Samiq Bits

So long Mossy... I still ow u a beer!

2009-10-08T19:35:00.000-07:00

Today the news broke public that Scott is leaving Microsoft as of November 1st, so this post is to say thanks for all and good bye. Microsoft is loosing a great piece in their chess game, I hope they will keep a list of his rants and points and keep making the Interactive world a better place to be.

I meet Scott first because of our relationship with the Rich Internet Application world, he had recently switch to Microsoft from a long standing career in the Adobe front and who better than him to put the dots in the i's for what Microsoft needed to do in order to move the whole Silverlight wagon forward and create a community around it.

Scott doesn't get scared easily and with full commitment to his position he started pushing the boundaries to make Silverlight a better place to be among all RIA technologies out there. He was vocal and he was loud, something Microsoft was in need if they wanted to make a change in the way we build experiences.

Fast forward a year in and a lot of emails back and forward and there I was in his office in Redmond discussing the future of Silverlight, what needed to get done and how, we were even putting code together past 2am just to make our point into how some feature or other should be modeled.

Scott backed up things that in an house of engineers will otherwise will be let out unseen. He knew the business and he knew that in order for Silverlight to make it, it'd had to be something other than just pretty C# & XAML code behind.

We as a creative industry are loosing a voice inside the interactive team that fought the battles not a lot of people knew they were facing, Microsoft has done a lot of good things to improve but it's still far from finished and venturing in a field like creative, they need creative people like Scott reminding them that things are not only strings of 1 and 0s but rather a rainbow of colors.

Now, we as an industry are gaining quite a loud voice to partner with. Scott will now be able to be vocal about the industry itself and put his hands to work to help other companies succeed with great experiences. Pushing the pins from the wild and with no front other than the community and its business.

I'm sure he leaves behind a lot of battles that have resulted in things we now give for granted and I'm sure there will be more results to come. There are still people in the house that will pick up those fights.

Dude, as I told you not that long ago... you fight great for us here behind the wheel and now your job at Microsoft is done... time to move up and look forward to more awesomeness from Oz.

Cheers,

Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. & the future of multi touch experiences

2009-04-08T05:48:00.001-07:00

Even though the Microsoft Surface has been around from conference hall to conference hall showing up how cool their technology is for several years, I haven’t been able to see one single implementation in a large scale, where this really interesting interaction medium is at the front of the experience.

Now, I know the piece only went live last October at PDC and that it’s near $12000 ain’t a really accessible price, but… remembering the day I first lay hands on one in Schematic’s LA office back in 2007, there were a myriad of opportunities flashing thru me mind on stuff that would be possible once this toy hit mainstream; yet I’m still waiting.

Now, what if there could be a way were we could take these experiences a little bit further. I know my friends at Identity Mine, VectorForm and my buddy of whacks Rick Barraza at Cynergy Systems, have been able to take it a little further creating really cool demos on their own… but what if we could all make it into something engaging, something that will make us still interested in using after 10min… something that transcend the feeling of “just a demo”.

We as experience designers are as responsible for engaging our audiences as the medium we use to deliver them is. The Nintendo Wii showed us that you don’t need fancy graphics and 3D life-like experiences to entertain us for hours. The iPhone and iPod Touch brought gestures and natural interaction to regular non-tech savvy people, lacking features even the cheapest phones had at the time.

Today I saw Ubisoft’s R.U.S.E. teaser, and that’s when I saw there is a compelling future for table top experiences out there. It might not be available today… but it serves as inspiration for the stuff we have to ship tomorrow.

Enjoy!

Happy April Fools Everyone!

2009-04-01T01:21:00.001-07:00

So technically it’s been April Fools for me for a few hours now, given that now that I live in Seoul I most of the time stay ahead in the future for most of my readers.

But it’s not until midnight in the western side of the world that all April Fools pranks start to show up… think otherwise? Well lets take a look at You Tube’s new viewing layout ;-)

Other have joined the party as well including Microsoft’s Channel 9 and the all cool Q&A site Stackoverflow.com with a new shiny gif animation on their logo.

So let’s get our feeds and twitter ready to see what fake news this year will bring.

Happy April Fools everyone!

Update: here is already a list flowing with April Fool’s news from the Tech Crunch, check it out here.

The Universal Desktop is Out

2009-03-31T07:00:00.001-07:00

Today Ryan Stewart wrote his last post over at ZDNet and with that the Universal Desktop, the all-things-RIA from ZDNet, stops it’s publishing.

Sad!

I am sad of this happening, with the RIA space sparkling in its foundations, rather than loosing spaces for covering their experiences, they should be evolving and growing with the industry.

On the other hand, I know that since Ryan joined Adobe, a couple of years ago, it has been difficult for him to keep his blog up to what it used to be, even when he did his best at it - When you are traveling around the world evangelizing one of the many technologies you’d to cover, time is at its best not your friend. But buddy, you will be missed!

Heck I even started this thing blogging after reading his blog and getting all hipped from this new cool thing named RIAs and after I meet him, I found on him a really cool buddy and an awesome professional.

Now RIAs are going at its mainstream, and as Ryan says new niches have been created base on the different front empowering them. Guys like the ones at O’Reilly’s InsideRIA even when trying their best, are still kind of an Inside-Adobe, as most of what they cover are Adobe based techs. We are missing a broader view.

We are missing one person or group of persons who can help the rest of the world see the RIA space for what it is. For their players as kind competitors trying to do their best with faults and gains. At analyzing upfront for all those companies and persons looking for their next rich platform to build upon.

I remember talking about this with both softies and adobe’s in several occasions, still no one has step out to this world.

Hopefully ZDNet will be able to help close the void Ryan leaves, and rather than empowering pissing contests on what platform is better at it, we could get true insight to the world of RIA, which now more than ever before, this game is truly getting Universal.

Good luck buddy and keep up the great work at Adobe ;-)

Cheers,

MIX 09 Sessions Video Podcast RSS for iPod & Zune Available Here

2009-03-25T05:38:00.001-07:00

Even though I couldn’t assist to MIX this year - I’m stocked in South Korea pursuing my Master’s in HCI - I have been watching on-line some of the sessions that caught my attention from the conference, specially those on User Experience.

Just as previous years, Microsoft did a terrific job at making most of this year’s sessions available on the web within the first 24 hours from them happening, and for people like me between that and twitter It felt almost like been there – of course, if staying late at night in the Lab with no beers IS it like been there, but you get what I mean - .

Sadly, though, just as last year, there is no friendly way to get access to ALL of the session’s videos in batch (alas RSS) - and no the RSS feed from the sessions page doesn’t give access to ALL of videos – or if on the other hand, a way existed where there were an RSS feed who aggregated all, iTunes (my preferred way to Podcasts) only displays the latest 50 episodes of a show, which is nowhere convenient either.

So thanks to Mike Swanson who posted a friendly list to click and choose videos from the sessions, a few minutes with Excel, LINQ and C#. Here I give you the RSS feeds (divided in chunks of 50 items per feed) to the MIX videos that have been made available until now.

So, now got get your preferred Podcast software to point to this babies, lay back, relax and wait for your videos to download.

Now who said there were not a convenient way to get the Mix conference with you on your device?!

Enjoy!

Zune*:

RSS for the first 50, second 50, and the remained 19.

iPod*:

RSS for the first 50 and the rest 11.

*Disclaimer: As per Mike’s post there are 119 videos available in Zune format and 61 in MP4 format, so be aware of that when looking for your session of choice and you don’t find it, it might be because it’s not in the list yet. Cheers!

