Dylan Greene dot com

The screenshot to the right is from a brand new Lenovo N100 laptop (formally IBM) .

Why do hardware manufactures ship machines with such abuse of the Start Menu?

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded."
- New Yorker, 1943

I hope Windows Vista gets a major overhaul in this area, and not just a way to search this mess. Companies should be disciplined for littering our Start Menus like this.

I downloaded Skype when Scoble first blogged about it on September 12, 2003. I didn't use it because I was afraid - it came from the same team that brought us the spyware/adware hell called Kazaa.

At Gnomedex I was one of a few people that didn't use Skype. Arieanna Foley of Blogaholics and BloggingHelp said she gets all of consulting jobs through Skype. KK+ of Bryght asked me what my Skype address was. That was it. I finally installed it.

My user account is dylan_greene.

Then things went bad... I was going to have it import my Outlook 2003 contacts, but instead I got this fun error:

Access violation at address 00BD3F80 in module 'Skype.exe'. Read of address 049BC000.

What does that mean? What am I supposed to do?

I'm going to try this (conflict with DEP - Data Execution Prevention - the only match on Skype's suppot site), but it requires a reboot, which I don't feel like doing. I already rebooted once this quarter.

Skype (or Windows, not sure who is really responsible for the error message) - can you make your error text a tad more understandable? Thanks!

There's probably tools there you didn't know existed. The author seems to have a Yahoo bias, and MSN probably should have been included in the mix as well, but this is a good start.

Link: Lots of Google vs Yahoo feature comparisons.

Why don't control panel programs and property sheets show up in the taskbar?

The answer.

This one of my many Windows peeves.

In my brain, if it gets a Window, it should be on the taskbar. I don't care how it was coded.

Update:

Thanks to TNL, I now have an account and 100 invites to give away.

My 360 page: http://360.yahoo.com/dylangreene

Leave a comment here if you'd like an invite.

Original Message:

I don't have any Yahoo 360 invites to give away just yet, but while you are waiting, I suggest checking out dhteumeuleu.com the witness some of the coolest interactive DHTML demos I've ever seen. I strongly recommend you visit using Internet Explorer since Firefox is unable to render some of his coolest effects. All of the demos include access to his elegantly simplistic source code. Flash and Java were not used for any of the demos.

One of my favorite demos is a DHTML PowerPoint-like slide show built as a ZUI (zooming user interface) - each slide zooms into view while the next slide approaches from the distance.

Meanwhile, Yahoo 360 mini-reviews have appeared from Steve Rubel and Tristan Louis, and some info from well-known Yahoo bloggers Russell Beattie and Jeremy Zawodny have good things to say.

So.... is Yahoo 360 what started the XBOX 360 rumor? That would be pretty funny.

Forty Media has an excellent list of predictions for web design in 2005.

If you are into web design, this is a must read.

Here are some examples:

Colors

Color of the year: Brown

Tech grays and blues take a sabbatical; may not be back soon.

Pure red (the “new blue” of the past few years) falls into disfavor.

Designers are feeling confident—lots of bold colors this year.

Lots of “in-between” colors (yellow-greens, red-oranges, etc.) used to achieve fresh looks.

Web-safe palette is at last widely understood to be obsolete; Web-smart palette takes over.

Typography

Designers realize that Verdana is ugly; most stop using it.

The novelty of Georgia as a body text type wears off; still used for headings.

Arial dominates as the body text typeface for the year; despite much disdain for this overused font, it provides some needed relief from the overuse of Verdana.

Heading text increasingly done in serif typefaces, especially with sIFR.

Ahh... web design geek humor - I love it! What, you don't get it?

Read on...

Thanks to Foo for find this simple Blog Reader created using Flex.

Flex is Macromedia's XML-based UI API, which I talk more about here.

This is the first almost-real-world Flex example I've seen. I've played with XAML a small bit, but haven't seen any real-world examples like this.

What I want to see now: A MXML (Flex) to XAML (Avalon) translator done in XSL.

I give up. What's the best tool for creating XSL web site templates? I don't want no silly XML editor that happens to support XSL, I want something of Frontpage or Dreamweaver caliber for the web design part and Visual Studio in the XSL coding debugging part. I'm sick of trying to memorize my XML schema just to build a web page around it.

According to ScottGu, the architect for ASP.NET, the next version of Visual Studio, currently code named Whidbey, will have built-in support for XHTML and Accessibility output, verification, and debuging.

By default ASP.NET will output XHTML 1.1, have intellisense (auto-complete) for various versions of HTML, XHTML, Mobile cHTML, and Mobile HTML, and will do the red-swiggle underline when you don't comply.

The output will also be Section 508 compliant (the US Government accessibility checklist which includes the requirement that tools are usable by those without proper vision) and WCAG compliant (the W3's Accessibility guidelines).

ScottGu has screen shots of his latest Whidbey build showing off these great new features.

There's built-in support for internationalization and globalization already today. Anything else we should be asking for? Hmm... TopStyle Pro-quality CSS tools?

XAML: Vector-based UI described using XML. From Microsoft.
FLEX: Vector-based UI described using XML. From Macromedia.

XAML: I've seen some very cool demos of XAML, and I've made a simple animated Hello World app using PDC Longhorn build. There's sample code, PDC sessions with demos, documentation, and even Longhorn on MSDN.

