Vista SP1 due at first quarter of 2008, but will it "deal" with UAC?

Microsoft has finally announced that the final release of  Windows Vista SP1 will be scheduled around the first quarter of next year.

Pretty quick, for an update, seeing that its been about 3 years since Microsoft released Windows XP SP2, and Windows Vista has just be released about half a year ago, but it won’t be anything major, just fixes to enhance the performance, security etc of Vista.

I’m just hoping they get rid of UAC (User Account Control) feature, it totally kills people who do not know how to configure their PC, its far too troublesome, and definitely not the solution to account privilege issues, thankfully, it seems that they’re bending to the will of users (and other companies….like Google ), by approving a third-party app that deals with the troublesome UAC.

UAC ain’t user friendly, look at this post from A List Apart, that evaluates on the usability of elevated confirmation windows….I hate them, yes they are needed for certain scenarios, but popping up when I open almost anything is downright annoying.

And yes, I disabled UAC just a day after Vista was installed. No turning back.

Developer-Designer Workflow

Check out Ryan Stewart’s post on the importance of developer and designer workflow when it comes to building RIAs and almost any other applications.

He brought up many great points, like how Apple’s focus on both presentation and functionality have contributed to its success throughout these years, and how we’re going to need both the designer’s creativity and the developers code, to come out with something successful.

Collaboration between both designer and developer is essential, and there is a need for a framework or technology to deal with this tricky, tricky issue. The first technology that came to mind, that currently has the best method of dealing with this issue of collaboration, is no other than – WPF.

The workflow of developing both WPF applications and Silverlight applications are pretty similar, where the developer will be using Visual Studio to pump code into the application, and the designer using Expression Blend to craft the user interface.

Where both parties would be dealing with the same project, the same format (XAML), that could be opened in both Visual Studio and Expression Blend, development and design could be done rapidly, and integration would be seamless, and the completed project would include both the creativity of the designer for better user experience and the functional capabilities provided by the developer.

Still, the workflow’s concept might seem a little too elusive, and if you would like to find out more, check out this video from Channel 9, Real World WPF : Designers and Developers working together?!

In the video, Martin Grayson and Paul Tallett from the UK MCS User Experience team talks about their experience working on real world WPF applications and how designers and developers worked together, they’ve also explained in detail the various workflows they have tried out, weighing their ups and downs and their opinion on which is the best workflow for developing WPF applications.

Well, ain’t WPF just cool!

Tafiti, Silverlight & Live powered Searching

Microsoft has just released Tafiti, a mashup utilizing the capabilities of both Windows Live Search and Silverlight search engine, the name “Tafiti” means “do search” from Swahili.

News about Tafiti is HOT around the web, EVERYONE is talking about it! Check out Channel 10, TechCrunch, All About Microsoft, The Universal Desktop, etc.

Animations are sleek, but some of them looks “laggy” (Set Ease In and Out to 100%?), switching search options to different mediums (Web, Images, RSS, Books, News), is great, and its noticeable that there isn’t any page refresh, which makes the application feel much more like a desktop application, thanks to ASP.NET AJAX.

Windows Live Search still ain’t as powerful as Google or Yahoo, thus the results are still not that relevant, but it could all change if Microsoft moves in to buy Yahoo (Seriously?).

The overall effects and feel is still pretty much lacking, and like pointed out by Ryan, the tree view feature (that looks far too cluttered), its a very very viable, and potential feature, and it has been used before, where? WPF News readers, eg: The New York Times Reader, to find out more, check out Tim Sneath’s post on it.

Also, like Ryan Stewart noticed, its very similar to another search engine powered by Live Search, Ms.Dewey, and its absolutely GREAT to see that web search applications would evolve to RIAs, which will definitely will happen in the near future.

The idea of being able to save you’re search results in a side pane is absolutely great, something I’ve never thought of, but always needed. But still, the search result is cluttered, and too much graphics and effects are distracting, unless they come out with something much more simpler (yes, still with animations etc, but simpler), with better functions, nobody is going to use it.

But I don’t think it’ll be an issue, as most of the articles pointed out, the Tafiti project is most probably a test subject….for a much, much better search engine this.