Technorati Tags: mix09,mix,microsoft,sessions

Life from Seoul it’s MIX: Keynote Day

2009-03-18T08:49:00.001-07:00

editorial comment: wow! this dudes rocked the world of interaction today… looking forward to play with all this goods!

11.23: And this is it.

11.22: Silverlight 3 is out in beta and will have a single beta before release later this year.

11.21: Silverlight 3 is 40K smaller than Silverlight 2.

11.19: Installation happens straight away with no glitch to the user experience.

11.13: First out of the browser experience demoed: radio station with support for offline access. Really neat.

11.09: Silverlight out of the browser support running on a sandbox environment and support for online capabilities.

11.08: Silverlight is a full compatible sub-set of WPF allowing for scaling up to full desktop experience with ease.

11.04: Data form coming to Silverlight 3. Creating LOB application is great and easy.

11.00: Data push support to the client, binary xml to reduce payloads and support to multi-tier data services… lots of data improvements.

10.59: Eclipse support for Silverlight comes to the mac.

editorial comment: Blend is rocking the house!!!

10.55: demoing sample data to be used in design time from local sources or remote source with drag and drop support.

10.52: support for behaviors, transitions and state wire framing for low-fi interaction prototyping.

10.50: document generation for the experience design right from within blend.

10.49: demoing Sketchflow player running on safari on a mac with feedback support for wireframes.

10.45: hmmm wireframe support right within Blend, this is getting better and better. Controls can be as real or conceptual as needed for the moment at hand.

10.44: The application that was in the sketches of bill earlier is now live on the stage.

10.43: First public preview of Blend 3 by John Harris.

10.42: Expression Blend 3: Sketch Flow, similar to the prototype Bill Buxton showed earlier, for low-fi prototyping (I want to get my hands in this)

10.41: The egg slides just made it’s appearance he he… who has not used those slides.

10.40: playboyarchive.com is going live with this user experience and 15 issues made available free.

10.40: Official release on Bondi for Rolling Stones will be in November this year.

10.38: Demoing touch support in Silverlight.

10.35: Vertigo showing a deep zoom application for The Rolling Stone Magazine. – got to say this guys are amazing at it.

10.34: Bondi Digital Publishing & Vertigo in the house.

10.32: Clear type support both in mac and windows. Multi touch support. Supports library caching. Deep linking WOW

10.31: Support for monetization

10.29: This new features should be used to do good no evil. True!

10.28: Perspective 3D support. bitmap and pixel API. pixel shader effects. deep zoom improvements including Hardware Acceleration.

10.24: next Olympics will be delivered using Silverlight. with DVR experience. providing the experience customer expect after the Beijing Olympics. (hope Schematic is also part of the renewal)

10.22: Going over statistics from Beijing 08. A phenomenal partner success (a great work from my mates at Schematic too).

10.22: NBC Sports is in the house.

10.20: Live content can also take advantage of smooth streaming but also pause live video with a tivo-like experience and replay.

10.19: Instant seek in streaming thru a hack on bit-rate to minimize stop playing.

10.17: Demo time for expression encoder multi bit-rate support with smooth streaming and automatic publishing to the web server.

10.15: Akamai now offering smooth streaming thru their services.

10.14: IIS Media Services. Available for free (now here is hard on Flash… how much is Flash Media Server?)

10.13: SL3 will have hardware based acceleration. New codec support (H264), raw bit stream support. Improve logging support for media analytics.

10.13: Silverlight 3 is in the house.

10.11: Netflix: Because of the experience they got from Silverlight they now have made Silverlight their main platform for web deployment. An a great way to test things to be used later in their device-based experiences.

10.09: Netflix: user benefits from progressive delivery of experiences. every 2 weeks there is a release of an improved video player.

10.08: Netflix: Adaptive Streaming => more bits = better video.

10.06: Netflix: installer experience is awesome and took complexity out of the ways with support out of the box for content protection and a great platforms (ouch Flash)

10.05: Netflix: With Silverlight the cross platform is real.

10.04: Kevin Mc Entee from Netflix is on stage talking about their experience using Silverlight to deliver Nextflix streaming to the Mac.

10:00: Virtual Earth SDK and World Wide Telescope now available thru Silverlight.

9.55: Now it’s Joel Spolsky, from joelonsoftware.com and Jeff Atwood, Coding Horror; on stage talking about stackoverflow.com an amazing service running in ASP.NET MVC.

9.54: Talking about Bizspark, a great opportunity for startups.

9.53: New .NET services available thru Azure and made available this year. Azure is still in preview mode but will be made available full later this year.

9.52: Azure will support not only .NET application but also PHP.

9.52: Azure is now making it into the scene.

9.47: A demo of Web Platform Installer is done.

9.44: Scott is announcing the Web Platform Installer and the Web Application Gallery to help the provision of new and free web tools and applications to help with the development and distribution of web apps under the Windows platform.

9.42: With .NET 4 and VS10 there will be support for url routing and web caching thru velocity, just as well support for multiple web.config files depending on the stage where they are been used.

9.41: Scott is going thru Visual Studio features made available with VS10, got to say it is a really big list of features and features into authoring, deployment and testing.

9.37: SuperPreview will be available as part of Expression Web 3 as well as a standalone application which will be made available for free.

9.36: Expression Web SuperPreview supports side by side preview of different browsers including IE6.

9.33: Erick Saltwell, PM of Expression Web, is on stage talking about a new feature called SuperPreview. Letting you test your websites on multiple browsers, life.

9.32: Expression Web 3 is announced with support for both ASP.NET and PHP development.

9.32: the mission is to make Windows the best platform.

9.32: the Gu starts introducing the tools and web server technologies that will allow to create great experiences.

9.31: Scott makes a rock star entrance.

9.30: funny Brian Goldfrab just appear as a buddy guard. I will swear he is like that even in real life.

9.29: a video shows back of the stage on the Gu dancing disco. in an indian haha. hilarious.

9.28: now bill buxton is introducing the gu where he is gonna talk about how microsoft will enable us developers and designers deliver.

9.27: six degrees of separation between technologies. all connected all between by design. all singing the same song: how to help developer thru a unified way to return on experience thru their work.

9.26: and the shortest demo of a win 7 hp touch pc. gone.

9.24: 3 years ago only 1 design. Now 10. significant grow in hiring. double of the tech hiring's are in design fields.

9.23: we are in an industry with a lack of tools for experience design. we are doing magic with out the right tools but be careful not get biased on your design.

9.21: bill buxton is showing the sketches of a tool he dreams of to take sketches and start adding transitions… movement… still in low fidelity.

9.20: if can’t characterize the interaction then something is wrong. states are just as important as the transitions. they need to be design as there is some much ways to do them and a high chance get them wrong.

9.19: if you are a developer don’t start design programming. get away from it.

9.18: use post-it notes to do low-fidelity prototyping (wireframes). it is fun and easy… better than touching technology artifacts.

9.16: if we cannot come up with 5 different ways to do something and not to be emotionally tied to one of them then we are doing something wrong.

9.15: our job is not to come out with answers but creating the correct question that will get us to the right answer.

9.13: designing objects is different from designing experiences. anyone can draw objects. experiences? we are use to not think of it.

9.10: experience designers are about creating stories with our product. not the product itself but shaping the experience to get the desired return.

9.09: learn from the past is key. kodak made their first model colorful after the first iteration. apple did the same. ivy didn’t copied he learned from experience of others.

