i am at riapalooza and just learned of this cool site, reactee, from my buddy anthony. essentially, it allows you to choose up to 3 keywords that you have printed on a t-shirt that people can then txt 41411 and have a sms message sent to them of your choosing. genius. what will your message say?
if you have not already checked out deepzoompix.com, go check it out now. by now, most of you know about the coolness that is deep zoom built into silverlight (some of my favorite examples are hard rock and the playboy archive (it is playboy, so beware). but deepzoompix demonstrates the power of an open source .net library called jellyfish deep zoom developed by a japanaese partner, 2ndfactory (the site is in japanese) running on windows azure.
i am definitely going to be playing around with this sweet library. watch the mix video (and check out using sketchflow for “mooncake” at around 56:00… you’ll see what i mean) and then go get it off of codeplex.
i have had these books for months and they are still my favorite for just raw web design inspiration. i have been paging through the video sites one tonight and still amazed by what i did not know was out there.
now you have no reason not to get you or your business on the web. check it out here.
i have to say that i have been loving me some live mesh lately. i have been digging into really understanding some of the scenarios where live framework and live mesh make sense and i am literally boggled by the possibilities.
i find the best way for me to learn is to actually do. some people learn really well by reading or listening… i am not one of them. so when i found out i would be on the world wind central region tour of msdn developer events talking about the live framework and live mesh, i figured i better really dig into it.
so the first thing i did was understand the framework. this was critical to me really understanding how to program with it. i checked out a bunch of pdc videos and had some help from really smart folks on the product team and corporate dpe (thanks ori, angus, nishant, arash, james, etc.). this set the basis for getting started.
by the time the chicago msdn developer conference came around, i had built my first mesh-enabled web application and felt i really could explain how it all worked. it turned out that programming the mesh is not all that difficult once you spend some time understanding the resource model. what i thought was so powerful is the ability to use existing projects and “meshify” them.
so here is a screencast of me building the mesh video player and the code associated with it. i want to give kudos to tim heuer for pointing out the great silverlight video player available on codeplex that i meshified for this project.
if you are interested in getting started building applications in the mesh and using the live framework and have not signed up, make sure you go register!
i recently had an internal email come through on one of our distribution lists that asked who the owner of mysearchoff.com was. it wasn’t until that email came through that i realized that i completely forgot i built this thing over a year ago as an attempt to see for myself what search engine was truly providing the best results… live search vs google vs yahoo!.
because i built it in a couple days (the sql took the longest… i am just plain no good at database schemas and stored procedures), i really did not put much thought into it. that is until i saw that mail come through and the accompanying blog post.
so that made me go dig up the source code (i first had to find it… there is something to be said for source control even with just one developer) and update a few bugs and update the framework to .net framework 3.5. first i fixed the crashing in firefox 3. at the time i deployed it over a year ago, it was working in ff2 but times change and i guess so does “standards”. second, there was a z-order problem in showing the scroll bar for the yahoo! results. fixed that too.
since i spent the time to fix some of the bugs with my little engine that could, i thought i would set it as my default search provider (in ie, notice the search toolbar turn orange and allow you to add mysearchoff to your providers) to see how useful it really was. it turns out that i am using it more and more and really finding interesting results. it is extremely helpful in finding information since it basically gives me the best of three engines at once (although, nothing against you yahoo!, but i collapse your pane down most of the time). mysearchoff is now my default search provider in internet explorer and firefox.
i have had some really good feedback on what to add and would love to hear more so let me have it. also, don’t forget to click the green checkbox icon in the upper right to vote on the engine that gave you the best results (full disclaimer: i am not capturing any personal information when you vote. i am only capturing your search criteria and your vote).
Example search for “gorbett”:
my blog 1 on yahoo! (maybe i should stop collapsing your pane!)
my blog 2 on google (google likes me more than msft :( )
my blog 3 on live (wtf?!? show me some love msft. i work for you for pete’s sake!)
in case you have been caught-up with all the pdc announcements and missed this one, we have announced plans with akamai to enable high-definition (HD) quality experiences over the web using smooth streaming.
so what the heck is smooth streaming? smooth streaming, a new extension for internet information services (iis) 7.0, enables adaptive streaming of media to silverlight clients via http. the sweet thing is smooth streaming dynamically detects and seamlessly switches, in real time, the video quality of a media file that a silverlight player receives based on local bandwidth and cpu conditions. consumers with high bandwidth connections can experience hd quality streaming while others with lower bandwidth speeds receive the appropriate stream for their connectivity, allowing consumers across the board to enjoy a consistent high quality streaming experience.
akamai also announced a proof of concept portal demonstrating the technology available at www.smoothhd.com. additionally, microsoft is announcing the upcoming availability of expression encoder 2 sp1 which encodes smooth streaming files.
pay attention to how this will change the game in media streaming!
while i am sure you have caught the silverlight news at teched, today soma somasegar and bill gates announced that silverlight 2 beta 2 will be publicly available later this week. there is no specific time, so keep your eyes on the silverlight site.
here are some of the exciting features:
i will be presenting all that is super cool about silverlight at the web development sig in solon, ohio this saturday. we will be discussing how developers and designers can start to take advantage of what is available in silverlight today and into the future.
the talk will include both discussion, demo, and code.
i have long prided myself on being a devigner (typically i would link back to a wikipedia article, but one does not exist… anyone interested in contributing?). this is a term that is starting to come back, but has been used for a long time by others that roll as a developer and designer. my fellow msft friend, adam kinney, talks about it here as well (although the designer force is much stronger with him).
anyway, as i was working on my site, briangorbett.com (yah… no link. you are already here. click the house icon in the upper right), i learned how asp.net 3.5 has made my development much easier and the growing complexities of site design has made my life a living hell.
let me start with the development. actually, there is not much to talk about here. with asp.net 3.5, i have never plumbed a site so fast. my homepage is rotating out the last 5 blog posts i made. in the past, grabbing the rss feed and manipulating the stream was fairly tedious. with asp.net 3.5, i did it in two lines. no, i am not kidding.