Flash Player 9 to support H.264 on its 3rd update

Just a quick note to point out last night announcement from Adobe... Flash Player 9 in its Update 3 will provide support for the H.264 codec, allowing playback support for HD videos.

If you remember it was first the YouTube announcement to be encoding on H.264 to support the iPhone, and now a bit later than a month Flash provides the platform to distribute such content based on its own platform both web as in the desktop as this updates also rolls out to AIR.

If you want to find out more, here is an excellent post from Ryan Stewart along with some extra resources; the official Adobe Press Release here, and a really complete FAQ from Aral here.

Enjoy and happy encoding! 

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Technorati Tags: Adobe, AIR, Flash, Flex, H.264, RIA, RIE, Video, Quicktime

Where I've been and cool stuff coming up...

So I've been off for more than a week... which is kind of weird, but well lot of things have been going on during such a time, and awesome thing are following, that have kept me aside from blogging in full... though if you have been following me on twitter might have an idea where I am going!

But anyway here is summary and then some posts I've been trying to work on.

During the last couple of weeks I've been heads down putting together my skills on Silverlight 1.0 and JavaScript, which even though, I've been practicing later needed some fine tuning looking or even creating a bit of best practices for the projects to come.

That takes me to reason # 2... Today (even though is holiday here in Costa Rica) me and my team will be starting a spring-run testing our skills in Silverlight for 2 weeks, starting with a quick phase on Gathering Requirements and Brainstorming during 4 hours this afternoon.

And it's because of # 2 that I also have been doing some field research on video players around the web - given that this might be the focus we will give to our project.

We have been really interested at really cool experiences built in Flash and mocking some of its functionality as proofs of concept to get the brain-cells in a creative mood - got to say we also have expend some time watching videos of the guys we are building this for so we get in the mood... plus I took advantage of it and brought me high-school lad back from within and into reality: I love this job!

Ok, so it's time for me to get going finishing up some later posts and get in the mood for today's workshops... peace and be happy!

Acropolis August CTP is out with support for VS.NET Beta 2

Yesterday a new release of bits was released from the Acropolis team under the August CTP label.

This time with a refreshed to support Visual Studio Beta 2 and with a couple of new features in its box it keeps building as the next generation baseline for Smart Clients.

The team has also posted new samples for this new release that you can download from here. Some resources can be found at:

• Acropolis August CTP download, here
• Acropolis Samples, here
• Acropolis Web Site, here

Enjoy! 

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Technorati Tags: Acropolis, Smart Clients, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Visual Studio, Microsoft, RIA, RIE, WPF, WinFX, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5

An Open Source alternative to Microsoft Project: OpenProj

Ever since I bought my mac, I've been in the quest for a good alternative to Microsoft Project, specially if it will manage MS Project files.

So far I haven't found one application that fit my needs - although there's been one that seemed interesting: OmniPlan from the Omni Group, same makers of the so famous OmniGraffle... although it also comes with a shortage of features and a $149 price tag, which for the moment I can't afford myself for something I already have for Windows.

Anyhow, on Twitter today I found a great new tool called OpenProj from Projity that might have done my day.

OpenProj is an open source alternative to Microsoft Project, sporting a similar User Interface and features, which supports Windows, Mac and Linux, thanks to its implementation in Java.

I installed it from the web alas click once, using the Java Webstart installer, and within a few seconds I had it setup in my Windows Vista laptop as in my MacBook as well.

Its performance is pretty good, and in top of it, it allows to open and export Microsoft Project files (*.mpp and *.mpx) as well as Project XML-formatted docs.

I will be giving it a try this days, but from an early test run I think I will be using it quite a lot. In the mean time here are some resources:

• Link to the web setup is here,
• A screenshot here, and
• More info about this tool can be found at Mary Jo's blog on ZDNet, here.

Enjoy!

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Technorati Tags: Microsoft Project, Project, OmniPlan, Open Source, OpenProj, Projity, Mac, Windows Vista

Uninstalling Beta 1 and getting Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 in afterwards

Gosh! It's been a few days I don't come around this bits and it's due to a lot of stuff going in my head, laptops and life... which can be translated into great stuff!

Getting back to my virtual life after a long weekend of vacations by the beach with my friends, I had the chance last Tuesday to install the new version of Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 on my Vista laptop and XP desktop.

Both installations went fairly painless after expending a good 5 minutes around the web reading other people's experiences.

It took me about an hour to get Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1 out of my system, although I would like to point out a couple of tricky things:

1. If you installed .NET Framework 3.5, before installing VS.NET Beta 1; by the end of the uninstalling the applet will ask you for those installers, so as a workaround here just cancel that, and it will end the installation without the .NET Fx 3.5. After this happens just uninstall the .NET Framework from Add/Remove Programs normally and presto.
2. Now, before you call it for the day and go in and install the new bits you will have to uninstall the Web Authoring Components, this is a small library with an icon of Office in the Add/Remove Programs, go and remove it.

Ok now this is it, this is what it took me to have successfully uninstalled the beta bits.

Now to the new ones, it took me about another hour to do this: here is a workaround I found to the issue of not being able to install from a remote place.

The only reason Visual Studio .NET won't install from a remote location is because .NET Framework 3.5 won't do it, so go ahead and install the Beta 2 bits separately (this is a download of about 118MB) and after this is done, kick the install bits of Visual Studio with out having to copy the 3.5GB to your local machine.

Once you get this done, you are almost done with the install - what? yet there is more to do?! : yes there are two more things:

1. Go to this post from ScottGu and download and run a small batch script that will fix a bug with the Binding Policy of System.Web.Extensions.dll and ASP.NET 2.0.
2. And, optionally, in case you had a previous version of Orcas running on your system (the one you just uninstalled before) you will have to run devenv /resetsettings from the command prompt located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\Common7\IDE\ this will reset the settings so that it won't mess with the previous settings and upgrade to the new ones.

Ok, Done! After all this manual work you and I have a working copy of Visual Studio .NET 2008 Beta 2 on your machine.

So here is to us both!

Cheers and enjoy the new bits!

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Technorati Tags: Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, Visual Studio 2008 Beta 1, C#, .NET 3.5, .NET 3.0, Microsoft, ASP.NET

Silverlight SEO Test

Jonathan Ramirez, a colleague of mine @ Schematic and whit whom I have done most of the Silverlight work lately, is conducting a test on Silverlight SEO. 

For such experiment he has published a really simple page hosting only a Silverlight control in it, part of the test is to get Google to index the word SilverlightSEO out of it for which there are no current results in it.

The page has not metadata nor text other than the control itself and the xaml file containing it - I am sure this post will get indexed but we want to get this post as an entry point to the test itself.

Now let's wait and see how long does it takes to get indexed if so happens...

We will keep you guys posted!

Cheers!

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Technorati Tags: Silverlight, Microsoft, SEO, Indexing