9.08: bill goes around successful stories about products that made it thru design. bell labs. kodak.

9.06: people need stories, it is the best way to get viral marketing. As experience designer we help our clients make it. our companies.

9.05: ux is the best position to be ever, it’s not about luck it is about been able to influence the next wave of experiences to make it in the return of experience.

9.04: cool video plays and Bill Buxton takes on the stage. Feeling lucky? and making fun of the economy and experience design :-) so much power.

9.02: keynote is starting, the screens are full with this event’s sponsors. announcements go on about the party and events. MIX 09 has officially started!

8.53: here I’m seating and waiting for the keynote to start. live feed from the Venetian couldn’t bee best. music is really lame though.

-----

It’s just minutes before one of the coolest conferences will start. Microsoft MIX is about to start with Bill Buxton and the Gu as keynote presenters, and I’m exited.

This year I have gone back to the life of an student and happen to be in Seoul where I’m taking my masters, yet there is no reason to be missing all the fun. So here I’m live blogging the keynote.

Bookmark this page as I will be updating it live as it goes.

Cheers.

Come get the bits from this year’s MIX

2009-03-18T06:50:00.001-07:00

Microsoft’s MIX has not even started and the new bits are already in the wild and waiting for you to come and get them…

The good bag of candies is open, come get what you like:

Silverlight 3 Beta SDK: The Microsoft® Silverlight™ 3 SDK contains online documentation, online samples, libraries and tools for developing Silverlight 3 applications. Usage of the SDK is subject to the SDK License (included in the package).

Silverlight 3 Tools for Visual Studio: This package is an add-on for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 to provide tooling for Microsoft Silverlight 3. It can be installed on top of either Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express with SP1, and it provides a Silverlight project system for developing Silverlight applications using C# or Visual Basic.

Expression Blend 3 Mix Preview: announced during the keynote and after blown away demos of all the new features, Blend 3 is shaping its way to become the tool for experience designers, as Bill Buxton stated, that has been always needed and never existed.

ASP.NET MVC 1.0 Final: ASP.NET MVC 1.0 provides a new Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework on top of the existing ASP.NET 3.5 runtime.

And all new and fresh out of the oven things no one new of before:

Microsoft .NET RIA Services March '09 Preview: Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Which have to say it’s the first product offering from Microsoft using the noun RIA as part of it’s name, guess this is a good step towards making RIA into the mainstream, specially nowadays where the competency in this field is somewhat growing with JavaFx joining the party a few months ago.

So go on and play… and make sure you keep coming back for more news.

Update 1: And the goodies keep coming now in the form of a configurable UI controls for Live Messenger, just as a JS Library to integrate with your properties. This means you can add support for you live messenger right in your web properties.

The following is a video that shows how the new toolkit from the Liver Services team works:

Update 2: Just also out of the presses is Expression Web SuperPreview, a companion tool for Expression Web to help you with multi-browser targeting development. Super Preview supports preview from both local as from remote browser, kind of call in the multi platform world that we live on today. Get the bits here and go here to learn more about this release.

Update 3: Web Platform Installer 2 has also been updated and set out free as a beta. From the website it says:

The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes it simple to download, install and keep up-to-date with the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer. In addition, install popular open source ASP.NET and PHP web apps with the Web PI.

Now yours for download here.

#MIX09 and #NotAtMIX09

2009-03-18T05:58:00.001-07:00

In just a couple of hours the Venetian Hotel in Vegas will give place to one of the coolest conferences there are for Web Developers and Web Designers a like.

Microsoft MIX is one of my favorites conferences to attend, not only because of the introduction to new stuff from Microsoft for the Web, but because the variety of minds that you get access to. From Interactive Designers to Hackers, Creative, Futurist… to even artists of the napkin drawing. Mix is a great way to inspire yourself, and different from Adobe Max, Mix goes farther than just been a tech showcase of Microsoft technology. It’s a vehicle to the next generation experiences… it’s a way to get to know new cool people. Oh! and don’t forget it’s VEGAS, baby!

This year will be no different and the list of speakers is amazing, I am looking forward to Bill Buxton’s keynote just as well to see what’s in the stake for Microsoft this year relating to Web, Cloud and Silverlight.

Unfortunately this year I won’t be there in Vegas, I will be sleeping while most of you are enjoying the many talks you have in schedule and will be catching up while you party… after all not all in pink in the life of an student.

Fortunately, though, Microsoft will be making available most of the session on line within the next 24 hours of their presentation, meaning for you and me not attending, or for those of you hangover, that it will not be all lost… we will enjoy it in some way or another.

So for all of you out there be happy, relax and enjoy the show that #mix09 and #notatmix09 is just about to start! As my body Mike Brown just twit:

Man...I feel like a parent watching his kids open their presents on Christmas hopefully #mix09 has some surprises in store for me too

Oh btw… if you didn’t saw my twit on Monday, here is my hacked approach to a homepage to #notatmix09… my tribute to all of us not attending this year’s conference. Cheers!

Live from SFO it’s MAX: Keynote Day 2

2008-11-18T10:50:00.001-08:00

A bit late today but here no the less…

Today’s keynote will be focused on tooling and showing off the new stuff in CS4

11.48 Thanks every one for coming!

11.43 Introducing groups.adobe.com a multi cultural community website targeted to user groups around the world as a way to find and collaborate thru the user groups around the world.

11.43 Ted Patrick is now on stage talking about the User Groups Communities around the world. 423 adobe groups across the world.

11.42 Some homework for all, get the tools and try them yourselves.

11.38 Introducing support of dynamic streaming from within Live Stream feed and DVR functionality right from within the live feed enabling pause and seek on a live streaming.

11.35 Introducing dynamic streaming for adaptive streaming without glitches or faults on On Demand Video. The player monitors the network and makes the changes automatically. Available as part of Adobe Flash Streaming Server 3.5

11.34 Adobe is endorsing the SWFObject as one of the ways to embedded your Flash in your pages so the bots will recognize it, the other one is using the Google Flash Kit.

11.31 Showing SEO support from Flash using a Virtual Agent (collaborative developed with Google) that renders the experience as a regular user will do and traverse the content and state changes and looks for text and indexed its, if a button then generates a click and repeats with the new render.

11.25 Introducing the new Ajax support from within Dreamweaver, really cool CSS and JavaScript authoring improvements on the tool. – I wish I could see Aggiorno running on that jewel.

11.20 Introducing support for Flex authoring right from within Visual Studio, enabling .NET developers to enter the Flex world right from within their IDE of choice and even with support to AMF3 right from .NET.

11.17 Introducing support for server side integration between Flex and CF as a straight forward data management wizard that will generate the right code to handle the complexity.

11.11 Ben Forta introducing support for Cold Fusion development right from within Flex Builder and available as part of CF5.

11.09 Now into Gumbo and ColdFusion.

11.07 Showing Nintendo NES simulator running inside Flash.

11.06 C++ integration is about productivity – questionable about that given the complexity of the language, would have been cool to see C# integration, but oh well C++ is good.

11.04 Support for codecs and plug-ins using C++ to incorporate support for features not available in the framework but available as open source libraries else where.

11.02 Showing SSL encryption algorithm built in C++ and invoked from a Flex application.

11.01 C / C++ support from within AIR 1.5 and Flash 10, no .dll loading but transformation of portable C++ code into AS3.

10.58 Early preview release of Catalyst available this week and Beta will be lunch early in ‘09.

10.55 States are really similar to those in XAML, but taking advantage of the features of Flash 10 in the sense of richness (3D, Pixel benders, etc).

