Applications

Living, Breathing, Dynamic, and Organic Web

Tony Yates — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 21:25:00 GMT

You may never had associated the title words with the Internet or web-based applications, but I predict that within 15 years thats exaclty the type of experience we will be getting used to on a day to day, site-to-site, basis. Web developers today can either get relevant or get lost.

With applications and technologies like Photosynth, Seadragon, Popfly, and Silverlight, that's exaclty where Microsoft is headed.

http://labs.live.com/photosynth/ : "Newest and most exciting way to view photos on a computer. Takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and then displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space, showing you how each one relates to the next."

http://www.popfly.ms/Overview/ : "Popfly Creator is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups."

http://labs.live.com/Seadragon.aspx : "Aimed to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network."

http://silverlight.net/Default.aspx & http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/ : "Enables rich interactive applications for the Web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces. Create richer, more compelling Web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance. Stunning vector-based graphics, media, text, animation, and overlays that enable seamless integration of graphics and effects into any existing Web application. Enhance existing standards/AJAX-based applications with richer graphics and media, and improve their performance and capabilities by using Silverlight."

Although king in its time, Flash has been around for '-ever', but has change very little. I can still remember learning the ins and outs of keyframe development, but it has never caught on because for many reasons; cost of the designer, limited scripting capabilities, and only web-bound support - just to name a few. Thats too bad in may respects, but like Netscape, they can only blame theirselves for growing complacent and stale.

Microsoft has, love em' or hate em', learned from many technologies mistakes (and made many of their own) in recent history. Picking up where Flash and similar techlogies have left off, Microsoft is again leading the pack into the next era of presence. Having the power of a first class programming language and world-class framework library is exactly where the Redmond camp is headed with Silverlight. Combined with the extraordinary capabilities of photosynth and seadragon, its only a matter of time before we start to be able navigate sites that way. And along comes Popfly - oh my-my see how far Frontpage has come (hehe)! Ok, its like apples and oranges, but still, Redmond has come along way with so much weight to carry.

Here's to the future of the Microsoft web, Cheers!

...now back to our scheduled broadcast...

A nice little CSS editor: StyleSpread

Tony Yates — Tue, 22 May 2007 07:43:49 GMT

StyleSpead is a sweet little jewel that surpasses any other CSS utility I've ever used! Take a look, its well worth the investment!

Open Source C# Project Hosting Site

Tony Yates — Sun, 13 May 2007 20:40:18 GMT

For those people who don't like to mess around with interpreted-language sites (e.g based on php, python, perl, etc), and have a desire to host a .Net project-based, subversion-friendly site, you need to check out SharpForge.

Its no TRAC, thats for sure! However, the project and site have been around for awhile, and more and more effort going into it makes it a worthwhile option for managing small to medium-sized projects. Expecially if you prefer .Net.

Interesting features include:

Multi Portal
Multi Project
Subversion Administration
Work Item Tracking
Project Forums
Release Management
Subversion Wiki
Browse Source Code
News Feed Aggregation

The best thing about this is that no Apache is needed to communicate with Subversion. Not that I have an issue with doubling up software suites. Heck, I can remember a time when I has both MS Office and Word Perfect installed on my machine. There was even a time when I had two or three music players installed too, but hello! Why try and fix what's not broken? Apache should be used, not seen - via error message after error message. Why install tempermental software on my machine when I don't have to?

Anyway, I'm not trying to start any web-server-religious wars here, just passing on the word to my .Net-friendly buddies out there.

Shameless plug:

For rock-solid project hosting, with more features than [fill-in your favorite software product here], check out http://www.coderesort.com (pun intended).