by Don Burnett
Tonight I am digressing a bit from the standard content here to talk about some things I have been watching that I find really very cool.
Michigan Flash Festival Wrap-up
Last weekend I had the honor and great pleasure to be asked to demonstrate Expression Studio, and WPF and Silverlight technologies at the Michigan Flash Festival. What really was exciting about the event is the incredible group of professionals this event brought together with the recognition that even using different companies technologies, we all share a basic common goal of creating great Rich client applications, on both the web and on the desktop as well.. I have been asked (as part of Michigan Interactive Designers) to help with next year's event.. It's nice working with these people and they are pretty dynamic. I look forward to more collaboration opportunities with everyone..
If you haven't been here check out these sites:
http://www.semafx.com
http://www.flashfocused.org
http://detmmug.com
http://www.organic.com
http://www.eprize.com
Thanks also to Chris Bernard of Microsoft for providing two prizes for the presentation two full retail release copies of Expression Studio (A $600 value each). I'd also like to thank Josh Holmes our regional evangelist for advice and help with focus in the presentation even though he wasn't going to be in town, he went out of his way to help us out.
Oredev 2007
As some of you know, I do work in design and training and do presentations on User Experience based design and workflow. I was very honored to be asked to present at Oredev 2007. Unfortunately because of problems getting a birth certificate and passport in the time needed to attend the conference I didn't get to go. However, my very capable colleague Ken Arbogast-Wilson was able to attend and present for the conference and provide a workshop. I'd also like to thank George Bolsch of Dotway.se and everyone involved with the conference for the opportunity to present. Ken and I are really committed to getting the message out and trying to make life better for both designers and developers and to help enhance their workflow with relevant tools and technologies to enhance that workflow such as WPF, Silverlight, and Expression Studio. We like to show companies how they can work better and faster together with these technologies and tools.
Michigan Interactive Designers November Meeting
Our meeting, though lightly attended because of the new day (moved due to the Thanksgiving Holiday) was still quite successful several contest winners were announced:
Electric Rain StandOut Design Contest winner: Greg Good - Greg submitted the winning design kit.
Microsoft Expression Studio Blend Contest winner: Shawn Heid
December Meeting Contest: Using Expression Blend with 3rd party components such as Identity Mine's Blendables
And now for something completely different...
As you know I am not a "fanboy", I like technologies that work and do what they are supposed to, nor am I platform religious. I reward and support companies that really offer enabling technologies and try to work on whatever I feel best gets the job done. Having said all of that, I didn't start life on Windows (though it's where I spend over 90% of my time these days) but on the Amiga. After Commodore died, I migrated to the Windows platform, although I also have done much work on the Apple Macintosh platform as well. I figured it was the last time I would see the Commodore-Amiga OS in any significant way. I was mostly right, yeah there is an Amiga Inc. out there, but there website seems mostly focused on selling PocketPC games for Windows Mobile.
Enter AROS.. The AROS Research Operating System is a lightweight, efficient and flexible desktop operating system, designed to help you make the most of your computer. It's an independent, portable and free project, aiming at being compatible with AmigaOS 3.1 at the API level (like Wine, unlike UAE), while improving on it in many areas. The source code is available under an open source license, which allows anyone to freely improve upon it.
This is a freely downloadable OS, that while doesn't offer binary compatibility takes a lot of the common "concepts" that made the Commodore-Amiga OS so popular and extends it now to Intel and PowerPC computing platforms. It also has a cute "mascot" I personally have a great interest in the x86 and x64 versions of this operating systems. I have watched this public project grow from something that barely boots up to a very functional operating system that is seeing some really great things happening. For instance over at the AROS Show Blog it was announced that a developer (Robert Norris) is working on a web browser based on WebKit, the browser that Apple's Safari and Linux's Konqueror is based on. This should do a lot to propel AROS forward as an operating system and AROS adoption by more Amiga community members, as there is much frustration in the existing Amiga community because there isn't a good up-to-date web browser for their platform and there has been much frustration over failed starts on a project to bring the "mozilla" browser to that platform.
If you haven't looked at AROS lately I'd suggest you download the latest build. Their new installer (besides AROS's recent support for networking (TCP/IP, and common ethernet card chipsets)) actually supports multiple partitions (System Partitions, Work Partitions, and Windows Partitions)..
The themed look is pretty cool too (you can set it up anyway you want) and the operating system doesn't require a fast state-of-the art PC to run effectively.Note the networking configuration preferences..
This operating system, while it probably will never be mainstream is turning into a great way for hobbyists to explore multimedia. This OS also gives you another alternative to Linux one that you might find more interesting because it's lightweight and has no where near the hardware requirements (yes it still could be put on a FLOPPY disk and booted from it) and it's easier to learn than a Unix style OS..
If you are curious about it's multimedia capabilities, you only have to look at programs like LunaPaint for AROS, to see the capabilities and the cool lineage from Amiga multimedia..As capabilities grow, this OS has the potential to be a heavy hitter.. It's reuniting the existing Amiga community (both PowerPC, 680x0, Intel Friendly derivatives) and runs on a number of machines including really cheap Intel machines (including the new $200 Everex Green PC at Walmart which I learned about over at Matt Cutts Blog) .
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