10.54 Full round trip of workflow between Catalyst and the rest of the CS4 designing tooling is thanks to FXG which enables

10.48 Ryan Stewart on stage Introducing Flash Catalyst. Using Photoshop artwork to create user controls, states and transitions - really sleek execution.

10.47 Photoshop support for smart scaling, smart painting on 3D surfaces and effects making it easier for the designer

10.45 Flash support for bones animation and manipulation of point to point animations, making it easier than ever to animate elements on stage.

10.44 Ben Forta and Tim Buntel are on stage dress of agents F and B with a group of guys showing Flash CS4 and now Photoshop, really cool features been shown on.

Join me at the Microsoft eXpert RoadShow ‘08 Costa Rica

2008-11-17T13:13:00.001-08:00

Microsoft Multi Americas invited me to talk at their eXpert RoadShow in the Multiamericas and I will be speaking in my home country Costa Rica.

I will be delivering the Next Generation Technologies session and it will be going around a central theme of building a solution from the scratch showing some of the cool technologies Microsoft has to offer to the enterprise nowadays.

If you are in Costa Rica during the first week of December, make sure you join me in one of the following events and you might have a chance to win a license to the really cool Aggiorno.

San Carlos

Where	Auditorio TEC, San Carlos
When	Dec 3rd, 2pm
What	eXperts Roadshow

Heredia

Where	Plaza Bratsi, Heredia, 200 norte del Paseo de la Flores, Contiguo a la Universal
When	Dec 4th, 2pm
What	eXperts Roadshow

Puntarenas

Where	Universidad de Costa Rica, Sede Puntarenas
When	Dec 5th, 2pm
What	eXperts Roadshow

Hope to see there!

Live form SFO it’s MAX: Keynote Day 1

2008-11-17T09:34:00.001-08:00

A’ight boys and girls it’s Monday November 17th and I’m seating next to Kurt Brockett and Adobe’s Ryan Stewart for the first day Adobe Keynote.

If connection is good to me I will be blogging live from my seat with all cool actions going on from the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

9.34: lights are off and a VJ is mixing Adobe on 30, really hilarious videos.

9.35: Video of little MAX going across the sceneries, really cool animation.

9.36: Shantanu Narayen, President of Adobe Max takes the stage and greets the over 5000 attendees that joined Max this year.

9.38: Shantanu, “Adobe technologies makes of for impossible experiences”. Reality of devices reach and the possibilities that were not possible with PC’s before. Multi screen possibilities and the better of experiences you can deliver while maintaining the continuum.

9.40: Adobe Flash Platform, enables an agile process with their pillars of Tools to Design & Develop (Flash, Flex Builder and Catalyst), Framework (Flex), Clients (Flash Player & AIR) and Servers (Cf and Ls).

9.41: Thermo is now Flash Catalyst, an interactive design tool that avec Adobe Gumbo will enable a complete workflow between Developers and Designers.

9.43: Now a video of Bono and Project RED on how using Adobe technologies the project has grow awareness across the world.

9.45: Introducing RED Wire: A Music discovery service where everyone can contribute and with a $5 monthly subscription you get music thru an AIR application, this application will be available later in the year.

9.47: Shantanu introducing CTO Kevin Lynch, Resident Magician also known as Harry Potter.

9.48: Kevin talks about current trends that we are going to be looking at today: Client + Cloud, Social Computing & Devices + Desktop as third trend. This trends makes the development challenging but ever growing opportunities.

9.51: Kevin introduces some of the features on Flash Player 10 as a result of work together with the community to enable easy and powerful experiences before hard to develop.

9.54: Showcasing Hobnox.com, dynamic audio processing and dynamic wave form analysis in real time to enable sound mixing and visualizations using Flash 10 built in 3D capabilities.

9.55: Showcasing other applications from digital artist who uses new expressive capabilities including pixel benders in Photoshop Online.

9.56: Flash 64bit coming to Linux.

9.56: Dub Albers, CTO Disney Interactive Media Group, gets the stage to talk about how Disney is going take advantage of new Flash Video capabilities.

10:00: Disney is showing a Wall-e experience branded portal where taking advantage of the new capabilities in Flash 10 can improve the experience of dialog-less communication with kids.

10.01: With the capabilities of broadband adoption across the world, Disney is able to take their viewing experiences to next levels, including social capabilities for kids around the world.

10.05: Announcing MLB.com going AIR and Flash starting initial day ‘09, making it the 4th of the 4th bigger sport leagues in the states to use Flash to stream sports over the internet.

10.06: Announcing Adobe AIR 1.5 today with all the power of Flash 10, Webkit + Squirrelfish and the Encryption of Local DBs. Available today for Windows and Apple. Linux in a couple of weeks.

10.09: NYTimes announcing an AIR-based News Reader for the International Herald Tribune. Showcasing the newsreader with some really cool features thanks to Flash 10 text rendering capabilities. Enabling access from different devices.

10.12: NYTimes: video advertising can be embedded as part of the experience making the monetization process come to live and enable advertisers new ways to present their content.

10.14: Kevin is showcasing AIR running on a MID device similar to the Nokia Tablet running on a Linux OS. AIR for MIDs will be available next year.

10.16: Kevin is now showcasing an experience by the California Museum where history content is made available as interactive experiences. A special application made available is the Learning Lab, an AIR App where teachers can interact with content and build curriculum around it, interacting with their students thru assignments and collaborative work. Available in ‘09.

10.20 Maria Shriver, First Lady of California, and Ann Lewnes VP Marketing take the stage to talk about the California Legacy Trails. A project to educate the community on the trails that made California what it is today.

10.23 Kevin, Adobe is exposing APIs to most of their services in the cloud. Showcasing Tour de Flex, a reference application for all the APIs with live examples, code access and language reference for developers.

10.30: Executive of Force.com takes the stage. Enterprise software is where innovation comes to die, but this is changing today with cloud computing. Enabling a new technology model that enabling platform as a service to virtually any company in the world.

10.37: Kevin back in stage to talk about Social Computing.

10.38: Kigel Pegg introduces Cocomo for realtime social applications in Flex, beta now available in labs.

10.40: Showcasing Acesis, a demo application for Medical Review. Support for AV conferencing and data sharing using real time collaboration.

10.46: Introducing Adobe Wave, displaying desktop notification is as simple as sending an email = anyone can do it. A service aggregation service for the desktop extending the experience of the Web 2.0.

10.49: Taking devices.

10.50: Flash Lite enabled in more than 1 Billion devices by ‘09.

10.51: Open Screen Project targets to 2 problems: 1. Web Browsing and 2. Standalone Applications.

10.52: Full Flash Player 10 to run in the higher end of the smart phones. Showcase time hot right from the engineering labs.

10.54: Nokia N85 running S60, HTC running WinMo and Opera Browser, iPhone (we are working on it, not ready yet) and HTC G1 running Google’s Android. Really cool demos of YouTube, Last.fm and some sleek Flash animations. – in my opinion Opera and Flash made the Windows Mobile platform a real alternative to the iPhone.

10.59: Andrew Rubin, Director of Mobile Platform of Google, takes the stage. Talks about the possibilities of the new mobile platforms to build great experiences in top of.

11.03: Introducing the Flash Lite distributable package enabling partners to distribute their applications on the web with the functionality to download Flash Lite player if not available. A great experience to deliver content on the mobile

11.08: Showing multi screen support with a Samsung UMPC and a tablet pc thru a mash up of current hardware technology.

