Photosynth is released today which will mean we can all do some crazy things with your photos in a 3d space. I saw photosynth show on ted.com a year or so ago and it has jaw dropping potential.

Basically (from what i Understand) you can upload your pictures and photosynth looks at the images and groups them with other users to create 3d environments from your 2d pictures.

However when I went to install I got the following message:

The Photosynth site is a little overwhelmed

I hope it come up today because I really want to mess around with it.

Looks as though MSN.com have started displaying Silverlight on their frontpage. It’s about time Silverlight started cropping up on Microsoft's heavy weight sites.

I wonder when we’ll see it on Live.com?

Yesterday I saw the first silverlight website that made me say Wow from a design point rather than just a technology point, the jaw drop was provided by the talented guys over at Klaklak. There new Silverlight Portfolio is Super pretty. See http://www.klaklakgroup.com/.

Also if your still not convinced about silverlight or it's purpose checkout The http://www.nbcolympics.com website. Silverlight has managed to deliver the most watched media event ever. The backbone used to deliver these programmes live is nothing short of ground breaking. Showing scalability that is just not possible with Flash.

With In excess of 8 million downloads per day Silverlight is catching up with adobe quickly with penetration. At last count 40% of the people that visit this site have silverlight installed. It'll be interesting to see how that figure rises in the next few weeks.

I got my MCAD through today finally. I'm now a fully paid up drinker of the Kool Aid!

Note: Details on how to win (£50/$100) are in the last paragraph

If I talk to an American I generally understand what their saying they have different sayings, different references and different ways of spelling but 99% of the time I understand everything they say first time around. I've found if your exposed for a week to a dialect, your ear adjusts and before you know it you can pull off a half decent impersonation.

That's precisely the same for VB.net and C#;  although technically they're different languages they're actually just different accents of the same language. However it still surprises be how many people (including some developers) still see VB.net and C# as completely different languages. If you are a VB.net programmer to any reasonable level then you are one week of syntax study away from being a C# developer at the same level and visa versa.

I've been thinking of setting up a community that helps developers realize how easy it is to transition between VB.net and C#, does anyone fancy helping me develop it? Leave your details in the comments or email me at martin@thewayithink.co.uk if you do. If you have a decent idea for a domain name (check it's available) then post it up here too, I'll pay the winner £50.

Looks like the Webkit team have proved they are the leading player in standards compliance as today they have released a public build that passes the Acid 3 test.

It can be downloaded here: http://nightly.webkit.org/

I wonder how long it will take for the other browser manufacturers to catch up? Considering that the Acid 3 test, tests for things that are not actually adopted standards, whether other browsers should want to pass the test at all?

http://webkit.org/blog/173/webkit-achieves-acid3-100100-in-public-build/

I just downloaded firefox beta 4 to test and see if it passes the Acid 3 test. Sadly it no longer passes the opening up test. Could firefox be the flakiest beta browser ever? Looks like safari are going to have a few more converts this month.

"In many ways it (Firefox 3) is much more stable than anything else out there," Mozilla Corp Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer. - IS THIS MORE STABLE MIKE?

I'm not currently a user of Office 2007 but this video from Jensen Harris made me realize what the ribbon bar was and why they'd so radically changed the Office User Interface.

http://msstudios.vo.llnwd.net/o21/mix08/08_WMVs/UX09.wmv

This video shows how science is used to create something that's beautiful and useful.

Every User Interface Designer should view this.

I’ve been stuck on RIA’s now for a few days and after reading Sebastien Arbogast blog What Does it Take to Be a Good RIA Platform? It got me thinking, all of the points he raised can be answered by existing AJAX technology and with AJAX support improving at the Browser Level are RIA's really bringing anything valuable to the Internet?

I remember being told back in 2000 that an a few year all websites will be flash based… Quite obviously they were wrong infact people disliked full flash website's because they often broke key functionality:

• You can’t cut and paste
• You can’t link back to your exact point with a URL
• If you refresh you back to the start of the application
• SEO problems
• If you press stop you may not end execution
• Back and forward buttons are broken.

