I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Fall travels I have.  Fresh on the heels of a 3-day session with the entire Silverlight team this past week, I’m rejuvenated and ready to rock.  I’ve also got some travels coming up and hope to see some of you at them as well…

Troubleshooting Data Services in Silverlight (09 SEP)

Tomorrow I’ll be presenting a webcast with the goal of trying to help surface some of the more common ‘gotchas’ in dealing with accessing data in Silverlight.  Some of it may not be new to some, but there has been enough posts/emails/etc. where I think sometimes seeing the issues/tools helps to better understand how to avoid them, or at worst, figure out how to stop banging your head against the wall.

PDC08 (27 OCT)

The premier Microsoft developer conference is upon us.  Thousands of us super geeky dev types will be converging upon Los Angeles to see what the next generation of developer technologies has to offer.  I know there will be a lot of great sessions all around, but of course I’m particularly excited about some of the things that the Silverlight team will be presenting.  They just posted 50 new sessions!

.NET Virtual Conference (28 OCT)

How can I be in 2 places at once?  Virtualization baby!  I’ll be joining a few folks for a virtual conference.  It looks like a great lineup of speakers and content.  If you will not be at PDC, check out this option…it’s only $100!  I’ll be speaking three sessions on Silverlight 2 development of course.

Øredev (19 NOV)

I’ll be headed to Malmö, Sweden in November to join a bunch of others at one of the premier developer conferences in that area.  I’m going to be presenting on Silverlight in a few sessions along with others from the Silverlight team.  If you are in the area, please be sure to come to the conference and visit us!

Something great in each month and I’m excited for each of them.  I’ll be spending a little holiday time with my family next week and will be dark, but will be back refreshed and ready to get going on some ideas I’ve been having in my head for way too long.

I hope to see you at one of these above!

There has been much a news about the use of Flash for Sunday NFL games on the NBC web site.  Some have claimed that NBC “dumped” Silverlight.  Whatever.  Anyone who thinks only one person at a company the size of NBC makes the decision does not understand corporate America in large companies.  NBC is a giant company of companies, probably each operating in their own right and left hands never talking to right hands.  That’s not to diminish the work for the NFL site, just a reality of business.

What is ironic about this implementation is that it proves that no technology is immune to business deals.  What do I mean?  Well, when the NBCOlympics.com site was introduced there were some critics of the actual implementation (not the quality, but the features).  People were upset about no full-screen as well as the inability to see the content outside the US from the NBC site.

Enter NFL on NBC.  Think Flash is immune and could “solve” that?  Think again.  Like most implementations of web applications, the NFL site developed for the lowest common denominator to meet their customers.  First, they target a 1024 screen resolution.  Second, no full-screen capability.  Third, users outside the US cannot view the content.

It is the latter two that I mean with regard to no technology immunity.  Why no full-screen?  Um, you think the advertisers want their ad space to disappear?  I bet not.  I’m pretty sure Spring paid good money to be visible the entire time.  One may be quick to point out overlays and such.  Quite frankly, I agree.  I’m not sure why developers don’t offer up the ability to do overlays on the media much like the experience that we see on regular television.  My guess here is that existing ad platforms are serving up content and the paradigm hasn’t shifted to in-media insertion just yet.  I know that Silverlight Streaming services is experimenting with contextual media advertising and I’m sure others are.  Until then, you won’t be seeing many full-screen applications unless the advertisers are in that full-screen experience…get used to it until this changes.  I bet NFL would have loved to have a full-screen experience.

On to the second one, non-US viewers.  They’ll be greeted with this:

Ironically, when the Olympics came out I saw many more “Microsoft you suck” for this more than “NBC you suck.”  So where is the “Adobe you suck” comments?  Anywhoo…you can “blame” nobody but NBC.  Welcome to the world of digital rights.  The broadcast rights for the NFL are probably sold regionally and NBC owns the rights to the US (I’m sure there are other countries licensing the rights to NFL online as well).  So for this particular experience provided by NBC US, they are honoring that license.  “Blame” is such a strong word.  I’m sure NBC and their advertisers would love to have as many eyeballs on the site as possible…but they are honoring their legal agreements.

So it just goes to show that no technology is immune to decisions made by business and as well in the world of media, decisions around content licensing.  Maybe we’ll come to a world of “open source content” but it isn’t there yet and implementers of technology will have to abide by these guidelines.

So my thoughts about the player?  Well, my first introduction was a note on Twitter and I went to check it out.  I was immediately placed into a “virtual waiting room” (with no virtual free drinks or appetizers mind you) with a message that said something to the effect of ‘due to overwhelming demand…’ and stayed at that state for a bit.  I eventually was placed in, but found it strange that they wouldn’t plan for “overwhelming demand.”  I’ve come now to realize that is the default message…hmm, I might consider changing that.

Once I did get in the quality of the game I was watching wasn’t great at all.  This was echoed by some on the Internet as well.  I experienced a very pixelated view that was choppy/buffering.  I didn’t get a chance to tune in tonight (07 SEP) to see the game online, but will compare this week.  In contrast, the recent Amazon implementation is much better quality.  I think the critical difference here is live versus pre-encoded where you have more time over the quality of the encode.  Some would say an outfit the size of NFL/NBC should have the highest quality hardware encoders available to them and that is no excuse, but I’m not privy to the equipment they are using.  For me, it wasn’t a great experience at all on the quality front.