11.11: and this is it… thanks a lot everyone!

Technorati Tags: Adobe MAX,Adobe,Flash,Flex,Catalyst,Thermo,RIA,RIE,Conferences,AIR

Come join me at Adobe MAX in San Francisco for some Flex/AIR and .NET fun!

2008-11-14T21:57:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago I got confirmation that my Birds-of-a-Feather session on Flex and .NET was accepted and hence I would have a slot available to Connect, Discovery and hopefully Inspire some of you into creating new experiences using the power of Flex and AIR front experiences with the power of .NET technologies running in the back end.

The session has now an official name, room and date so make sure you booked it in your agenda for some inter-op fun between 2 of the most powerful platforms out there.

What	Developing Flex and AIR applications in a .NET Environment
When	Monday, November 17th @ 9.30pm
Where	Room 2006

Things like WebORB for .NET, ASP.NET MVC, WCF and some cool data access will be covered and if time allows I will be demoing a couple of cloud surprises that I am azure will inspire more than one to go out and play with some great Microsoft technology out there.

It’s Monday evening and I’m sure there will be stuff going on after the session so come meet some other folks doing stuff with .NET and let’s get started for a great week of experiences.

Cheers!

Technorati Tags: Adobe,Adobe MAX,.NET,Flex,AIR,WCF,WebORB,ASP.NET,MVC,LINQ,Azure,Windows,.NET Services,Mesh

Aggiorno on Channel9’s The Continuum Show

2008-11-11T12:29:00.001-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Aggiorno team had the opportunity to share a booth with the Internet Explorer 8 team at Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference and I was lucky enough to be there with Aggiorno’s Product Manager, Federico Zoufaly.

Lots of great feedback we got along the week, specially around our new feature called Smart Search and Replace, a revolutionary way for you to transform your markup based on templates - trust me is really cool!!

During these day I had the opportunity to showcase Aggiorno’s latest build to a lot of people and it was great, one of those guys even got a camera… it was my friend Adam Kinney who was shooting some awesomeness for his show “The Continuum Show” and greatly enough Aggiorno made the cut of how awesome things were.

So here it is with out further adieu, enjoy!

Smart Search and Replace with Aggiorno

Live from LA it’s PDC: Keynote Day 3

2008-10-29T08:41:00.001-07:00

10.10am the show is over after a glance a all this new technology and hope to see more in the years to come.

10.08am a mini surface can be enabled by using an infrared camera enabling interaction with a mobile surface by using the same infrastructure of the surface and just refracting light to approach the gesture and context.

10.05am the way it works is that it transparent the 1st surface by applying a voltage letting the light pass thru to a second diffuse surface, at a rate that makes it invisible to the naked eye and providing the effect of 2 displays.

10.01am Demo. Wow! so there is a second light projection going on that behaves similar to a magnification glass in top of the surface, really really cool!

10.00am Steve Hodges is on stage and introduces SecondLight, interaction beyond the Surface.

9.59am Rick is back on stage on showing a video of a prototype for Surface using a projector on a table.

9.56am now showing a video of things that could be possible with Boku. really cool and complex stuff made simple. I ain’t no kid but me kid inside is craving to play with it.

9.51am Boku is a functional, rule based system that let kids associated actions to intuition. – it kind of takes me back to me time in CS101 learning Scheme *cool*

9.49am Demo time. How to use Boku to write a hello world, using an Xbox Control.

9.47am Boku is a lightweight programming for kids by means of building games.

9.45am Rick is talking about his 9 year old kid programming C# programs using generics, WPF and console programming and introduces Mat MacLaurin to talk about Boku.

9.39am World Wide Telescope has over 1.5 million active users and as now there is a new release called Equinox with a set of data that doubles the initial set of images available in the previous release.

9.36am Education is another big center for collaboration with the Academy in robotics, children learning mechanisms and use of technology in educational communities.

9.30am Rick is back on stage and is introducing the use of Machine Learning Theories on the investigation of vaccines by mean of simulation and data analysis based on large data sets.

9.19am showing the use of sensors in building energy efficient solutions.

9.10am Feng Zhao now is introduced to talk about sensors in our environment. *for those in PDC, check out the Windows 7 booth for your sensor card, so you can build your own prototypes*

8.59am Research pushes the process into one that is agile and can come into rescue when things go not as expected.

8.57am Research is a source of IP and new product technologies generating over 25% of the company’s patents, generally categorized as more “fundamentals”.

8.52am DirectX, Windows Media and the Tablet PC are examples of products who made it out of the Research Division.

8.48am as of today there are more than 800 PhD researchers making it one of the biggest faculty facilities in the world. 4000 papers published in the last 17 years with facilities in over 4 countries including India, China, England and the US.

8.47am MSR uses a University Org model and behaves as one. Focusing on Open Research with Strong ties to University Research.

8.45am Code that was written by Rick back in Carnegie Mellon is still running on Mac OS X and the iPhone; inspiring on the basic focus of expanding the state of the art in the field of technology by Research.

8.42am 1990 a Memo was written to BillG and the board of directors to open a basic research laboratory, when the company was still a small company.

8.39am Rick Rashid takes the stage and introduces what Research is in the 21st Century.

8.38am One of the things MSR provides Microsoft is that it allow them to “see into the future”. Focusing on problems that they could only dream.

8.33am Lights are out and a video introducing Microsoft Research. Really inspiring video on what the goals and the tasks at hand on going in this Division of the Company.

-----------------

Day 3 is out, it’s Wednesday, October 29th 2008 and the time comes for Microsoft Research to make its appearance in the stage.

Here is the live blogging.

Live from LA it’s PDC: Keynote Day 2

2008-10-28T08:32:00.001-07:00

Update: My computer battery died before the end of the keynote – and my Nokia Tablet didn’t like the conference wireless set up - just went they were introducing Live Services. For more information regarding Live Mesh Development check this out.

My computer’s battery is dying switching to the Nokia Tablet…

10.25am Live Services = Identity + Directory + Communication and Presence + Search and Geospatial

10.24am Time for Live Services.

10.23am Announcing Silverlight in side the browser and out using Live Mesh.

10.20am Announcing the Silverlight toolkit. A set of controls that are available in WPF and now into Silverlight 2.0 including charting controls and made available under the MPL Open Source license.

10.18am Silverlight. NBC Olympics – kudos to my mates in Schematic for this ;-) - with adaptive streaming. And announcing IIS Smooth Streaming to enabling this features for free on Windows Server.

10.17am Support for different Web.config’s depending on the scenario it’s been publishing. *nice*

10.16am ASP.NET 4 is on the road with VS10, including Web Forms, MVC, Ajax and Distributed Caching using Velocity.

10.14am ASP.NET is first and he is talking about the current state of the Web technologies, including full intelligence support starting today of JQuery within VS2008.

10.13am The Gu is back and now is time for the .NET Continuum.

10.11am really cool demo with support for barcode recognition using the integrated webcam. Kudos to cochango for this really neat demo.

10.07am Demo time, TESCO – biggest grocery shopping in the world. A grocery store API coming soon, nice. Showing a cork board application, letting users interact from within the kitchen.

10.05am Showing new extensibility capabilities for VS10, based on MEF and able to take full advantage of WPF right from within -Looking forward for aggiorno to take advantage of it. *awesome*

10.01am Visual Studio 10 build with WPF and support for Multi-monitor and richer code visualization.