PS: the logo reminds me of Six Feet Under, LOL

Microsoft Silverlight site Silverlight-enabled

Even though it should have “happened” earlier, Microsoft’s official Silverlight site is now Silverlight-enabled! (It was actually Silverlight-enabled a few weeks back)

The animations are slick and smooth, for example when I click any one of the sections, there is no refresh, which means…partial-page updates…its the ASP.NET AJAX UpdatePanel Control in action, and the animation included in UpdateProgress Control, is a sexy spinning Silverlight Orb (I’m not sure if its a .gif file or an actual Silverlight animation), neat!

The site would be a great example that shows what could be done with the combined usage of Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX, everything loads faster, with the use of the update panel control, even the video at the main page, probably encoded using Expression Media Encoder, and the slick animated objects for each section were very cool indeed.

The only flaws of the site is that some of the content’s text color is light grey, even though it matches well with light blue, the text isn’t that readable. And the Silverlight RC1 build isn’t exactly stable, there is always error messages popping up, not only in this site, but most other Silverlight powered sites I’ve browsed.

Its funny though, where if someone wanted to download any one of the Silverlight plug-ins, going to the site would automatically prompt the person to download it, else he wouldn’t be able to view the site.

Well I doubt it’ll make any difference anyway, as Microsoft would most probably would be distributing it with Windows Update once its released anyway

Tech.Ed SEA 2007

This coming September, Microsoft will be having its premier & largest annual conference in the South East Asia region, Tech.Ed SEA 2007, at 10-13 September at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center.

Why should you attend?

Those attending would be able to learn about the new Microsoft products and technologies, not from just any instructor, but experts and specialists in the industry, some of them even from Redmond, and even some which helped built the products and technologies. Which means you can fire questions at them without thinking twice, neat! (On second thought, do think twice)

Not only will you be able to learn, you would also get to know more people in the industry, share your knowledge, get to know more on what’s happening in the ever-changing world of technology.

Who should go?

The conference is mainly targeted at IT professionals and developers, not only to get them exposed and aware of the new products and technologies available, but to better equip them with the priceless knowledge on how, when, and what technologies or products should be used as their business solution, better improving both themselves, and their organizations.

But this time around, developers that like design, or designers that have technical knowledge, should also take part in this conference! Why? Continue on to find out more!

Malaysian Florist Site adopts Silverlight

“flowers for you”, is a Malaysian Florist Site, selling fresh flowers to certain parts of Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur, Ipoh, Penang), nothing special at first glance, but in fact, the cool thing is, they’re one of the showcased silverlight-powered web sites in Silverlight.net!!

The company have chosen to choose Silverlight, along with ASP.NET AJAX, to create their full website, where it uses a combination of video, audio, and animation to showcase the beautiful flowers they sell for various occasions.

Well, the RC1 build isn’t fully stable yet, and the web site’s large usage of video is probably the driving reason why they’ve chosen to implement Silverlight, but judging from the design of their overall site, and the animations of their catalog page… this definitely must be a site in development.

Why do I say so? Well, the first thing is, the design is almost unacceptable, especially the color schemes (i’m seeing like sooo many different colors that seriously don’t contrast and match). For the logo….its jumbled with almost everything, and the and the spinning flowers looks funny.  On top of that, I have no idea why they have video in their catalog, its too distracting, and coupled with the color scheme…its almost disgusting, or maybe they just used it to showcase Silverlight’s media streaming capabilities?

The designers of the site should definitely learn from the design of sites like They’re Beautiful, which is a free virtual flowers site, founded by designers who left Microsoft, on the other hand, has a pretty simple and neat design, and the virtual flowers are very very nice, to find out more, about the site, check out this post from TechCrunch.

Silverlight isn’t always the ideal business solution, there are times when interface design is much, more important than flashy animations, and this site may very well be a case.

New Banner

Uploaded a new banner for my blog! Its created using Expression Design, and added some effects using Photoshop CS3, its designed with simplicity in mind, as they say, simplicity is key!

Do tell me your thoughts, do you like it? hate it? or are you just plain confused?

10 great things about Silverlight

I was reading through my Insider newsletter and found this awesome titled “10 Things You Should Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight”, written by Shawn Wildermuth, a Microsoft MVP in C#, to me, its more like 10 great things you should definitely know about Silverlight!

