Samiq Bits en Español: The new kid on the block

With the publishing of my first Webcast in Spanish today, Samiq Bits en Español is born to provide with access to the Latin American people to the greatest of tomorrows technology.

The mission of this new blog is to share with Spanish speaking audiences the future of Rich Internet Applications, the best of the User Experience and provide reviews to new Products and Services as they are released around the world.

As part of my service to the Latin America society, I will be translating key articles previously published by me or my fellow bloggers regarding the above subjects, providing people who don't speak or in this particular case, read English with access to knowledge only available in that language.

I hope this effort will grow into others and help the development of such an amazing group of people.

Cheers!

I'll be hosting Ask the Expert for Microsoft eXpert Zone Latin America

Hi guys, just wanted to write really quick to let all know I'll be hosting a couple of sessions for Ask the Expert on the Microsoft eXpert Zone event for Latin America on going this week...

The first session was held this afternoon and I answered questions regarding WPF and best practices for data binding, the designer and developer role and a bit on WCF integration with WPF.

The second session will be next Thursday @ 11am CST, if you would like to join that session  please follow this link.

Apart from this 2 interactive sessions, on Thursday my Webcast on Rich Internet Applications will be available for on demand viewing here. I think Microsoft will roll this Webcast later on for anytime watching, but for now it will be available only on Thursday as part of this event.

Cheers!

Real Player Revamped!

Since earlier today Real Networks made available its new player for a public beta, and you can go on and download it here.

During the past few weeks this new revamped media player has brought lots of attention back to Real as in brings the Internet Video experience closer to its users, allowing for download of clips from several online services including the recording of streams being fed on the web... plus it will let you burn those videos so you can watch them on your living room in the peace your HDTV... as per the lack of an Apple TV or Media Center box.

Scoble has a good post here where he interviews Jeff Chasen, VP of Real Networks as part of his ScobleShow @ PODTech... go check it out for a preview of most of its features and its new look and feel.

Go get the beta here.

Enjoy!

Safari Web living under the Redmond Hut

Last Monday Steve Jobs unveiled the new Safari 3 Beta for both PC and Mac at his keynote speech at WWDC.

Being a Mac and a Windows user myself I found the Windows release a bit odd in how Safari rendered the fonts, I would have thought that they would use Systems fonts when rendering comes to play and thus was wondering were the odd came from, but I think I was wrong...

Joel Spolsky, from Joel on Software, put up this great post explaining how font rendering works and the approach each Microsoft and Apple have when it comes to drawing them, after reading it you'll come to know why most of we Windows users will look at Safari font rendering in a weird way the first time the experience it... and as well why long time Mac users will be just fine with it... check it out here.

BTW. Just as a fact check, I was just checking out Apple's news page and it seems that they hit the 1 million download within their first 48 hours of being available for download.

But it is funny that they had their fist malware exploit and patch within that same 48 hour timeframe. I guess that would mean we should expect the 2 million mark within the 96 hours as they roll out the new compilation to their user base... let's wait and see!

Enjoy!

Open XML SDKs for both .NET and Java worlds

With the advent of Open Document formats during the last couple of years, the fact of having a standard way to manage such document types and been able to access its content in a programmatically way is quite of importance and a key feature towards its adoption, enabling better and creative ways of interactive with them from our own implementations.

Open XML is Microsoft's document format used in their latest Office 2007 System. Open XML is a file format specification for the storage of electronic documents based on a ZIP container for packaging XML and other data files, similar to its generalized sibling definition XPS.

Today I saw posted on the MSDN Blogs a little post referring to the newly release of the Microsoft's SDK for interacting with such formats from .NET; and digging a bit more I found this post from Brian Jones where he shares the project OpenXML4J which is an Open Source Java implementation API born to lead the interaction with such formats from the Java world.

It's great to see how such implementations are setting the base in the development world as to drive the next generation of document driven applications supporting Open Document formats, in this case Open XML, and enabling a mirage of uses on the ever growing world of Rich Interactive Experiences.

Full RSS with Feedburner

Just an FYI to all of you who have subscribed to my RSS or Atom Feed, starting immediately please refresh your feeds to the new refreshed Feedburner one, here.

This feed is an intelligent one so if you have an Atom reader it will feed you with Atom feeds, if the case is RSS then you will be feed RSS.

Just to noticed I changed the auto-discovery settings in my blog so that all of those will go automatically to Feedburner moving forward, as well as added a link to it on the right side bar.

Sorry for the trouble guys, but this is a bit of housekeeping to better serve the communication of great information!

Cheer you lads!

Microsoft Educational Resources for the Future

So I've been with not that much to do during the last couple of days and so I started to reach around the different Educational Resources I've seen lately around the web for Microsoft Technologies, specifically WinFx and Silverlight related stuff.

Update: I will try to maintain this bit as updated as possible.