10.00am WPF Improvements: multi-touch, deep zoom, visual state manager, text. Huge: .NET CLR 2 will be able to load on the same process as the CLR 4, enabling support for legacy assemblies.

9.58am Silverlight and WPF shares the same templating tooling so you better reuse your assets.

9.55am Now it’s time for touch.

9.50am Showing how to take advantage of new features of Windows from an existing WPF app. Introducing the new Ribbon control and contextual task support for Jump Lists.

9.49am Demo time.

9.48am Windows Applications for .NET has improved significantly with the update to .NET 3.5 SP1 and will be built into Windows 7.

9.47am VS10 will have support for very large code bases and multi core development, along with Native APIs for Windows 7 specific features.

9.47am The Gu takes the Stage.

9.43am Calls to action: Install Windows 7, Develop 64-bit, Integrate to Windows Desktop and Write for Standards - btw remember you can use aggiorno to get your Web sites and apps standards with just a couple of clicks.

9.41am Path to RTM: Pre-beta, E7 Blog, Beta, Feedback tool. Customer Experience Improvement. Release Candidates to RTM phases.

9.30am Cool, support for VHD, multi monitor support and boot from there to test and development environments. Really cool features handy during development.

9.29am Fundamentals for Windows 7: decrease memory, disk i/o and power consumption; while increasing speed and efficiency.

9.20am Developer features for Windows 7: Ribbon UI, Jump Lists (group of applications in the start menu and taskbars), Libraries (storage groups that work seamlessly across computers and devices), Multi-touch, Ink and Speech, and the DirectX family.

9.17am WordPad now supports the OpenXML format out of the box. Part of their commitment to standards, following the steps on IE8.

9.15am Ecosystem Readiness, Standards, Compatibility and Scenarios of use, is what they learned from Vista RTM up to the day to make Windows 7 the best choice for Desktop OS.

9.14am Steve is talking about the feedback they got for Vista, including blogs, press… oh some commercials.

9.12am Windows Live Essentials is a suite of Rich Applications that enhances the experiences in the desktop. Windows Live Services will enable a complete set of communication and experiences across PC + Web and the Phone.

9.10am Demoing Paint to interact with finger painting.

9.10am touch is mapped to mouse events, so even if the application doesn’t provides support for gestures, mouse events will be triggered to augment the experience.

9.09am IE8 supports on screen keyboard with words assistance and gestures understanding.

9.07am Windows 7 now supports touch (way better than Mac gestures) even on applications that don’t know about touch.

9.04am Showing personalization features in Windows. Glass colors, system tray icons configuration and performance features are now just a couple of clicks away.

9.02am Side bar gadgets are now able to dock anywhere in the desktop and not only on the side.

9.02am Printing management capabilities depending on location.

9.01am Showcasing a new and rich device manager. Allows to access all capabilities from the device and exposed to the user.

9.00am Windows Media Player now sports support to play music from other galleries in the home as well as to devices hooked to the network – similar to iTunes capabilities.

8.59am Showing new network discovery capabilities for content management and discovery. Allows to search and access information in other computers within the same work.

8.56am Windows Explorer. You can add libraries to storage views, so mixes different storage locations into a single view, really handy when several external hard drives

8.52am First demo of Windows 7. A new task bar. Really cool. When you hover the apps it will bring all of the Windows of that application into a thumb view and when hover the thumb will bring the window to the front.

New improvements into the Windows management system, multi monitors friendly, docking and manual rearrangement of windows in the task bars.

8.50am Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 share the same kernel but we will focus on the client today.

8.50am Steven takes the stage to talk about Windows 7.

8.49am Ray is introducing the next set of speakers.

8.47am Ray is talking about Web Apps that can be download, work offline: a continues experience - wait what?! Silverlight Offline?

8.46am applications that can be easily installed, isolated. Delivery the best of experiences under a given context.

8.45am platforms should work together and yet we want to have access to the power and capabilities of each.

8.43am the web is a common place of gathering. Between the URL and email, the web has become everyone’s front end, yet the browser should not be central point because of its boundaries and limitations.

8.40am Ozzie tell us we need to focus to make the most out of combined value for our customers investments. Our objective is to enable a combination of PC + Web + Phone that is greater than the sum of its parts.

8.38am Ray introduces the position we all share around the PC and talks about how the web and the PC have been up today 2 different worlds.

8.35am Ray Ozzie takes the stage and welcomes the audience. Today will be focused on the front end infrastructure. The future of experiences of personal computing: pc, phones and web.

8.32am Lights are out and video is playing. with all new .NET logos and great set of applications been showcased.

-----------------

Alright it’s Tuesday, October 28th 2008 and things are getting ready to rock on for Microsoft’s most important conference in the last few years.

Today we will be focusing on Windows 7 and the next generation of Development tooling focusing on VS10 and .NET 4.0. I am eager to see the strategy on Live Mesh as well and the next generation of services targeted to consumers.

Good times to be in the industry indeed and I am exited on been here.

Once again, check often this post as I am ready for live blog this event.

Cheeers!

PDC Day 1: A cloudy recap

2008-10-28T08:17:00.001-07:00

Wow, the first day went on with a lot of new stuff announced in the cloud spaces and the cool part is that things are still coming.

Yesterday Ray Ozzie announced Windows Azure, a Serviced Based Operating Environment that is set to drive Microsoft Cloud strategy on and which is set to define the bar high for a lot of services that are already on the grow of demand.

A key changing strategy in Microsoft’s horizon

From distributed storage with SQL Data Services, access to Live Services, SharePoint and CRM to your own set of .NET Services; this platform was build to grow to internet sizes. Following Microsoft’s previous efforts in the personal and enterprise computing.

Build to scale and expand, Microsoft’s offering differentiate from any of its competitors by providing a set of tools that build on the maturity of C# and the Visual Studio tooling, enabling the wide range of Windows and Web developers out there to take advantage of Cloud services after a small curve of learning of the basics.

A foundation to extend

I am looking forward to today’s announcements. Even though Azure is a hint at what is coming in the years ahead, today Microsoft will announced their strategy into Mesh, the more personal approach to cloud services and the one who, avec Live Services, will help drive the more general consumer adoption of such models. Windows 7 looks like it’s taking shape quite fine and for the first time in this decade it seem Microsoft is getting its act together and set to execute.

PDC Keynote for today is just about to start, so I better head over there. Make sure you check out my live coverage from yesterday for a more descriptive view of what went on and wait for today’s.

Cheers!

Live from LA it’s PDC: Keynote Day 1

2008-10-27T08:38:00.001-07:00

10.13am: This is it for today and tomorrow will focus on the Computing Experience. Thanks all.

10.10am: Azure.com is live and open for start playing with the services. SDK is up and people can start using it right now. 2008/09 will be timing for testing and development before it gets released commercially.

10.08am: Ray Ozzie is back on Stage summarizing the news that were delivered today.

10.05am: Demoing a Silverlight app that showcases end to end scenario of Federated services with a CRM application using a Silverlight portal.

10.00am: Showcasing the setup of Microsoft Services Connector, which will allow companies to Federate their “on promise” services with the cloud services. – Looks powerful and really straight forward.

9.54am: All Microsoft’s enterprise services moving forward will be enabled with the possibility for an online service, either provided by Microsoft or 3rd Party Partners.

9.52am: Talking about Customer Challenges face in today’s IT shops.

9.48am: On-Premises Platform translates to Cloud Services, allowing companies to transition and inter collaborate among services as needed and scalable per demand.

