Wednesday 28 May 2008

Windows 7 to have more natural user interaction

Windows 7, the next release of the Windows operating system is romoured to have multi touch ability such as seen with the new MacBook Pro and the Ipod Touch.

The multi touch ability will allow such actions as pinches and swipes, ideal for using with maps and Silverlight 2.0 with the new DeepZoom facilities.

Hopefully these multi-touch features will be built into the .NET framework to allow developers to built multi touch applications for any compatiable devices.

Wednesday 21 May 2008

Silverlight MSN Toolbar

Microsoft have released a new MSN Toolbar for IE which as far as toolbars go looks pretty cool. It seems more like a snazzy RSS agregator, with added search facility.

The toolbar as well as having the RSS streams for various content areas such as news, sports and autos. It has the ability to know when a user has done a search using any of the search websites such as google, yahoo! or Live and using the search parameters does its own search using Live and aggregates the results such as news, images, and websites into the toolbar so that the user can jump straight to the live results if required.

The toolbar has been created using Silverlight, however it is currently only supported by Silverlight 1.0. Which means it wont currently work for all us eager dev's who have installed Silverlight 2.0, however a SL 2.0 version will be realesed soon I hope.

Channel 8 offer a really good video walk through of the MSN Toolbar and some of its features right here.

Saturday 17 May 2008

Long time no post

It been a really long time since I last blogged, however theres been soo much happening that I've had very little time to do anything.

Exams and revison has take up a large ammount of my time of recent, I've virtually lived in books. Having 4 exams spaced over a month gave me enough time to do some good revision an I now feel that I have done really well in all of them. Only 15 minutes of university left, where I will be giving a presentation on my final year project. After that I will be free from uni for ever (at least i think).

Along with exam's ive been concentrating on the Imagine Cup and the second round submission, which I am extremly please with. More information about our entry can be found at www.resolveevolvesolve.com , will be keeping the blog updated with how we get on. Will know more after the MSP event in london.

But now that exams are over and our imagine cup entry has bee submitted for the next round I can start relaxing and getting back into the groove.