10th
May
2007
I’ve been posting over on the Launch21 blog about the CouponLooker vertical-search engine that I’ve been doing for Judy’s Book. Interesting stuff- this is one of the more fun projects I’ve done in a while. I suppose I should be embarrassed to admit that I did about zero research into how search is supposed to be done. Still, the results seem pretty good and its fun to share some of the techniques that I’ve developed so far.
On another front I’m interested in tracking the evolution of hard-drive prices. Here are the current top price/performance figures for 3.5″ drives-
400GB = $97 = $.243/GB
500GB = $119 = $.238/GB
750GB = $240 = $.32/GB
1000GB= $413 = $.31/GB
500GB is still the sweet-spot. The 1TB drives aren’t really available yet so the 750GB drives are still priced at the “highest capacity available” premium. I’d expect once the 1TB drives become easily available the 750GB drives should drop quite a bit quickly.
posted in Technology, Developers, Hardware |
3rd
May
2007
The Silverlight announcements at MIX this week are pretty exciting. I’d been doing a bunch of work in WPF/E (the old name for Silverlight) and the new release seems like some solid progress.
One of the most interesting parts of the announcement is the support for a mini-CLR that runs .NET code anywhere Silverlight runs. It appears to have a very limited set of the framework libraries. Given that the install is only 4MB this isn’t a surprise. But my big question is how will interop work between the .NET and Javascript work.
One of the bigger problems we had with Avalon (WPF) meeting the needs of web developers is that we changed the app model all around. You weren’t serving dynamic script from the server, the app had to be compiled and use web-services or something to talk back to the server. WPF/E was interesting because you could use some of the same graphic capabilities while sticking with a conventional Javascript coding model.
If Silverlight supports good Javascript / .NET interop you could have the best of both worlds. Build controls, etc, in .NET where the cleaner programming model and better performance helps. And script the logic and flow of your app in Javascript using conventional web tools. I haven’t had a chance to dig into the new release but it looks promising.
I’ve also got my fingers crossed for an announcement of linux support. I can think of about 5 or 6 projects that could use Silverlight if there were support for running on linux.
posted in Technology, Developers |
3rd
March
2007
His observation that Macs are everywhere is dead on. I bought my MacBook a couple of months ago and on most client visits I’d rather bring my MacBook, both because its lighter than my Dell, but also because its the “cool” machine to have and you see them all over now.
But Robert goes on to say that “WPF/E and Expression and the fun workflow that Manuel and John show off won’t matter one bit if you develop Web sites on a Mac”. I think this misses one of the key angles on the recent Mac phenomena- many of those Macs are running Windows, at least partially. The inflection point when the developer community shifted from a few mostly isolated designers running Macs to everyone carrying them around is pretty clearly the Intel Macs, Bootcamp and Parallels. This means that Expression, etc, run great on those Macs.
Of course part of the sad thing is that both Microsoft and Apple are so ambivalent about this shift that neither is really capitalizing on it. Apple is the closest, but I get the vibe (I hope I’m wrong) that Apple doesn’t really want Windows to kick-ass on their machines. If all the drivers for Vista were 100% and Apple added right mouse buttons and/or a couple of keys to the keyboard, Vista on my MacBook would be a killer experience rather than a “nice but somewhat annoying” one. But Apple is conflicted because they fear that might diminish the MacOS.
So, while it would be nice if Expression ran on the MacOS, the fact that WPF/E runs great there, and you can run Expression on your Mac hardware I think gets Microsoft 80% of the way there. Most of the Mac-developers and designers that I’ve worked with lately all run Windows for various tools and IE testing and as long as they can run the results of their efforts on the MacOS, they are willing to work in both environments.
posted in Technology, Mac, Developers |