JCooney.NET

After the sub-par commercial success of my first microISV product thoughtex I’ve been working on another turd commercial disaster product recently. The wit and wisdom of mac developer extraordinaire Wil Shipley (will ship, as in ship software….yes, from what I can tell that IS his real name) has been of great comfort to me (except the parts about only developing only for the Mac…no-one is perfect). What - you don’t know who Wil Shipley is? He appeared in his own penny-arcade strip.
He co-founded the Omni Group that wrote a bunch of stuff for the mac. He co-founded Delicious Monster with a teenage designer and (working out of a coffee shop) in eight months hacked out Delicious Library which netted Wil and Mike Matas $54 K in the first day and $250 K in the first month. With no advertising budget.
Recommended listening - his WWDC (think tech.ed or PDC but for apple people) talk to students.
Recommended viewing - his C4 talk on the creation of product hype

Comments

»

I tend to live in a bit of a Microsoft bubble and often wonder how people outside the bubble percieve Microsoft’s offerings. I was pleased when I saw this post from design shop Effective UI describing their impressions of surface.

I think the Surface has huge potential! Imagine hotel lobbies, bars, restaurants, dentist offices, doctors, etc. Any place people are sitting with time to kill, the Surface could really make a big impact on the customer experience….Microsoft hasn’t always led the fold in UX, but Surface really is a very cool step in the right direction.

Judging from the content on their blog, these are pretty serious Flash/Adobe designer/developers. I got their via Peter Blois’ blog, where he ported some control themes he found on one of the Effective UI guys blogs from Flex to Silverlight 2. Nice work Peter (oh, and I’m still a big fan of Snoop).

Comments

»

I guess somebody had to do it (and probably has done it before me) but goog…err windows live was only filled with search results for stories of announcements from ASUS and other netbook vendors of future machines that will run Windows 7, but no word on anyone actually doing it. Armed with a copy of vLite and a blissful ignorance of all the things I didn’t know about creating cutdown windows installs I went in a chopped out anything that looked non-essential. After installing in a VM (with a resultant vhd size of about 4GB) I was encouraged enough to burn a disk and give it a shot. It installed without a hitch, although I had to use the second, larger 8GB SSD in the 900 and the installer took a little while to complete. Only 3 devices didn’t work “out of the box” - the video card (fall-back to VGA, and a display res of 800x600) the network card and another “unknown” device (still not working…who cares). The wireless adapter picked up immediately, and before the install was complete it had identified my wireless network and was asking me if I wanted to join. There are almost 2GB left on the 8GB dirve (so that’s a 6GB install for those of you playing along at home) with the other 4GB drive untouched. The performance is fine for what I use my EEE PC for (casual web browsing, and reading PDFs and RSS feeds at train stations, and there are a number of additional tweaks I can try. Overall I thought this would be difficult, but I was completely wrong.

Comments

Joel sent me a link to this Wired article on the new zune recommendation data visualization, which looks quite nice (although there seems to be a strange ghosted male face up in the upper-left corner….rikrolled???). Joel is on a recommendation engine bender after tech.ed where he demod one he’d written in F#. I saw him checking out the prices for ram on MSY so he can go to 8GB at home and remove his dependency on SQL Server. »

After 8 years Lutz says he wants to move on to different things, and has handed over the reigns of Reflector to Red Gate (makers of a number of SQL and .NET tools). There is a Q&A piece here on what the change means. I have mixed feelings about this: if it was a choice between no reflector, and a reflector supported by a commercial entity then naturally I would prefer to have reflector, but I would have preferred to see this project maintained and moved forward by the community. »

The windows 7 engineering team have started a blog, which talks about future disclosure by that team without actually saying a great deal…but it’s a start! They also foreshadow some announcements at the PDC and WinHEC in late October.Up until now the team has played their cards pretty close to their chest (and who can blame them after the Vista marketing debarcle….I’m looking at YOU Robert Scoble!), so this is a welcome change. »

»

A few weeks ago Snagy (don’t worry, he’s not always as serious as he looks in that photo on his blog) got a new laptop - an extremely large and amazingly spec’d 17” XPS (raid, SLI video cards…a laptop!). At the same time he forwarded around a great offer Dell were running here in .au - 25% off XPS laptops over $2500. Fast-forward a few weeks and I now have a brand new XPS 1530 with 4GB of ram, a dual-core 2.6 GHz CPU and an 8600M GT GPU, good enough to score a sweet 5.1 on the Windows Experience Index out-of-the-box (the same score as Snagy’s SLI monster). And then I went and installed Server 2008 x64 on it.

I spent plenty of time getting Vista beta2 running on my previous notebook melty, and I’ve been running Vista x64 on two of my machines at home, and one at work so I’m able to tolerate (and even relish) a small amount of driver pain. After a day of concerted effort about half my devices work properly, and I’m generally lovin’ life on my new rig.

The question I have is - should I install hyper-V? It gives me great virtualization, a feature I don’t use _that_often now that I’m deeply in WPF land where running on real GPUs is much better than virtualized ones, but which I’m keen to play with a bit more. I lose fairly important laptop features like “sleep” and “hibernate” in exchange. Should I stick with Server 2008 (to break the Vista homogenity) or roll back to Vista x64? Regardless of the answers I’m hoping the current state-of-affairs won’t last tooo long, and I’ll have a Windows7 drop in the next few months. Leon is indeed right in that there aren’t too many original ideas out on the internet. While I originally thought running hyper-V on a laptop was a little unusual there are lots of people doing it.

Comments