With a couple of nights of rest and some time to process all the info I tried to cram into my head in 3 days last week, I think it’s time I shared my two cents on MIX08. I won’t go into great detail but give you some observations and thoughts on the announcements and sessions I attended.

Before I start tho I’d like to extend a big thanks to Paul and Qixing from the Canadian UX team for all their hard work in making me feel welcome. You can read their rundowns of the event at the CanUX blog.

MIX08 was crammed full of announcements, demos and pre-launches. Of all of them I think Internet Explorer 8, Expression Studio 2 and Silverlight 2 were the most important ones. But that’s just me. And here are my thoughts:

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8)

For the first time ever I can picture Mozilla and Opera developers scrambling to clone the new features in Internet Explorer rather than the other way around.

As a web dev-igner (I’m not sure I like that term but it kinda makes sense doesn’t it?) I’ve had a hate-on for Internet Explorer for a long time. And it’s no secret that my sentiments have been shared by pretty much anyone who has ever tried to make a web site look the same in Internet Explorer and any other browser. For some unknown reason, Microsoft has always chosen to interpret web standards differently from everyone else and as a result it’s been nightmarish to write code for sites to be displayed uniformly over multiple browsers. As if that wasn’t enough, Microsoft has persistently denied (or rather refused to comment on) these problems, and MS fanboys and pedantic coders have perpetuated the claim that this is not an IE problem but bad coding on the dev end. Well, no more.

At the first keynote of the event, MS openly admitted not only that the way IE has parsed CSS in the past was atrocious but that IE7 was a browser so full of garbage code and glitches that it should never have been released in the first place. And with that came resounding applause. I’m not sure people fully grasp how important this announcement is so I’ll spell it out for you: By making IE8 compliant with the standard set by every other browser on the market, not only is MS admitting fault but they are showing that they listen to consumers and work hard to correct the wrongs they have created. Now technically one shouldn’t have to celebrate a company doing what it should have done a long time ago, but in this case it demonstrates such a drastic turn that it’s worth noting none the less.

The implications of IE8 are significant because it means that once the program is out of beta and market penetration has kicked in, devs no longer have to worry about filling their sites with IE hacks just to make them look good.

There are several other interesting features in IE8 like Activities, Web Slices, Ajax task-bar behaviours, php and CSS debugging tools and so on. You can read more about all these features at the Beta site.

Expression Studio 2

With the 2nd release of Expression Studio, Microsoft has lifted the software package from the “good idea, but needs more work” stage to the “solid competitor and a threat to the status quo” stage.

If you read this blog religiously you know I was started it to force myself to learn how to use Microsoft Expression Studio. And you also know that after testing the software I’ve actually transitioned my entire work flow from Macromedia to Expression. But being a first-generation software package, Expression had some serious limitations including (but not limited to) colour matching issues, horrendous bitmap compression, nonstandard sizes, no php support, FTP issues and so on and so forth. Through my communications with Microsoft staff I knew that all of these issues were being addressed, and with the release of Expression Studio 2 Beta I see that in almost every case the problems have been fixed.

I have yet to test out the Beta releases but from my playing around with the software in the Sandbox at MIX I can tell you that it’s an entirely new experience. Whether it be small things like individually lockable and visible sub-layers in Design or monster improvements like direct layered PSD imports in Web the improvements are impressive, substantial and necessary. Expression Design 2, Expression Web 2 and Expression Media Encoder 2 are programs that are going to become the basis of my operation and that of many others and I have no doubt they will steal a significant market share from Adobe.

The one program that still needs some work is Blend, but only because the evolution to Silverlight 2 has been so dramatic it doesn’t look like the program developers have managed to keep up. The new features demonstrated in Silverlight 2 are astounding and make it a true competitor Adobe should fear. But as of now, many of these features are only accessible through XAML hard coding. This is facilitated by Visual Studio which has extensive Silverlight and WPF coding support but for a designer it would be great if Blend could catch up. And I think it will, it’ll just take a little more time.

When Expression Studio 2 comes out of beta, it will be a full upgrade you have to pay for. But before you cringe and start waving your clenched fist in the general direction of the nearest Microsoft logo I have inside information that the price of the upgrade will be very reasonable. That’s all I can say without getting myself or anyone else in trouble.

For now you can download all the new Beta releases for free.

Silverlight 2

With the introduction of Silverlight 2 and the upcoming NBC Olympic online broadcast, Adobe should stock up on anti-anxiety meds.

When I first was introduced to Silverlight last year, I reacted like most others: Oh, Microsoft has created a Flash clone… wonder how that’s going to work out. In hindsight I realize that thought was not only misinformed but quite frankly stupid. After six months of fiddling with this new application and seeing demos at MIX I can honestly tell you that Silverlight will become a true competitor before you know it. And here’s why:

[DISCLAIMER: The following is my personal theories about product development and usage. I have no stats, research or information to back up my claims and there is a good chance I am way off. Nonetheless, I think you’ll find my reasoning compelling and my conclusion viable.]

When Flash first came on the market it was mainly an animation platform. But it didn’t take long for web developers to see the potential in the application and before long it became a full fledged web development platform largely based on code. The problem is that Flash was never meant to do this and therefore the back end coding became a total nightmare. As designers and developers went from drawing out their animations in the timeline to simply plonking in an empty movie and then attaching 300 pages of ActionScript, Flash started showing signs of not measuring up to the demands of it’s users. But since there was no viable alternative, the platform retained it’s place as the number one web animation (and now also video streaming) application.

