Jesse Ezell Blog

First Pretty Silverlight Site Spotted

Via Tim Sneath:

"Celso Gomes is an amazing interactive designer working at Microsoft who is responsible for the beautiful sample applications that ship with Expression Blend and did some of the earliest design explorations for Silverlight.

Now he's come up with Nibbles: a series of "snack tutorials for hungry designers" that cover the use of Expression Blend to build WPF and Silverlight content. The site itself is a stunning example of Silverlight, with faded animations and transitions and accordion bars: it makes my own work seem feeble by comparison. Make sure you check it out - it's inspiring..." [1]

It is pretty cool. This is the first Silverlight based site I've seen that actually looks like a Flash site. Almost everything else I've seen has been a sample made by a developer, not a designer, if you catch my drift ;).

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2007/06/21/snack-tutorials-for-hungry-designers.aspx

Silverlight on Linux Already

"The open-source Mono project will show off an early version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in running on Linux later this week.

Work on the plug-in, called Moonlight, was started only in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference. Moonlight uses version 1.1 of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications, which is due in the fall.

Once completed, Moonlight will allow Linux users to see Silverlight content on the Web, such as videos, and run rich Internet applications.

According to Miguel De Icaza, Mono project leader and Novell open-source president, Mono engineers have been working 14-hour days to create an implementation of Silverlight on Linux using Mono, an open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net software.

An alpha version of Moonlight will be ready for showing off later this week at a Microsoft Mix conference in Paris. (Microsoft also plans to show off its Silverlight-based Popfly mashup builder there.).."

[1] http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9731410-2.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=Webware

Flash: Now Slowing Down Your Multi-Core PC

"As I mentioned in Flash Player Update 3 we finally realized that multi-core CPUs are here to stay. So why not follow the times and take advantage of it? As most of you hard core Flash developers know, rendering is a huge bottleneck. I've seen a couple of blog post complaining that their second core/CPU is  not doing anything when they run the Flash Player. Well people, this is about to change in this update." [1]

I suppose you could argue the ability to split work across multiple CPUs is a good thing... however, this is just a sign that they really just need to start pushing some of this work to the GPU instead of taking up more and more CPU power (both Silverlight and Flash will be using the GPU to some degree with video... why not push a little more down the pipe?). One GPU can do far more rendering than a couple CPU cores, and the gap is only going to widen in the future. I can see how multi-core rendering might be useful, but I actually like the fact that on my multi-core machines the processes that are going bonkers are capped at 100% of one core. That means I still have 50% of my CPU power available to make sure the rest of my machine is still responsive and I can still click on buttons in other apps. Are Flash movies really getting to the point where they need to suck up this much juice? Looks like with the next update of the Flash Player, an over the top Flash movie will once again be able to drag down the performance of my entire machine.

[1] http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/06/multi-core-support.html

Safari on Windows

One less reason to buy a Mac for testing. Go download the beta:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/

 With Adobe also pushing WebKit (Safari Core) in Apollo, looks like we might end up really having to support 3 browsers now.

Expression Blend: First Impressions

So now that Expression Blend is up on MSDN, I figured it was ready to take for a spin. First impression, it's very cool. For creating user interfaces, it easily beats the Flash IDE... with one exception, no code editor. Give me a break. Who's the retard that made that decision? Maybe there is some way to get a better experience, but when you want to add 2 lines of code to an event handler in the default install is beyond horrible, it just shells to my .cs file editor. Come on... you seriously couldn't provide a even a basic code editor in the IDE itself?