Of course all these tiny problems can be addressed, but none are fixed out of the box and many developers neglect to deal with them. This means users are often confused by what’s happening in an RIA and what they expect to happen on a website. This is the case in Flex and Silverlight.

So back to the 5 points of good RIA – lets take a look and see how many Ajax answers:

1. the runtime has to be as widespread and portable as possible:  - AJAX is available on more browsers than flash or silverlght
2. behind the fancy stuff, the code has to be simple, clean and state-of-the-art: Ajax is now a breeze to code. Visual studio 2008 has intellisense and full step by step debugging of JavaScript. There are even engines which can now convert C# code into JavaScript . Even PHP/Ajax debugging is made easier in the latest version of Microsoft Expression. Fact is it’s never been easier to write an Ajax application.
3. it has to be supported by a wide variety of development tools: It can be produced and consumed on all systems and published on all servers, its about as supported as an Internet technology can be.
4. RIA is all about the presentation layer, so it has to be connected to some backend to be useful, and the more backends it supports the better: Connecting Ajax to a backend is in many ways easier than Flex and silverlight.
5. it has to be deployable on any platform: Of course it is.

You may be thinking; Well what difference does IE 8 make? LOTS, if you take a look at the browser it’s fixed a great deal of issues that relate to Ajax development.

• Browser back button is now fixed.
• An event has been in place to tell you when a connection to the Internet has been lost so you can switch to offline database storage.
• IE8 is a fully standard compliant browser so developers won’t have to worry about different browser interpretations.

A real difference is the visual effects and smoothness of a RIA, but to be honest I think http://www.mindmeister.com/ is probably better than the user experience of http://www.musicovery.com/

The other benefit of RIA is speed because RIA's are compiled and aren't performing all that costly server client communication, but with all that said, facebook seems plenty responsive to me.

I still think it’ll be a longtime yet before we see RIA take over AJAX in popularity. Over the next year I think the trend will be mixed applications (AJAX and silverlight interacting together) rather than stand alone RIA's.

Macs are better than PC’s, Flex is better than Silverlight, Ajax is better than Flex, Steve Jobs has a better turtle neck than Bill Gates… Do you ever get fed up with all the Jingoistic mud flinging that goes on between developers? Have we really not grown up past the playground days of “My dads stronger than yours?”

I’m guilty… I know… If you read my, why silverlight is nailing Flex post, you'll realise that on occasion I hold a bias towards Microsoft products. Perhaps bias is an understatement; if Microsoft released a Zune phone I'd be more excited than Amy Winehouse would be to see a syringe.

Supporting or promoting your favorite technology is always a bit counter productive. I guess by spouting about how bad another companies product is, all I’m doing is pissing off the exact people I’m hoping will join in on the fun.

Therefore, I’m not going to tell you why I don't like Flex but give you 5 reasons I like Silverlight. I’d appreciate it if you could provide 5 reasons why you prefer the RIA environment you use, try not to repeat other posters comments.

1. Developer support is Awesome. For Example Microsoft have paid Vertigo to build this open source YouTube style Video Hosting application to get developers up and running: http://codeplex.com/videoshow. (P.S. This application lets you host and stream 4gb of video for FREE using Windows Live Silverlight Streaming.
2. Design is completely separate from Code. Developers can pass over the engine and designers can create the body by either opening up notepad and crunching XAML or by using Microsoft Expression. Designers can collaborate  and without treading on each others toes.
3. Ajax, JavaScript and Silverlight work together as one. The XAML on the page can be accessed directly from JavaScript in precisely the same way you would access any other Dom elements. This means you can have the best of both worlds. A really cool Ajax site that integrates seamlessly with Silverlight rich elements (My currently preferred use of silverlight)
4. Adaptive streaming on video content, means that depending on the network speed the stream quality automatically adjusts. Meaning you don’t have to ask a user what bandwidth speed they have, the application is checking in real-time as the video is playing back. So if the network activity peaks Silverlight will reduce the feed quality to ensure playback is smooth and uninterrupted.
5. You can use the same XAML code in both silverlight and WPF. Meaning experiences that you’ve created for vista applications can be cut and pasted into Silverlight.