Archive for June, 2008

Cannes Lions Shortlist

Saturday, June 21st, 2008

The Other You, one of the sites I worked on earlier this year, is on the Cannes Lions Titanium shortlist!!! We’ll know later today whether or not it wins.  But being on the shortlist is incredible to say the least!  The Other You was an absolutely incredible project.  We used every technology in our arsenal to create this site; Papervision, After Effects rendering servers, text messaging, multiple Flex and html sites, myspace, facebook the works.  And the most incredible aspect of it all was that it was done in 3-4 weeks.  Alot of long nights, seriously, alot….that carried over into the next day…and night…for real….alot.

But it was soooo worth it.

SproutCore Drama

Monday, June 16th, 2008

Alright, adding “Flash Killer” to my blog titles is meant to be a joke.  Mainly because Adobe is so ahead in the game its not even funny.  But this thread makes me rethink how I should word my posts…. NAAAA Its still funny.

Apple Releases Details on a Flash Killer?

Monday, June 16th, 2008

So Apple pulled a fast one on us at WWDC.  They had a small session on Cocoa for the Web in which they used a javascript MVC framework called SproutCore to create a thick client with bindings just like Cocoa.  I’ve been trying to get a look see as to what all the hoopla is but the SproutCore site is flooded.  Keep ya posted, in the meantime here’s a great article on it and here.

Pledge Now to Download Firefox!

Friday, June 13th, 2008

So Firefox is trying to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day, so go ahead and pledge and set our email up with them so they can send you a reminder!

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Feature List

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

Full Feature List

  • Animation
    1. Support for animating custom data points
    2. Object Animation support (animating structs)
  • Deep Zoom
    1. New XML-based file format
    2. MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience
    3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view
  • Controls
    1. Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy.
    2. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes.
    3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
    4. New TabControl
    5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
    6. DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more
  • TextBox
    1. IME Level 3 input support
    2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
    3. Scrolling and clipboard support
    4. Document level navigation keys
  • Improvements in error handling, reporting
  • Parser and Property system
    1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
    2. New DependencyObject.ClearValue
    3. Visual tree helper
  • Data-binding
    1. Per binding level validation
    2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extensions
    3. Binding to attached properties
    4. ItemsControl extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
    5. Fallback in value conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)
  • Input
    1. Support for limited keyboard input in Full Screen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space). I’ve seen more than a few requests for this on the forums.
    2. Managed APIs for Inking and stylus input
  • Networking and Data
    1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
    2. Cross Domain security enhancements
    3. HttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from background threads
    4. Upload support in WebClient
    5. Isolated Storage: default size increased to 1MB and new ability to change quota with user consent. Also a new management UI.
    6. Duplex communications (”push” from server to Silverlight client with no need to “poll” for data)
    7. LINQ -to- JSON serialization
    8. Significantly improved SOAP interop
    9. “Add New Item” template in Visual Studio for “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service”
    10. ADO.NET Data Services support
  • UIAutomation and Accessibility support in the platform
  • Media
    1. Platform support for Adaptive Streaming (also referred to by people as multi bitrate), the ability for Silverlight to switch between media depending on network and CPU conditions
    2. Content protection with PlayReady DRM and Windows DRM
    3. Basic server-side playlist (SSPL) support
  • Localization
    1. Changes to localized application model. You now create one xap per locale, instead of one monolithic multilingual app
    2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
    3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 10)
  • Several changes to make API and behavior more compatible with WPF
  • Tools
    1. Beta 1 projects will be automatically ported to Beta 2
    2. Remote debugging for VB on the Mac
  • CLR
    1. A new developer-oriented runtime package with debugging binaries, localized strings, docs etc.
    2. Support for OS fallback logic for resources
    3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture isolation to AppDomain level
  • DLR
    1. Performance improvements
    2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
    3. Various new IronRuby features

Thermo Screenshot “Exclusive”

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

Check out Ted Patrick’s latest blog post with a bunch of screen shots of the new Thermo app.  It looks incredible.  And oddly enough its not built on Eclipse, looks more AIR to me.  Beautiful app though, hats off to UX.

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/06/thermo-screenshot-exclusive_856.php

 

Acrobat.com Launches with a Suite of Office Products

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

So Adobe has launched there first suite of Office applications on the web at Acrobat.com.  It looks like they’re all free to use so you should go and try them out.  The list of apps is as follows…

Adobe Buzzword

Buzzword is the word processor from Adobe and sports a sleek and elegant design interface. Of course, Adobe uses Flash/Flex to prove the UI and interaction complete with a WYSISYG tool. Adobe have taken care that your Buzzword document whether on a large screen or small screen or on a printed page, what you see on the screen - fonts, letter spacing, colors, and graphics - are all reproduced perfectly.

Buzzword documents can be edited by multiple person at a time and it can be commented. There are tabs at the bottom that shows who has accessed the documents recently and it also indicates their status whether they are authors, reviewers, co-author or readers. There are pagination features too.

The timeline whose dots indicates different version of the document is an awesome tool that will simply glide smoothly from one version to the next. It is always accessible at the bottom of the screen.

Adobe Brio

Acrobat.com has Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee.

Adobe Brio, unlike WebEx and GoTo, works flawlessly and beautifully on a Mac.

Adobe Share

Adobe Share allows you to share files with others. Just many other typical file sharing platform, Adobe Share allows you to share large files instead of emailing them. You have full control over your documents — approve the recipient list and their access to a particular document. The document previewer built into Acrobat.com also lets you launch and view PDF and image files right in your browser instead of having to launch the original application.

Acrobat 9

The big news for Acrobat 9 is the support for Flash. You can now create documents with embedded Flash movies, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex. PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents.

The PDF portfolios in Acrobat 9 allow you to combine multiple file types — documents, audio, video, even 3D objects — and compress them into one PDF file.

For professional paid version of Acrobat, there are varying levels of features available in the Standard and Professional allowing for the ability to create, convert, track, and protect PDFs. However, all versions are enabled to work with Acrobat.com. Even with all the new feature additions, Acrobat 9 takes lot less time to launch than Acrobat 8.