9.42am: Showcasing a LOB Cloud app, supported by a LOB Silverlight application. – side note: MSFT u guys have to work better on your demo’s so far nothing really cool.

9.35am: Inviting Red Prairie to demo Product Recall solution running on top of Azure.

9.33am: Introducing SQL Services = Database + Data Sync + Reporting + Data Mining + ETL + Reference Data

9.30am: Service Bus is the way enterprises will get their “On Promises” services to connect securely to the cloud. Access Control is the federation between identity services. Workflow Services will allow workflows to span from within the enterprise and into the cloud making them available to everyone.

9.29am: Introducing .NET Services = Service Bus + Access Control + Workflow Services.

9.27am: Talking about the requirements needed for a successful cloud infrastructure

9.25am: Introducing the 5th Generation of Computing: Services. 1st (1970’s) Monolithic, 2nd (1980’s) Client-Server, 3rd (1990’s) Web, 4th (Today) SOA. 5th is based on all 4 prior tiers and build upon to provide the best of all them all. Enabling scale out services across a set of devices today.

9.22am: Now welcoming Bob Muglia.

9.18am: showcasing the Azure Management Console. Showing the configuration setting of instances for services which can just be switch and swap as needed. As easy even a CEO can do it ;-)

9.16am: Bluehoo.com is on stage to show how they built an application for the cloud.

9.15am: ASP.NET Dev skills will make you a Cloud Developer already. There will be a “Cloud on your Desktop” simulation environment to help Developers debug their applications locally. Applications build in the cloud can be accessed using the http://yourapp.cloudapp.net

9.11am: Demo, how to build and deploy a “Hello World” service in Windows Azure.

9.09am: Apps and Services are isolated between them making applications run independent in a high availability model.

9.05am: Apps and OS services are managed separately, making the application publication and execution management as easy as the current model of monolithic OS. Fabric Controller is the name of the Service Manager that will make the magic happen, making your services work in a stable, high scalable way.

9.03am: HiperV seats as a key player in the way Azure run. Azure is an OS that seats distributed geographically, including managing the global data center infrastructure.

9.00am: SQL Data Services are been renamed to SQL Services. Plus Live Services, .NET Services, SharePoint Services and Dynamic CRM Services, define the pillars that will empower and run on top of the Windows Azure infrastructure.

8.57am: Windows Azure is not a server to run in the enterprise but rather a service that runs a set of distribute infrastructure is been released today as a CTP with just a fracture of all the services that are coming later as part of this new effort.

8.56am: To leverage the Windows brand it has to provide the same foundations to developers as present in the rest of the Windows Family.

8:54am: Announcing Windows Azure: Windows in the Cloud, with support for RIA distribution. Service based Operation Environment for a platform that will empower the future of experiences.

8.53am: Ray is acknowledging Amazon innovations with EC2 and says all of the other cloud providers will be walking on their shoulders to differentiate.

8.51am: Ray is introducing the different tiers of the technology experience: Tier 1 is the personal computing, Tier 2 enterprise level one and Tier 3 is of the size of the web.

8.47am: Talking about the cost and complexity of building secure, effective infrastructures in a world of global customers in a way that is efficient, always on, and available as needed whenever needed. Making relevance to a shared infrastructure build for the demands of the Web today and with the capacity to scale as the world demands.

8.45am: Talking about how the world of communication has made the web become a key generational demand mechanism, setting expectations higher than ever in the way people interact inter office as in their personal life.

8.40am: This morning you will learn Microsoft’s takes in the revolution of S+S with a strategy merging Services, Tools and the Infrastructure itself.

8.39am: Talking about his experience as a developer and how Microsoft is key at making ISVs been successful with the platform they build and the innovation across the infrastructure.

8.35am: Ray Ozzie takes the stages and welcomes everyone.

-----------------

Alright it’s Monday, October 27th 2008 and things are getting ready to rock on for Microsoft’s most important conference in the last few years.

I happen to be one of the dudes with the best seat in the house which I am sharing with great guys like Coding Horror’s Jeff Atwood, Kip Kniskern from LiveSide and Walt Ritscher from WPF Wonderland.

I will be live blogging from the event here, so make sure u keep refreshing this post for news just as they happen.

Cheers!

Welcome PDC 2008

2008-10-27T07:25:00.001-07:00

Today is the day where all the geeks in the world turn their looks to Microsoft for a sneak peak at the future of all things Microsoft and the cool part I am here to be part of it!

Got to tell you, the pre-con experience couldn’t been better. Activity in the Cafe lounges was exiting and relax at the same time. Having access to great minds a la carte and been part of great talks are pretty much priceless and I expect a lot of those to go on during this week.

Party with Palermo was one of the events I got to attend last night, and even though I was expecting a bit more, it was a good source to network and see friends I haven’t seen in a while. I hope this will be the rule for the PDC evenings and starting today I am in full motion!

Now let’s the games begin and kudos to all the teams that have made it happen thus far. I’ve had the chance to glimpse at some of the stuff been shown and I am eager to be able to talk about them in the public.

Cheers!

CS4 is out… now let them come in!

2008-10-15T08:53:00.001-07:00

Indeed it’s has been a great week for RIAs and it seems like it goes non-stop. This time coming from the guys across the lake: Adobe.

Creative Suite 4, which just got announced a few weeks ago, was released today and has started shipping all across the world.

From all the new stuff coming, I am really exited about the new features the guys from Flash put together in their latest release. For the first time in a long time myself, as a creative developer, am eager to get my hands on these bits.

~~Trials are not yet available but you can~~ ~~sign up~~ ~~to get notified once they do~~. Trials are up for download now and as the bits downloads, I would recommend to head over to Lee Brimelow’s TheFlashBlog for a good run on tutorials and overviews of what’s in box for Adobe’s Interactive Tool.

Lot’s of great news this week and I don’t see them stop anytime soon, Microsoft PDC is just around the corner and Adobes own MAX follows right thru…. cool times for been a geek.

Happy Learning!

P.S. Don’t you think it’s about time to get your hands into Aggiorno and save some precious time out all the web coding you do? I know you could use that time on learning some of these cool stuff :-)

Update: Mike Chambers just published a list of articles and tutorials you go check to get started in this new release.

Update: Trial bits are up for download, go get them here

Technorati Tags: CS4,Adobe,Flash,RIA,RIE

Silverlight 2 final bits are out… come get them!

2008-10-13T23:12:00.001-07:00

Just as I blogged earlier, Microsoft went public today with the final bits for their Rich Internet Platform, Silverlight 2.0, and well here the bits are now out for you to go grab them.

Now back to keep up updating a little app I’ve been working on lately… hopefully will be released to beta later in the week.

Cheers!

P.S. Thanks to Brian Henderson for the heads up in twitter.

Update: Even though the Silverlight Tools for VS reads RC1, it seems like it’s just because of a typo, so go on and rock on!

Update: Now that the news are out the Gu and Tim Heuer have a couple of amazing posts describing the news.

Silverlight 2 announced with plans for development support on Mac and Linux

2008-10-13T11:44:00.001-07:00

It was a year ago when I took the stage at the Silverlight DevCamp in Chicago with my white MacBook and a beer in hand. I was set to talk about building MVC driven applications in Silverlight 1.0.

At the time I was working on a project for WWE and even though the project was secret, I got to show some of the tech we build behind the scenes for such project: A MVC approach to manage data visualization and an small framework to orchestrate its functionality.

