April 2007 - Posts
My Joost account is up and working. I've only had it a week or so and not much time to play with it. For those who are unfamiliar with Joost, it's an online TV service with a client component conceptually similar to Media Center. (e.g you browse through channels etc.) I have not found a way to save content and that might be impossible. ??? The video seems to be of varying quality, but it is good enough to watch without getting annoyed.
Anyhow, for me the biggest problem is that I can't find anything worth watching.
That said, today I got 3 spare invitations that I can hand out.
So if you are interested leave a comment.
I'll wait a couple of days and see how many are interested. If there are more than 3 I'll just draw 3 at random.
[Update 30-4-2007]
I made a random draw and after confirming the emails I'll send out the Invitations through Joost.
And the lucky ones...
Marie, John (sent an email instead of comment) and splintor. ( splintor, yes you actually got it through the random draw! :-) )
Have fun!
According to the
following post, the pricing of the new WPF controls is 395$. It should come as a nice surprise that the WPF controls are free to existing NetAdvantage subscribers. The press release announcing the WPF controls states the following:
"Current subscribers of Infragistics NetAdvantage products, with a valid subscription on the date of the initial release of NetAdvantage for WPF, will receive free keys for NetAdvantage for WPF at no additional cost. This will be a full featured complete WPF product release inclusive of matching product support to the level of the current subscription to which it is attached." You can read the full press release
here.
I'm impressed, very impressed!
Yesterday Infragistics released their WPF control suite. The suite contains:
- WPF grid.
- Carousel controls. (See image below)
- A few editors that are missing from the WPF stock control package.
Before I say anything more about these new controls, I just want to share some of my previous experiences with Infragistics. I have worked with Infragistics for a couple of years and have gone through several iterations of their NetAdvantage suite. On one hand their controls allow you do do almost anything, but on the other hand they might seem a little overwhelming. At least once you get a grip on things they are consistent. One issue that have plagued the previous versions is poor documentation. With a control suite of this complexity it is imperative that they come with in-depth documentation to get the developers up to speed. IMHO, Infragistics have failed in this area. That is, until now. The documentation that ships with the WPF suite is excellent. This is escpecially important in my opinion, since at least for the foreseable future most deveopers wanting to use these controls will be in the middle of the WPF learning curve and any aditional learning overhead that can be avoided should be avoided.
Here's an online demo app that demonstrates the new controls. (The sample requires .NET 3.0)
If you don't have .NET 3.0 installed and just want to watch a video click on the image below:
It's been a while sine I replaced my Thinkpad with the excellent DELL M90. You can read about that transition here.The DELL rocks, but it has a drawback that the Thinkpad didn't have. It's too big to move around the house. I'm a tech book junkie and spend quite some time reading tech books. Tech books also tend to be like bricks and they are not very comfortable to shlep around with you, let alone a few. Ever tried to take with you Petzold and Prosise for more than a few meters? Well, it's been quite a while since I picked up my copy of Petzold (I'm not complaining). To work around the weight issue and still have most of my tech books available I have been a subscriber to Safari for a couple of years. I like the service and I have access to most of the content either online or in downloadable PDFs. Since replacing the Thinkpad with the M90 my book collection has again moved a little out of reach.
So I decided to take a look at tablet PC offerings. I thought a tablet PC would be perfect since it would allow me to take media with me and it would also let me connect to our wireless home network. After a relatively short research I was left with two models to choose between.
- The thinkpad X60 with a Core Duo 1.83 2500L with 1GB of RAM and 80 GB 5400rpm HDD.
- The Fujitsu T4215 with a Core 2 Duo 1.66 with 1GB 512MB of RAM and 40GB 5400rpm HDD.
The Fujitsu is available with more memory and a faster CPU, but then the price was significantly higher than the Thinkpad. I made a few phone calls and couldn't find any store with a Fujitsu with Vista in stock. The waiting time would be more than a calendar month so I decided to see if I could get hold of a Thinkpad instead. I like the look of the Fujitsu more and the reviews on both models are excellent. The Fujitsu has an integrated DVD drive that the Thinkpad lacks so that was a plus for the Fujutsu as well. After only two phone calls I found a reseller with a Thinkpad X60 with Vista Business in stock. I didn't want to by an XP machine to be sure that I wouldn't run into some driver hell with a proprietary tablet.
5 hours later the Thinkpad landed on my doorstep and the first thing I did was to remove the memory and hard drive. (Replacing RAM and hard drive yourself does not void the warranty!) I got 2 GB of RAM that installed in a snap and I had a 100GB 7200rpm 2.5" hard drive available. The installation of the hard drive was also over in 5 minutes. It is the first time I've seen a hard drive in a rubber cover to keep it silent. Very nice! I did a clean install of Vista, downloaded the "online system update" from Lenovo and let it install a selected subset of system drivers to make the tablet usable as a tablet. The performance was great even with Aero Glass running.
I transferred my book collection to the tablet and sat down in my favorite chair. After a couple of chapters of "WPF Unleashed" my verdict was clear. Tablet PCs rock!