Being that I have a soapbox on non-plugin-installed experiences, I checked that as well.  People give Silverlight a lot of crap for the default install badge that lazy developers don’t take the time to change (that’s right, I’m calling you out…fix your install experience).  I realize that Flash is pretty readily available on most machines, but I wanted to check the experience if I didn’t have Flash:

Nice.  Someone might want to take a look.  I assume the “Get Adobe Flash Player” is the default from some of the Flex tools.  For a site like NBC/NFL they should really put some design effort into this.  It tells me nothing about the content.  Say what you want about ubiquity, but it’s lazy.  And yes, if I see a production Microsoft site with the default “install Silverlight” badge, I’d call them out too – they’d be lazy as well.

I hope that over time, old media will meet new media and the online experience will continue to get better.  The Democratic National Convention proved that it is possible to deliver HD quality media live and scalable.  Here’s to hoping more online media gets that way.  I really liked last year watching next-day online episodes on ABC (it enabled me to keep in touch with LOST while traveling) in an HD-experience (that experience was powered by Move networks) and site like Hulu as well give us hope for increasingly better online media.  Now lets get those advertisers inline so we can get features we want as well without being imparied by old media rules/platforms.

Two new resources came to my attention recently that could be helpful resources for Flash developers wanting to learn Silverlight.  The first has been out there for a bit actually, but the other is new.  Let’s start with the new one, Project Rosetta (video).  As Adam Kinney said this week while in meetings in Redmond, “because we need another web site.”

Project Rosetta describes itself as:

Project Rosetta is a site dedicated to helping designers and developers build applications in Silverlight while taking advantage of skills they already know.

There are two articles up there now, The New Iteration and From Flash to Silverlight.  The newest article involves a Flash maestro, Rick Barazza.  The articles aren’t blog posts, but rather more in-depth discussions of various aspects of design/development where your skills can be re-used while doing development for Silverlight.

The second resource is a blog called Shine Draw from Terence Tsang and describes itself as Your Flash and Silverlight Repository.  Terence has 6 years of Flash experience, but even concedes he is not as much of an expert as he aspires to be.  This site is great in that he combines the knowledge of Flash with the concepts of image and animation to see how things are done in each respective technology.  Terence starts with a concept/question to himself (i.e., 3D image navigation) and then goes about creating that sample in both Flash and Silverlight…with the goal of an same experience in each technology.  He provides code for both (Flash 9/AS3 and Silverlight 2/C#) as well as documents the time it took to do each example.  It’s really an intriguing read and some helpful nuggets of code as well.  Oh yeah, and he takes requests.

I hope you find these useful, or at least interesting…I certainly have.

Earlier this year I wrote my thoughts on the current mobile scene and what troubles certain players more than others.  I made the assertion that Android will face the same troubles that Windows Mobile is challenged with.  That being that Google/Android are providing a platform and not a physical device.  I think it would be hard to argue that owning the complete platform and hardware is not a good idea.  Apple’s complete control of every aspect of the channel provides them with the ability to deliver in a somewhat more reliable fashion (except for the fact that Contacts suck and their implementation of ‘enterprise’ features is questionable).

So why another post on the failure of Android?  Take a look:

(source: CrunchGear)

What you can’t really see in the photograph is the proposed angle of the button controls (they angle upward in other design drawings/renderings), making it look like a more old-school handset more than a revolutionary device.

And therein lies the struggle for Android: they aren’t making the device.  I’ve seen the demos of Android and have already said they are impressive.  The fact that all of that is made available via open source is great and exciting.  But for consumers, useless unless some great packaging comes with it.  Remember the old adage of lipstick on a pig?  When I look at the above T-Mobile picture device running Android, that’s what I think about.  There isn’t anything innovative in the design and regardless of innovation it doesn’t even match some of the sleekness of current designs.  In the consumer market, design matters over features. 

I will say that the “HTC Dream” has other shots/drawings around that look a lot different than the above picture, so I could be eating my words.  But right now it looks like a Nintendo Wii accessory.  And in some angles it looks like an iPod sized thing with an FM transmitter adapter on the bottom…just not polished.

I foresee a bunch of Silicon Valley types walking around with this device, but my wife won’t be carrying it because it looks too Star Trek-ish.

Better view of the weird angle bottom in this video ("is that Android in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?"):

I first saw the accelerators (the artists formerly known as activities) during The Code Trip, when Woody created an IE8 activity for Wikipedia.  It was a convenient tool to have in your right-click toolbox on IE and I loved it (and still do).

Well, now that IE8 Beta 2 is out, I decided (well, my selfishness decided) that I should create an activity accelerator for something that I use often so I introduce you to: IE8 Accelerator for TinyURL.  So with a little XML, it was done.  Seriously, like < 5 minutes.  I ran into one problem with URL encoding, but Kevin at TinyURL fixed his end to handle the encoded URL information sent to his service. 

Kevin rocks.  Seriously.  We’re still trying to figure out why his icon dosen’t display in the context menu, but he’s been super responsive and willing to try different random things on his end to help.  Thanks Kevin.

Basically you can select (highlight) text that is a URL and right-click (or choose the accelerator icon in IE8) then choose the “Shrink URL” option (I’m taking votes if this should be “TinyURL-ify” instead).  This will take your selection (or selected hyperlink) and send it to TinyURL.  A simple, but hopefully useful accelerator for you to use.  Here’s a little video demonstration:

Oh, and I also modified Woody’s Wikipedia one to meet the new specifications for the accelerator manfiest, so here’s that one as well!  To install them, just click on these links:

• Install TinyURL Accelerator
• Install Wikipedia Accelerator

Enjoy.