March « 2009 « Tim Anderson's ITWriting

Flash library for Facebook, Silverlight library for MySpace

By tim, on March 31st, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Adobe and Facebook have announced that ActionScript 3, the language of Flash 9 and higher, is now officially supported by FaceBook along with JavaScript and PHP. Information about coding for Facebook with Flash is here, and the library itself is on Google Code.

MySpace has announced the MySpace Silverlight SDK which will be hosted on

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Open Cloud Manifesto – but from a closed group?

By tim, on March 30th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve read the Open Cloud Manifesto with interest. It’s hard to find much to disagree with; I especially like this point on page 5:

Cloud providers must not use their market position to lock customers into their particular platforms and limit their choice of providers.

Companies like IBM won’t do that? I’m sceptical. Still, it

…continue reading Open Cloud Manifesto – but from a closed group?

Sys-con vs Aral Balkan in Web 2.0 war over intellectual property

By tim, on March 30th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Aral Balkan is well-known in the Adobe Flash community as an independent speaker and developer; I first came across him a few years back as a champion of open source Flash. On Friday Balkan was surprised to find that he was apparently a key author at Ulitzer.com, a new online publication from Sys-con media which

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Experts Exchange: a great way to make money on the Web

By tim, on March 27th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

For Experts Exchange that is, not for you. Experts Exchange is a question and answer site which most people who use Google have come across, because it often features high in the rankings when you search for troubleshooting information about some strange Windows error or the like. This can be frustrating, because the solutions are

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Microsoft’s hefty Outlook 2007 patch – a performance fix at last?

By tim, on March 25th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve just come across Microsoft’s February 2009 cumulative update for Outlook 2007, thanks to a comment on this blog. This is apparently a pre-release of what is coming in Office 2007 SP2, promised for release between February and April 2009 – yes, that’s round about now.

As for Outlook, if you are keen to get

…continue reading Microsoft’s hefty Outlook 2007 patch – a performance fix at last?

Tim Bray’s contrarian views on Rich Internet Applications

By tim, on March 24th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

There’s a though-provoking interview with Sun’s Tim Bray over on the InfoQ site. One of his points is that Rich Internet Applications aren’t worth the hype. He says that web applications are generally better than desktop applications, because they enforce simplicity and support a back button, and that users prefer them. He adds:

Over the

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Leaving Las Vegas: Mix09 wrap-up

By tim, on March 21st, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m heading back to London after 3 days at Microsoft’s Mix09 conference in Las Vegas. I took the opportunity to ask a few delegates what they thought. One thing that everyone seemed to love was SketchFlow, a new feature of Expression Blend which enables designers to sketch out design ideas, distribute them for discussion and

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How to print in Silverlight out of the browser

By tim, on March 20th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

Trick question, you can’t, or not in any sane way that I’ve discovered. When an app using Microsoft Silverlight is running in the browser you at least have the browser’s print features, but a SLOOB (Silverlight Out of Browser, a new feature in Silverlight 3) does not even have that to fall back on.

This

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Mix09 Day One: Silverlight 3.0 is launched

By tim, on March 19th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’m at Microsoft’s Mix 09 conference in Las Vegas, where VP Scott Guthrie has unveiled Silverlight 3.0, the next iteration of the cross-platform browser plugin that renders multimedia and executes .NET code.

There’s plenty of good stuff in Silverlight 3.0 and it’s been well received. Highlights are pixel-level graphics API (which lifts any restrictions over

…continue reading Mix09 Day One: Silverlight 3.0 is launched

Cloud computing means exporting your IT infrastructure to the Internet

By tim, on March 13th, 2009 Follow tim on Twitter

I’ve just attended my first cloudcamp unconference, held during QCon London. We ended up debating how you would explain cloud computing to a non-technical audience. The problem is that different people mean different things by the term.

The consumer perspective is to do with running applications and storing your stuff on the Internet. Gmail, Google

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