My History with OS4SL = Aptana + FireBug + Blend

I started my career on Silverlight using Visual Studio and the Expression Studio, although in the middle of a development sprint a bug in the dev tools made me go shop for an alternative other than rebuild my dev machine… time was a constrain. I found Aptana and stick with it for the rest of my Silverlight 1.0 experience, Firebug did what it did for debugging of JS and Blend, well… let’s be honest, there is nothing like Blend for XAML authoring.

People was shocked to see me use open source technologies to build on Silverlight. Heck, I even got Larry Clarkin and Chris Bernard to twit about it (here and here). Things were good though.

Silverlight Dev Tools for Visual Studio have gone a long road since then and they are in a State of the Art sort of thing. Since those days Silverlight has embraced full support for the CLR and a mature architecture aroused from all those initial CTPs and long run Betas.

Delivering on a Promise for Better RIAs using .NET

Today Microsoft delivered on the Rich Internet Platform promise and made public its official release of Silverlight 2.0 along with a set of Open Source initiatives that not only will allow us access to a big set of controls source but also the ability to build Silverlight apps outside Visual Studio and even outside of the Windows Platform… now things are getting interesting in the RIA world.

Eclipse4SL

As part of this big announcement day, Microsoft made public its partnership with Soyatec, a French company that will take Eclipse up to support development of Silverlight applications, including C# editing support, a XAML WYSIWYG editor and debugging tools.

Such an effort goes by the name of Eclipse4SL and it’s first preview is available now for Windows. With support for other platforms coming along in the future.

Silverlight Control Pack

And finally to put the cherry in the pie, Microsoft will also be releasing a bunch of complex controls under the Silverlight Control Pack umbrella, also available is their source code which you can modify, rebuild and reuse.

The reason behind this is to not only provide better support for the already set of controls shipping with the runtime, but to serve as an example for the community on how controls should be build, setting a standard that both people and companies could take as reference point when building their own.

Exciting Times

Exciting times no less for the RIA world this next 5 weeks will be, with PDC just around the corner and with Adobe MAX following just right after with all the goodies from Flex and Flash 10, the ecosystem for better and greater experiences on the Web is nothing but starting… and I am thrill to be part of it!

So go ahead and get up to speed with the learning curve as there is be a lot to be digested in the weeks ahead.

Now ,that’s just another reason to give Aggiorno a try and get all those time consuming tasks we all go thru while web developing, automatically fixed. That way you can put that time to better use.

Cheers!

Technorati Tags: Silverlight,Open Source,Flash,Flex,Microsoft,Visual Studio,Eclipse,Aptana,Firebug,Blend

A Better Place

2008-10-04T16:09:00.000-07:00

I know I've been absent for the last couple of weeks heads down working on the release of Aggiorno 1.2... but as I get back my grip into blog again I wanted to share this.

Today, I ran across this site called Better Place, focused on making reality a plan on renewable energy sources for the world itself, with the mission of decoupling ourselves from oil and into a better world.

Now, here is what I have to say!

Do you have something else to say? then come join me!

Cheers!

I'll be Speaking at MSDN Tour Costa Rica this week

2008-09-22T14:20:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow Tuesday 23nd and Wednesday September 24th, I will be speaking at the MSDN Tour in Costa Rica as part of a series of events going on across Latin America this week.

I will be covering a little bit of the future of the new Services Platform that Microsoft is empowering as well as their S+S plans based on Mesh and the Live Platform.

I will also be doing a couple of demos of the new Internet Explorer browser and showing how you can take advantage of aggiorno to facilitate the transition of your web sites to more standard grounds.

To register to any of this two events check out the following links.

When	September 23rd
Where	Microsoft Offices
What time	2pm - 5pm
Address	Oficentro Plazaa Roble Edificio El Patio 2do Piso Escazú, San José
RSVP	Here

and

When	September 24rd
Where	Artisoft Free Zone
What time	6pm - 9pm
Address	Torre La Sabana, Piso 11 300 metros Oeste del Edificio del ICE, Sabana Norte
RSVP	Here

See you guys there and keep on rocking!

Accelerators coming to Windows 7

2008-09-21T23:05:00.000-07:00

I expend most of the past week in NYC with the Internet Explorer team showcasing IE8 and aggiorno to most of the attendees of the Web 2.0 Expo; and got to say that some of the most acclaimed features from IE8 in the booth where both their new Accelerators and Webslices features.

Accelerators are services made accessible from within the users reach and can be activated by just selecting a piece of text in a page and getting results through a mashup of services without having to leave the page the user is in; while Webslices are pieces of Web pages that can be sliced and placed in the bookmarks toolbar for ease of reach and updated as per users request.

Accelerators such as the Define by Encarta and the Map with Live Earth, where among the ones that created the most wow effects from the hundreds of people that approach one of the 3 displays slated for demos, excelling the user experience of the user at hand.

Now to my surprise I found through the leaked photos of Windows 7 that were published yesterday, that such features seems like are also coming to the next generation of the Softies Desktop OS. Check the first menu item under Accessories in the the image below:

I can only imagine been able to mash up services right from within my Desktop experience, having the myriad of web services available at the reach of a right click and contextual to my task at hand.

I guess the view of an ubiquity experience between the desktop and the Web is becoming more and more a unifying paradigm, and with the advent of platforms such as Live Mesh powered by cloud services and the access to all of my services will enable an truly interconnected world of universal access.

Let's keep setting our expectations open, that Microsoft's PDC is just around the corner and you never know what could be that next big shift in the world of a semantic living.

Cheers and enjoy the future!

Google Chrome updated to run Silverlight

2008-09-16T22:55:00.001-07:00

Following up on my technology status for RIA under Google's Chrome, I got the scoop earlier today about Google's latest build of Chrome, 1251, updated to address most Silverlight's initial problems, and got to say that its improvements are more than welcome by interactive dev community.

Chrome latest build was released under the Developer chain, an alternative release cycle which let you update to interim builds of Google's Internet Browser, for testing purposes.

Getting yourself ready for the switch

Google's latest turn of events lead them to enable the Dev chain, giving the community access to upcoming features, features in development, and the latest bug fixes in a per weekly basis.

In order to enable this feature on your box, you will need to run the Channel Switcher, which you can get from here, and set the switch from Beta to Dev and then fetch the latest update from the About menu.

As per Google's own words

We need Dev users, and we'll give your feedback and issues higher priority.

Which if you are like some of us and you are used to get your hands into messy set of bits every week in order to get your magic going, I'd recommend to make the switch and keep up testing your applications under these builds at least for expectation purposes.

Getting it to perform: It just works!

Giving that I am out in NYC for the week attending the Web 2.0 Expo and with probably the worst connection to Internet in all the Manhattan island; it took me some time to get the setup done and get it to test with some internal builds of a couple of Silverlight applications I'm working on, yet I am happy to report that it works!

I can also say that from the public beta version to this interim one, an important set of improvements can be perceived in the overall stability of the browser, having fewer crashes and getting both Flash and Silverlight to execute as close to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3 as it can get.

I'd guess that the Chrome team is really spinning up on getting things in the right track, enabling the ever growing world of RIA's to keep on living as 1st class citizen of the web.

Now, for a sneak at some of the flagship Silverlight applications check out Jonas Folleso's post on this update and take a look at his screen test; and, for more up to date news on Chrome, make sure to follow GetGoogleChrome, who are making a great work on keeping up with the news from all around the world.

Cheers and happy switching!

Technorati Tags: Chrome,Google Chrome,Microsoft,Silverlight,Flash,Development,RIA,RIE,HTWWO