Flyover Country

I’ll be in Minnesota for the next week celebrating my sister’s 34th birthday and my 25th birthday. Posting may be sparse. In the mean time, here are a few albums you should listen to:

• The Decemberists – The Crane Wife
• Modest Mouse – We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank
• Massive Attack – Mezzanine
• Thievery Corporation – The Cosmic Game
• Arctic Monkeys – Favourite Worst Nightmare

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78% of respondents agree that an ecosystem of long-tail conversations is exciting.

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Slate’s posted a tremendously embarassing-looking unclassified Powerpoint deck from the CIA. The twelve pages present a sort-of who’s who guide of Powerpoint design mistakes. I don’t really fault the CIA procurement executive who created it, though; it looks like the result of an official template run amok, coupled with the world’s worst collection of stock art…from 1993. Here’s the blow-by-blow for each slide:

1. OK, let’s get it out of the way now: the fonts they’re using suck. The yellow-on-blue color scheme really does nothing for me. The official seal makes perfect sense, but the fonts are just a disaster. C’mon: this is 2007, why are you using Times New Roman at the bottom?
2.  The slide title presented here is next to impossible to read. A heavily desaturated yellow on a bluish, semi-transparent background does nothing for my 24-year old eyes. Imagine what a career CIA analyst pushing fifty must feel like when he squints at this. Also, the phrasing of the bullet points on this page is rather painful. Please stick to a handful of descriptive words or to a sentence structure, but not both.
3.  Dude, 1993 called and it wants its clip art back. The 1950s-esque atomic structure representing “technology” is my personal favorite. What’s yours? Once again, the color contrast is killing me. Furthermore, at a structural level, I cannot figure out how this slide (entitled “Multiple Areas of Concern”) relates to the Overview slide we just saw.
4.  Font colors. Again. Also, I hope that this was a slide that took all of ten seconds to run through. Key takeaway: “things have changed.” We get it, no need to run through point by point.
5.  This slide actually made my left eye bleed. I’m reminded of the guy at the beginning of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure who said “Everything is different, but the same… things are more moderner than before… bigger, and yet smaller… it’s computers… San Dimas High School football rules!”
6. The heavy-handed metaphor employed on the sixth page is just annoying (get it? Acquisition is key to their success!)
7. Jesus, why not just put the full text to War and Peace on this slide? The little scroll clip art at the bottom is cute, though, I’ll admit.
8. This is how much of the slide looks like Pac-Man.
9. Oops, they probably didn’t want to share this info. Also, would it kill them to use XP theme support? The UI tends to look better when it’s enabled.
10. It’s like a SWOT, but lamer! I really dig the painful bastardization of the word “AGILITY” on the right. Tres chic.
11. Just like slide 7, I hope that this was not read verbatim. There’s way too much text present on this slide. I don’t think it would make Tufte very happy. It’s bad form to switch between using periods and not using periods on slides. I try to avoid them, personally.
12. Huh? This looks like the same data seen on #9. What the heck?

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Continuing yesterday’s Silverlight love-fest, I just found a fantastic blog post from Scott Guthrie, the General Manager of the .NET Developer Platform group, that covers virtually every aspect of Silverlight 1.1 in a good deal of depth and includes usable samples. Scott goes into a great deal of detail about the basics of XAML, animation, isolated storage for Silverlight apps, custom controls, and tons of other stuff.

To run the samples you will need to install Silverlight 1.1 Alpha, which is available from MSDN for both Windows and Mac OS X. I think that SL 1.1 is going to revolutionize web development with its incredibly rich programming model, fantastic tooling support (Visual Studio and the Expression suite) and sweet browser hooks. I can’t wait until this is generally available.

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It’s like doing a bodyshot, but with a cracker; a low-fat cracker!

— Anonymous

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Mark Johnston, a Microsoft developer evangelist in the UK, has a bunch of great Silverlight-related content up that covers topics like:

• The fundamentals
• Animations and Javascript programming
• 1.1 debugging
• A 1 line of code video player
• Silverlight Streaming (which I can vouch for as being totally awesome, and incredibly easy to use – I built our video players for Popfly with it and Expression Media Encoder in next to no time)

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This is always a nice way to start a week:

If you haven’t already discovered the world of mashups, Microsoft’s Popfly is a good place to start. Mashups combine multiple Web-based sites or applications to produce all sorts of useful things, such as an overlay of traffic information over Google Maps. With Popfly, you can create your own mashups–and you don’t have to know a lick of code to do it. Just drag prefab building blocks, connect them, and you have an instant mashup that you can add to an existing Web page or turn into its own site. For example, you can easily produce a mashup that grabs pictures from a site like Flickr and then displays them in a rotating cube.

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It hasn’t even been a month since we launched Popfly, but we already finished our first batch of updates for the site with a ton of new features! We have some notes up on our team blog about the new features; here’s an abbreviated list of my favorites:

• Silverlight Streaming-hosted videos, so Mac users get a great video experience, too! 
• Block suggestions to help you build your mashups  
• Loading the mashup designer is enormously faster in IE, but it’s also faster in Firefox as well
• Saving mashups should now be a bit faster (for all browsers)
• Mashups that hang should now be the exception rather than the rule
• Loading avatars in search results should be much faster (for all browsers) 
• You can see when every member joined Popfly
• Slick inline UI for adding a dev key (no more popup blocker madness) 
• You can now click someone’s block from their project page to instantly use it in a mashup
• Preview-time console to help power-users debug 
• Tons of new blocks: Live Ads, Live Image Search, Live News, Live Search, Live Spellchecker, Phonebook, Bar Graph, PhotoShow, and Straw Poll

Additionally, the Popfly community has been hard at work with over 125 user-contributed blocks! These community-built services are incredibly cool, and feature such awesome things as:

• Virtual Earth 3D support
• World of Warcraft player data
• Weatherbug
• Top iTunes songs

Whew, what a list! Anyway, I need to get back to my features for our next release, which we’re in the thick of developing right now. We can’t wait to show you what’s coming next

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I just heard about a fantastic hands-on lab you can download that walks you through building a replica of Outlook 2007’s user interface in WPF. It’s fantastic to see such detailed, useful examples of building Avalon content finally coming out. Being able to build reflections into your application launcher is all well and good, but I’d rather have a full PIM application that can be extended with these sorts of effects. This also reminds me that I need to bring my signed copy of WPF Unleashed home with me so that I can start running through it.

[Start] at File / New Project and end with a facsimile of the Outlook 2007 user interface.

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I was just reading a truly bizarre (yet oddly heartwarming) story on MSNBC about how a deaf mother dolphin and her newborn calf are getting along at a marine mammal rehabilitation center in the Florida Keys, but I was terribly disheartened to discover the lack of proofing present in a few paragraphs:

Officials hope the calf will develop communications’ skills by speaking to dolphins at Dolphins Plus when the system is fully turned on soon.

Mother, calif will not be released
Mother and calf are to remain at the Conservancy for at least six months before relocating to a more permanent facility. Castaway can’t be released because a dolphin needs to hear to utilize echo localization, or dolphin sonar, to survive.

Oh. My. God. This is an AP newswire story, too, which has traditionally meant (to me at least) that it would meet certain standards of quality. Evidently not. I think the author(s) would be well-served to spend some time reading Matthew Stibbe’s blog.

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