First in the list is the Lynda.com set of tutorials available free for Blend and Design. The Blend set was taught by Lee Brimelow from thewpfblog.com and the Design one was done by Ted LoCascio. Between these two you guys you will find over 10 hours of video tutorials.

Next, Tim Sneath posted today about this Hands On Lab that will guide you on creating an Outlook-look-alike application based on WPF. With this lab you will go thru a bit more than 90 pages and by the end of this tutorial you will have a resemble of Outlook plus a vast experience in putting together a fairly complex application yourself using this new presentation framework.

- BTW Files needed will be found here.

Moving towards books, a few weeks ago I saw Chris Anderson published a new book on WPF called Essential Windows Presentation Foundation. From that book SearchVB.com is hosting Chapter 1 which I think serves as a really good introduction to this new way of building user experiences, I think this will go handy before the Hands-on 90-page-thing.

Anyway, I went also yesterday thru the Quickstart for Silverlight 1.0 (currently in Beta), I found it really nice and easy and holding a good structure as to guide you thru what the possibilities are with this first approach to building Rich Interactive Experiences on the web, with all its limitations and bugs, moreover I think it serves as a good ground base moving forward to the more powerful Silverlight 1.1 Quickstart (currently in public Alpha), which will be the more natural approach to all of us C# coders.

Celso Gomes, an interactive designer @ Microsoft, has also made available his website nibbles, which on his own words, it is a series of snack tutorials for hungry designers. Here you will find a good set of tutorials for creating both WPF and Silverlight applications using Expression Blend.

I also found this post from Tim Sneath on a series of training for Microsoft technologies going over this summer across the states, so if you happen to live near by any of this stops (they are quite a lot) then you might have the opportunity to attend one or more of those.

So here you have, a good set of resources to entertain yourself for a few days and get some new stuff in your Microsoft box of knowledge,

Cheers!

Apollo is a new AIR

Just as I reported back on Saturday, Adobe had some new releases under its sleeve and today it came out playing drums for what it is a big set of announcements in the Rich Media world, first one to get it was Adobe's Ryan Stewart here.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is the official name for what we have come to know as Apollo. A new beta release has been made public today along with integration plug-ins for both Adobe's Dreamweaver and the Aptana IDE, for those of you who want to start kicking the HTML on AIR approach.

Following along with this release another beta made its debut today, as providing greater support for AIR, Flex3 is becoming the first iteration release since Flex was made Open Source earlier this year.

To end this morning of great news a refresh was announced for the Flash 9 Runtime providing hardware acceleration to video playing when in full screen, boosting the capabilities of the client... as to date this is the first time Adobe adds any kind of support for Hardware acceleration to one of its Flash based product... so great things are up to expect out this new approach.

Following links will provide you with the meat of this great morning:

• Adobe AIR SDK and Runtime
• Adobe Flex3 Builder Beta
• Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver
• Developing AIR with Flex3 and Flash

Apollo or else

It seems that "Apollo" will cease to exists as a technology name and a new naming term for Adobe's desktop everywhere application framework will make its debuts in the coming days.

After some blurred screen shots posted by Adobe's Ted Patrick on his blog pointing out some new additions that "Apollo" will be introducing to Flex 3, the name on the captioning for the wizard's windowing and body has been distorted as to not reveal its new name... calling for a wait and see.

New name and new release coming this following weeks embracing this great technology, we will see how this new features will help boosting force to the ecology of Rich Interactive Experiences in our life... this are amazing times!

ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit just got upgraded

ScottGu posted this morning about the new release the team over the ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit put together.

This release comes with the release number 10606, and as with previous released versions it is available both in its binary format as well as its source code, the later which you can extend and modify accordingly to your needs.

For this release over 125 bugs were fixed plus animation support for some extenders, event support across the Toolkit, a Script combiner for reducing Toolkit scripts' download time, Dynamic context support for controls using Web Services, fixes to make ASP.NET Validators work with Toolkit extenders and Accessibility improvements.

On the ASP.NET website there are over 39 free videos with "How-to" and Tutorials showing you how to leverage Ajax technology on your web applications and more.

Enjoy!

Adding a Digg button to me Blog

I've been looking for an option to add the Digg button and counter to my posts and given that I am using Blogger it's been a bit hard to get it done... until today!

I give it a try just a few minutes ago and came out with this amazing post where Steph explains how to do it quite simple, without adding files to a file server or doing nasty things (sorry about the comment it really is painful)... using the recently upgraded Digg Tools.

Any way this was meant to be short and with the goal of sharing the joy I'm feeling right now... cheers! 

Link to the solution is here

Recording Webcast @ Microsoft

Hi guys, just wanted to add a quick update... I've been asked to record a Webcast for Microsoft Caribbean and Central America for their next eXpert Zone event to be held later this month here in Costa Rica.

For this Webcast I will be talking about Rich Internet Applications and the .NET technologies around this approach: WPF & Silverlight 

I'll be posting the slides both in English as in Spanish, given that this blog is mostly written in the first one, and the Webcast will be in the second one...

Later!