Techno Babble

The Apple iTouch media player. or more properly called the iPod touch, was recently released.

perhaps it can also be called the iPhone without the phone.

Some of the features include:

• multi-touch interface
• 3.5 inch widescreen display
• wi-fi web browsing

Available with an 8Gb (or 16Gb) flash drive and can store up to 1750 songs (3500), 10,000 (20,000) iPod viewable photos or 10 (20) hours of video.

The re-chargeable battery will support up to 22 hours of music playback or up to 5 hours of video playback.

Prices in the UK are £199 for the 8Gb version or £269 for the 16Gb and are scheduled to be available for shipping from the 28 September. (Prices in the US are $299 and $399 respectively).

All the details are available at

http://www.apple.com/ipodtouch/

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A session at the recent MixUK by Rob Blackwell, Una Walsh and Jonathan Greensted discussed various examples of what you can do with Windows Live Services.

These include the Contoso University and the Contoso Bicycle Club.

The sites themselves (which require you to install Silverlight) can be seen at

http://contosouniversity.mslivelabs.com/

and

http://contosobicycleclub.mslivelabs.com/

and are used to demonstrate how Windows Live Services can be used.

Slides of the full presentation are available at:

http://cid-2bace20a0ab578fb.skydrive.live.com/…/WLQA%20MIX%20UK%2007.ppt

or locally from:

http://www.kf12.com/blogs/uploads/wlqa-mix-uk-07.zip

Other resources mentioned during this session include:

• http://dev.live.com/quickapps
• http://www.codeplex.com/liveinabox
• http://www.popfly.com
• http://www.easygps.com
• http://www.sportsdo.net
• http://www.conchango.com
• http://www.liveside.net
• http://www.viawindowslive.com
• http://www.robblackwell.org.uk

Michael Foord (known about the Python community as Fuzzyman) presented a session on Python in your Browser with Silverlight at the recent MIX:UK. His blog is available at

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/weblog/

The presentation was made using the S5 slide show format

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/

which is a format based on XHTML , CSS and JavaScript.

The presentation can be viewed at

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ironpython/silverlight/pycon.html

Although I find it easier to view as a “normal” html page. This can be switched to from the slide version by selecting the 0 (zero) option from the bottom of the page (move your mouse to the bottom of the page and wait a few seconds for the options to appear).

IronPython is a Python compiler originally created by Jim Hugunin which runs on .NET and is now supported and developed by Microsoft.

To experiment with using IronPython in conjunction with Silverlight you can use the IronPython Web IDE sample created by Foord at

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ironpython/webide/webide.html

I’ve been experimenting with Microsoft Silverlight for a few months now and have just returned from the MIX:UK conference held in London Sep 11-12 to a “sell-out” crowd of 500. This is a Microsoft sponsored event where people get the opportunity to learn more about new and forthcoming technologies.

I found the talks by Scott Guthrie of particular interest which helped to consolidate my understanding of the Silverlight technology

(btw, He also writes an interesting and useful blog at http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu)

He gave a number of talks at the conference, and makes the slides freely available. The slides can be obtained directly from Scotts Blog or from the following links

silverlight_slides.zip

silverlight_samples.zip

and

Building ASP.NET 3.5 Applications with VS 2008 (Part 1 and 2).

aspnet_slides.zip

northwind_sample.zip

Note: All samples are built using the current Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and VS 2008 Beta2 with the Silverlight Tools Alpha Installed.

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The Ajax View proxy provides the ability for remotely monitoring client-side wep application performance and behaviour.

This is currently an early research prototype available from Microsoft Research.

The Ajax View project at Microsoft Research aims to give developers easy visibility into their web apps’ performance and behavior as the apps run in end-users’ browsers. Ajax View uses a server-side proxy to rewrite JavaScript “on-the-fly” and automatically inject instrumentation code into a web application. This instrumentation provides end-to-end visibility into app performance, behavior and critical state. “On-the-fly” rewriting allows Ajax View to serve different instrumentation across users and over time, capturing more detail about app behavior while minimizing per-user performance overhead.

Find out all the details at

http://research.microsoft.com/projects/ajaxview/

A web debugging proxy which is used to log traffic between an application and the internet. It allows you to “fiddle” with the in-coming and out-going data.

Available for Internet Explorer and Firefox amongst other applications.

Details available from

http://www.fiddler2.com/fiddler2/

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The IE Developer Toolbar provides a number of features for extracting more detail from web pages.

http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=92716

You get the ability to

• Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page.
• Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques.
• Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings.
• View HTML object class names, ID’s, and details such as link paths, tab index values, and access keys.
• Outline tables, table cells, images, or selected tags.
• Validate HTML, CSS, WAI, and RSS web feed links.
• Display image dimensions, file sizes, path information, and alternate (ALT) text.
• Immediately resize the browser window to a new resolution.
• Selectively clear the browser cache and saved cookies. Choose from all objects or those associated with a given domain.
• Display a fully featured design ruler to help accurately align and measure objects on your pages.
• Find the style rules used to set specific style values on an element.
• View the formatted and syntax colored source of HTML and CSS.

The Google Earth Blog

http://www.gearthblog.com/

reports on the ability to fly around Google Earth (v4.2) in a Flight Simulator mode.

To get started, hit ctrl-alt-a (or ctrl-a in the UK) to get the plane selection menu

All the controls are listed at

http://earth.google.com/intl/en/userguide/v4/flightsim/index.html

Read hints and tips at the Google Earth Blog

http://www.gearthblog.com/blog/archives/2007/09/google_earth_flight.html

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