Finally I managed to build the Silverlight CLR (C#) version of bubblemark demo. Check it out here (requires Silverlight 1.1 alpha).

Note: Top bar is CLR

Continue reading…

You know that Google’s motto is “Don’t be evil”, however with all that intelligence, it collects every day, every minute, every click, it could eventually turn very tempting for it to sample the power of the dark side. Let’s imagine just for a moment, what Google could do if it were evil.

Let’s start from what it has.

1. It knows what you search, which results click and keeps complete history of your searches (if you use Google search)
2. It knows what you send and receive in your emails, knows who your connections are (if you use Gmail as your personal or corporate email)
3. It knows what RSS feeds you are subscribed for, what you actually read and when (if you use Google Reader or the publisher uses Feedburner)
4. It knows what websites you browse beyond the search (and every page you visit), what you buy and how much spend (if the site uses Google Analytics and / or Google Checkout)
5. It knows, where you live (if you ever used Google Maps to take a look on your house from satellite’s point) and where you work
6. It builds huge datacenters and employs the best scientists and engineers specializing in information processing

Continue reading…

Richard Bair from SwingLabs created a Java (Swing) port of my browser-based 2D animation test, which previously included DHTML, Flex, Silverlight and WPF variants.

Java version is one of the fastest in the list, which, however, should be discounted for the fact that it uses bitmaps-based animation (like DHTML and Flex with cacheAsBitmap=true) while Flex, Silverlight and WPF variants operate vector objects.

Both IE and Firefox run it at ~100 fps, while Opera (strangely) performs quite differently. It proves the status of the fastest browser again and gets well over 100 fps (up to 200 fps with a single object) but tends to produce some visual artifacts (see sceenshot below).

Continue reading…

Like every creative person I have many ideas, which look excellent. At least they do until the next morning. Some of them stick though and keep on bothering my mind. It still has a limited capacity so I want to let some of these ideas out. Here is the most troubling one, which didn’t had a name before I started writing this so I’ll be calling it CodeTube — “YouTube for the code”. Yes, I know it’s a silly name but it’s better than The Project.

Continue reading…

If I needed to illustrate the word “weird” I would use the following scene I saw today (sorry, I have no pictures so you have to use your imagination).

11 PM, it’s dark and rainy. A bus stop. Few late workers waiting for the bus. A street cleansing machine circling round and around the bus stop again and again washing the street and occasional pedestrians’ shoes to their great surprise.

If you don’t mind downloading 5 Gb of Visual Studio 8.0 Beta, which is needed to build the samples.

Comparing to previous CTP releases of WPF/e Silverlight 1.1 Alpha sounds like a revolution (RIA is no longer Adobe’s party). Here is what we’ve got:

• Cross platform .NET subset implementation, which allows to run C#, Python, Ruby, JScript and VB.NET compiled code inside the browser (IE, Firefox or Safari)
• DLR (Dynamic language runtime) capable to execute scripting code on the client including Python, JScript and Ruby. I understand that more languages can be added as plug-ins, which sounds fantastic. This ultimately ends the monopoly of JavaScript as the only client side scripting language for the web
• People say it’s fast and the runtime is 4 Mb only
• Silverlight has access to complete DOM of browser’s document, while on the other side you can expose selected classes from your CLR code to document’s JavaScript
• It adds many things missed from earlier releases, including ZIndex support and GUI Controls
• In fact now it’s fairly easy to implement any controls you like using C#

Continue reading…