Microsoft Expression

ms_expression.gif
Well, well. If this ain’t something. Why does all Microsoft work feel devoid of any kind of life? They seem to have put a pretty packaging on their software, but it feels more like they put lipstick on a pig. Were you guys all out of the brown you used on the Zune?
I’m surprised I even found this product, since there’s no apparent marketing push for Expression, but that’s what they did with Zune, so I shouldn’t be surprised.
I say good luck to you Microsoft, I’m sure you’ve worked long and hard to put together a suite of tools that integrate well with each other and I’m sure it in no way looks like derivative Adobe/Macromedia software.
I also say good luck to your battle for supremacy with the Zune against the Apple iPod.
…and the 360 against the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii.
…and MSN search & MS Office with Google Search, Google Docs, Gmail, and everything else Google’s kicking your ass at.

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Oh Really? Palm Dismisses iPhone.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan on the news of Apple’s iPhone (found via macnn):

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

You may be right Ed, but then again, you may be wrong.
It’s also wrong to assume Apple is just ‘walking in’. They’re walking in with more than a phone. If you do a search for any of the articles published about the iPod in 2001-2002, you’ll see that all the critics were underwhelmed at it as well, and brushed it aside.
It’s fun, as I re-read Ed Colligan’s quote, I see something different with my special Bullshit Decoder Ring:


“We’ve worked our asses for a few years here figuring out how to make a Treo that doesn’t have to be replaced 3 times,” he said. “Apple is not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just take our shit away from us. Over my dead body.”

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It’s technical

Dana: “What is that thing you’re doing?
Venkman: “It’s technical. It’s one of our little toys.

from the Ghostbusters, Listen to audio here.

So I’ve switched gears in my career, something I think I did behind-the-scenes a long time ago, but now it’s come around to my job title. I’m now Technical Director at Deep Focus. Up until this point I’ve always been an interactive designer or an art director or a Flash designer with a lot of technical skills. Now I’m a technical director with an eye for design.
There’s a few reasons for this gear shifting.
– Programming and development have become intertwined with the designs I create (for instance, I usually will not start projects in Flash that are content heavy unless I can update the site through XML)
– I’ve identified areas where Deep Focus needs to improve on the development process
– I’m a geek and I need to embrace it, because, well, I’m good at the technical stuff.
Websites are no longer shiny islands of static content. Websites are applications, with images, video, news casts, and are constantly in flux. They’re websites of collections of other websites. I’m very interested in this dynamic of website evolution and I’ve continued to learn about the tools that make these websites work. I’m still very much involved in how a website is designed, how it moves and interacts with users, but I feel as though I can have more of an impact infusing great visual designs with equally good programming.
In my opinion there are 2 extremes in web professionals:
Animation & photoshop professionals – these cats make designs that sparkle like a Ferrari and move like liquid
Development professionals – these geeks understand pattern recognition, and try to built sites in an innovative way, whether its a AJAX-powered content management system or dynamic Flash video gallery.
… and then there’s all the people who fall in between.
For a while I was the dude who fell in between, but I’ve become the dude who reviews the designs of the junior designers then looks under the hood at the code and screams when he finds dozens of Dreamweaver-crusted, nested tables and tags all over the place. Or a PHP-driven site with hard-coded headers and footers. Or a 100 image Flash photo gallery that doesn’t use XML. For me it has to look great AND be coded great.
And so…….. it’s time to get some development ass.

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Does XML Suck? I don’t think so.

I ran across this link in the ‘popular’ section of del.icio.us this morning, Does XML Suck?
Prior to having found that article I had just finished a conference call with Google and a client about a project that would utilize Google Earth for an upcoming event. The client wanted to use Google Earth so that viewers could ‘go’ the the event location and see live image feeds of the event. What a cool idea.
“Can we do this?”, my boss said.
“Sure, why not?”, I replied.
Like many companies now, Google provides a public API for working with Google Earth and it’s version of XML – KML. With KML, you just change the tags as needed, changing values, references, location titles, etc.
Along with Google and its use of KML, Adobe has also been working with a simliar approach with its program, Flex (as of this writing version 2.0).
From Adobe’s website:

Adobe® Flex™ 2 software is a rich Internet application framework based on Adobe Flash® that will enable you to productively create beautiful, scalable applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform.

My friend sent me this link where you can experiment with a Flex Compiler, which utilizes MXML (I don’t know for sure, but this probably stands for Macromedia XML), obviously, the markup looks very familiar.
Prior to learning about XML I worked extensively with XML in many Flash applications and websites I’ve built (I-Travel Shoes, my portfolio site, Richard Felber Photography, Filigrana by Zani to name a few). XML provides me with a way to update and maintain Flash sites without having to crack up FLA files again and again for clients that want revisions to their sites.
So does XML suck? Not for me.
XML reference files for my links above:
http://clients.thecombustionchamber.com/itravel/collections.xml
http://thecombustionchamber.com/6/_xml/menu_tcc.xml
http://thecombustionchamber.com/6/_xml/news.xml
http://richardfelberphotography.com/_xml/images.xml
http://filigranabyzani.com/filigrana.xml
http://filigranabyzani.com/collection.xml

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Flash in the news

Verizon Wireless to Use Flash Technology – Flash can be used intelligently or stupidly … lets hope Verizon goes with the former.
I’ve submitted a trouble ticket to Adobe Labs regarding the blurry text with the Flash 9 plug-in. I’m not sure what can be done now with people that have the possibly defective plug-in other than release a new build of it with a higher version number, i.e. – 9,0,21 … thus prompting people with a pop-up to update their plug-in.
Yahoo! Flash Developer Center – looks like it could be a great little resource.

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Text displaying fuzzy with Flash 9,0,16,0 plug-in

The Flash 9 player is not rendering the body copy on my site in the crisp, ‘anti-alias for readability’ setting. My site was published in Flash 8 so it could take advantage of this new text rendering feature. Before I upgraded to Flash 9, the Flash 8 plug-in was rendering my text perfectly. Now it was looking like this:
tcc_fuzzy.jpg

The left side of this image was viewed with Flash player 9,0,19 while the right side was viewed with Flash player 9,0,16. Uhhhh, what the hell……

Continue…

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A day with good things

What things? Mostly nerd things:
Mozilla Firefox 2 RC 2 Release – they’ve fixed the stupid Flash focusing problem, added drag ‘n drop tabs, moved the tab close button onto the tab like Safari.
*note – if you have a lot of FF extensions installed, they might not all work yet.
CD/DVD Scratch Repair Kit – apparently this works on iPods too.
Ofiicial Google Mac Blog – sounds good to me and makes sense, considering Eric Schmidt is on Apple’s board now.
This is potentially, inevitably good news:
Apple about to announce wireless video iPod?

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