FLEX: I haven't seen any demos of FLEX. There is a Developer's site but it only has marketing talk and a Flash-powered Powerpoint-like slide show that is just more marketing talk. There are no demos or sample code on the site that I can find. There is a sign up for the beta, but I just want to see what it looks like right now.

XAML is built to replace anything you use today for building user interfaces, from Windows applications to web pages. The engine/technology that renders XAML in Longhorn is called Avalon. Since Avalon will probably not be available for platforms other than Windows Longhorn, I'm not sure how popular building XAML user interfaces will be because your audience will have to run the latest version of Windows. Given how bad Microsoft's marketing is for upgrading OS versions (how many of you are still using Windows 2000, which is now almost four years old?), it will probably be a while before a good market share is using the new operating system.

I assume FLEX is targeted at replacing Windows Forms, Swing, SWT, etc. I assume FLEX is not going to target replacing HTML/DHTML because you wouldn't want the fate of your application to hinged on the user not pressing the Back or Refresh buttons which would cause your application to instantly shut down or restart. You also don't want your users to have to download hefty Flash UI's every time they want to load your product. Anybody else sick of slow-loading Flash UI's?

While Flash is considerably slower on the non-Windows platforms that support it, at least it is available. I haven't done any non-Windows testing of Flash, so I don't know if it is as bad as Java's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" broken promise ("Test Everywhere" is what it should say), but the idea of software working on multiple platforms is what makes management happy (more people to sell our software to!).

Having seen only chunks of pre-release XAML code in non-real-world demo-only applications, and having seen zero FLEX code because Macromedia doesn't seem ready to show it off yet, I'm going to make is possibly a crazy stupid silly statement: XAML and FLEX are going to be interchangeable.

This won't be from Microsoft and it won't be from Macromedia, but somebody will built a XAML to FLEX translator or converter or mapper or XSLT or something. Just because they both use XML doesn't mean that the job will be trivial, but XML makes the project a lot easier.

Once this is possible you'll be able to use Flash MX to create your XAML UI's, and Visual Studio to create FLEX UI's. Note I'm not going into what's behind those UI's... in XAML you use any .NET language, such as C#, J# (basically Java without the name), Fortran.NET, Smalltalk.NET, etc. In FLEX you get to use... J2EE. Ugh... (Find me one person that knows both .NET and J2EE and has nice things to say about J2EE and I'll remove the "Ugh".)

I also have no doubt that we'll see XAML renderers from other companies, such as Adobe which could add XAML support to Adobe Reader (check out the very cool Adobe Reader clone done in XAML demo to see what I'm referrering to.) The non-Microsoft .NET CLRs from Novell and GNU are probably already working on non-Microsoft cross-platform XAML renderers as well. I have never seen a non-Macromedia program render Flash and I bet we'll never see one render FLEX either.

So you've read my predictions... what do you think?

This past weekend in my off time in Minnesota I added what I think is a pretty cool feature to this site: Asynchronous partial web page loading. Yeah, it needs a sexier name.

Before: Certain parts of my web site were kinda slow to load. For example, the Random Photo Caption and the page counter. This meant that while getting that random caption, the web page couldn't show anything after it because that part of the page wasn't created yet.

Now: Now I get the whole page, and I load the random quote in a separate thread. This means that you can see the whole web page much sooner, even though the Random Quote might not have finished loading yet. Once the random quote finishes loading, it automatically displays.

How: I make a simple web service call (using the XMLHTTP object) via JavaScript back to the server as the page is loading. This works in both IE and Mozilla, and does not use any special plug-ins. As a bonus, I can make this web service call repeatedly to show live data. I plan on adding a web page that shows what page everybody currently on this web site is viewing in real time using this technology.

The inspiration and much of the XMLHTTP code for this feature comes from WebFX's xLoadTree, which is a DHTML tree that loads nodes from your web site as you expand them rather than download the whole tree at once. If you would like to know more about how I did this, leave me a comment here and I'll go into more technical detail.

Wow, it looks like Avalon (the new Windows user interface system to debut in the next major new version of Windows currently codenamed Longhorn) will include live spell check (like Word) in every text form. This means you'll get spell checking when using forms on web pages, when writing email, in your IM program, in non-Microsoft applications, and anywhere else you've ever wondered if what you are writing is spelled correctly but not cared enough to open Word to check. As a terrible speller, I've been waiting for something like this for a long time.

53 redesigns for Jakob Neilson's web site and none of them really look that great...

I've been looking for somebody to help me redesign TeacherReviews.com, and somebody for a project I'm working on at work.
Current site: TeacherReviews.com
New (incomplete) site: TR.betterblog.org

Thanks, Craig, for sending this great usability humor site.

Microsoft was rewarded the IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Award) Gold Award for a prototype interface Microsoft call's the MS Center for Information Work, or MSCIW (the name didn't win any prizes). Here's what the new user interface looks like. Yes, it's a bit large for your current screen, but check out what they envision your new monitor to look like. I don't know if this will be what Longhorn will look like, but it's probably a step in this direction.

As somebody who is very out of sight - out of mind (probably my ADD), this desktop would be great. For most people I expect the first thoughts to be cluttered and overbearing. Well hopefully it's customizable, because that much information isn't going to fit on any laptop screen anytime soon.

The other products that won are also pretty cool looking, and unlike Microsoft's user interface, many of them are available now.