My Headlines

Monday, July 2, 2007

Sunday Night News

By Don Burnett

IdentityMine Does it Again!

Well I haven't been blogging as much lately, things have been busy but there hasn't been a whole lot of news.. I guess the big news is over at the PopFly.ms Alpha site. It seems those wonderfully smart cool guys over at IdentityMine are at it again. They are creating Silverlight controls and they are showing up over on the PopFly site.

If you aren't on PopFly I can't say a lot about it except it's a happening place, a lot of great multimedia mash-ups are going on, and if you aren't there you are going to be very impressed when you are..

I can talk about the Blendables Controls for Silverlight from IdentityMine because you can find them demonstrated on their blogsite.. Also, right here below this paragraph..




These controls really rock and even if you are not on PopFly you can click on the links above to see the control live.. There are also articles on using these controls with the community server platform.

Michigan Interactive Designers Meeting for June 2007

We had to reschedule our June Meeting for the 30th and we still had a good temperature.  We had a great meeting and reviewed the following:

Monthly Prizes Awarded

A 3G EVDO card D-Link Mobile router (for Sprint or Verizon mobile broadband cards, was our May meeting give away. Mike Dragon (last name changed for privacy reasons) our only May meeting attendee won this by default. Attendance was up this meeting and we gave away (courtesy of Microsoft)  a Microsoft Branded USB drive, a book on design elements to step up your PowerPoint demonstration, and direct from Mix 07, WPF virtual boot camp training DVDs..

I have blogged about a lot of these subjects before but the things that sparked most discussion was the iPhone. I have a Windows Mobile phone, but the design of this device is near perfect for features and performance, you can't help but love it and want one when you see it and touch it. Apple I think has scored higher from the design perspective than they even did with iPod. This is a definite winner. It loved the free WiFi at Bombadils. Other subjects that held serious interest was Visual Studio 2008's Dynamic Data Controls for .Net 3.5 framework also the Astoria web services, proving you don't have to connect directly to a SQL database to have full control data access (among other things).

PixelOasis' founder Greg Good was at the meeting showing off his new corporate website for his photography business and also showing us the cool new ASP.NET AJAX functionality he had implemented. It was really cool to have him demonstrate and show what was possible with Ajax, the application was very fast, and refreshes of the pages weren't even noticeable. We later saw the site on Matt's iPhone and it also looked flawless. This blog is also nicely viewable on the iPhone as well.