In the article, the Shawn talks about the 10 key points based on his hands-on experience for dealing with Silverlight for months. He covers on how Silverlight could very well be the solution synchronizing Web Strategy with Rich Internet Applications, as even though it currently may not be able to match Flash in the RIA industry, one thing to note (that even I myself sometimes forget), is that it is currently in its embryonic stage (still RC), and when released, its features would most likely be able to rival Flash.

Even though it was just an article, it was very in-depth, and Shawn clearly defined the key areas of Silverlight that sometimes even eludes most of us, and how Silverlight 1.1 is clearly the version that all of us should be keeping our eyes on, like how Silverlight utilizes technologies developers already know, which is .NET, and the XAML used for Silverlight is much more easier and lightweight compared to that of WPF, and much, much more easier to pick up. Come to think of it, Adobe AIR is going in the same direction.

And with Microsoft holding true to its promise on Silverlight being Cross browser/OS, looking at how they’re helping the Moonlight team come up with the implementation of Silverlight for Linux, Silverlight may very well live up to its “flash killer” name.

More and more companies are starting to notice the existence of Silverlight, especially those in the video industry, one of the latest web sites to implement Silverlight RC1 is MLB.com (Major League Baseball), as pointed out by Ryan Stewart, its probably the first customer-facing usage of Silverlight running on the RC1 build (not sure if NetFlix etc has already implemented RC1 or not, but the transition will be quick).

Judging from the rapid growth of the It will probably be a matter of time before more and more web sites would choose to fully implement Silverlight.

Whether Silverlight will be a success or not, you’ve just gotta understand why the barons of Redmond are quietly confident, they’ve pulled it off once with the .NET Framework (“displacing” the Sun’s Java platform), so…who knows?

Remix’07 Australia Videos

Didn’t have enough from Mix’07? Craving for more videos to get your mind up and spinning?

Look no further! You could check out the videos from Remix’07 Australia from the PostMix Australia blog!

So far only the videos of day one have been uploaded, and the cool thing is that you could actually see the presenter, unlike the Mix’07 videos that were first uploaded (They’ve replaced some, if not all, of the videos to have both presenter and presentation content, guess I have to re-download……)

One of the videos to note would be Lee Brimlow’s (Design Technologist of Frog Design, author of theWPFblog) session “Rapid Fire Design and Prototyping in WPF”, where he shares his experience in developing WPF applications, including the upcoming Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista! Awesome! He also posted some of the sources he presented in the presentation in one of his post, here.

Conclusion? Download them all

Why need RIAs?

RIAs, from Adobe’s perspective, Rich Internet Applications, from Microsoft’s perspective, Rich Interactive Applications, well, they are both referring to the same thing, which is basically an application running on a browser that has some of the characteristics of a desktop application.

The million dollar question, why do we need RIAs?

We’re seeing more and more applications throughout the web that have embraced the “standards” of Web 2.0, and to live up to these standards, and there are more than a few key areas of the Web 2.0 standard that directly relates to RIAs, like the capability to enhance user experience through richer interactivity, allowing these applications to be much more accessible, usable, and user friendly.

These points alone have highlighted some of the reasons why RIA has become an essential part of web applications nowadays. But these are all just a glimpse of the surface on why we need to adopt RIA for our web applications.

To find out more, check out the RIA motivator series by Matt Voerman, a Senior Consultant for Adobe Systems, that I found from this post from Ryan Stewart’s ZDNet Blog.

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Part 1: RIA Motivators – User Experience (UX)

For part one, Matt focuses on the areas where RIAs could enhance User Experience, stressing on various key areas that includes the overall design of the application, which doesn’t only include the interface design, personalization, striving on the how the end users would be able to customize their experience when dealing with the application, and how productivity could be further enhanced.

Part 2: RIA Motivators – SOA, SOC & Web 2.0

For part two, Matt dives down deep into how RIAs complies to Web 2.0 “standards”, and how it relates to service-oriented architectures (SOA) and service-oriented clients (SOC), and how the Flash Player comes into the picture.

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Absolutely love the in-depth analysis by Matt, thankfully the series doesn’t end there, definitely looking forward to them!