And that’s where Silverlight comes in. You see, Silverlight picks up where Flash hits a wall: Flash is a complicated animation platform that can be manipulated through a very limited package of code. Therefore there are very real limits to what you can do. Silverlight on the other hand is a hard-code platform that can be manipulated through an animation platform (Blend). And since it runs on C#, there really is no limit to what it can do. In other words, Microsoft has picked up where Macrodobe stalled. And unless Macrodobe puts on the thinking cap and comes up with something radical now, they’ll be left in the dust.

I can see you shaking your head at that last comment. “Come on” you’re thinking. “Flash has something like a 98% penetration rate and all the major video sharing networks are using this platform. There’s no way Silverlight can catch up.” Really? Isn’t there? Coming from a broadcast background I can tell you that as a video platform, Flash is equivalent to old VHS tapes: Unless you do things exactly right, the video looks like shit. That’s because video was a last-minute ad on to the Flash platform. Silverlight on the other hand was built around video first. As a result it supports fully scalable, high-definition video right out of the box. If you’ve tried to build a custom Flash video player from scratch you know it’s a total pain in the ass; it requires intimate knowledge of ActionScript, a deep understanding of how Flash streams and parses information and a lot of time and patience. It’s a long and arduous process and it requires pages of code. In Silverlight, building the exact same player should take you no more than 10 minutes and the results are guaranteed as long as your video compression is up to par.

As for the penetration issue, 1.5 million people are downloading the Silverlight plug-in every day and when the Beijing Olympics start in August and NBC launches their humongous (and potentially internet killing) video application running Silverlight, every sports fan with a high-speed connection in North America is going to have the app installed and ready to go.

I had a chance to talk to a lot of people from different parts of the business at the show; from programming teachers and instructors to designers, developers, students and end users, and they all pretty much said the same thing: They have to invest in this technology because even if it doesn’t kill Flash, it will become equally important in no time. I could see the department heads and teachers from schools and universities go through a full range of emotion - from fear and hatred at having to build all new programs around this new and unfamiliar technology to elation and lust at the potential it presents. I myself found my brain racing as the possibilities, especially when it comes to video distribution, became clear and I realized just how limiting the Flash platform really is.

You can get more info on Silverlight by visiting the site.

If you are curious about all the sessions at MIX08, you can watch them at the site.

Finally, after much promising but little doing, I found the time to redesign the Pink & Yellow Media Blog from the bland WordPress theme to something a little more suiting.

I figured since I’m going to MIX08 in Vegas and just got a pile of new flashy cards printed there’s a good chance people will be stopping by to see what I’m saying so I should really make an effort to give a good first impression. I hope this will suffice.

The graphics were made using a multitude of software including Illustrator (for the swooshy lines), PhotoShop (for the lens flare) and Expression Design. Once completed I chopped it all up in Design and used Expression Web to reformat the theme to fit the new look. All in all the entire process took around 8 hours with php re-coding.

Drop me a line and tell me what you think!

Thanks to my new friends at Microsoft I am attending the Microsoft MIX08 conference in Las Vegas in March. With the introduction of Microsoft Expression software into my work process, the conference will be a much welcomed opportunity to interact with other adopters and Microsoft staff and broaden my own understanding of the software and it’s abilities.

I’ll be blogging from the event so stay tuned!

For more info on the MIX08 conference, visit the official website.

Finally, after 4 years of hard work, one of our trusted workstations finally gave in and decided to die on us. I guess the pre-Core 2 Duo Prescott processor couldn’t handle the workload any more (running PhotoShop CS2, Premiere CS2, Firefox, Opera and a host of other programs at the same time isn’t exactly kind on the processor). So we were forced to get a new system, and with it came the inevitable transition to Windows Vista.

I’m one of those guys who has an aversion for adopting new and untested technology no matter what it is.  And when it came to the new Microsoft OS I would rather have waited for the first Service Pack to come out before making the transition. After all there are always some major kinks that have to be sorted out before any new OS can be considered completely trustworthy (something that rings true even in the “infallable” Mac world as the latest release of Leopard has shown). Thus my policy was simple: I’m not switching to Vista until I get a new computer. And with the death of our old workstation my hand was forced.

After installing the new OS and getting the new computer up and running I have a few thoughts and realizations (I’m sure I’ll have more later on - the system arrived on three days ago) that I’d like to share - some good, some bad.

The System Itself
First off I just want to describe the system itself so you get an idea of the baseline. My wife who uses this computer does a lot of video editing, primarily for her lifestyles blog Dabbler.ca . Knowing this we decided to go for an Intel Core 2 Quad processor (the Q6600 I believe) . The system also boasts an ASUS P5K se motherboard, 4gb of ram, two 500GB Western Digital hard drives and a monster CoolerMaster power supply. The only thing we cheaped out on was the graphics card so instead of the store recommended GeForce 8800 we went for a GeForce 8400 with 256mb RAM. Considering we don’t do any 3d gaming the 8800 would be a colossal waste of money and we saved over $360 on the smaller card (which retailed for an astonishing $69!).

The computer came fully assembled but without any software installed. I had three discs in my hand: Windows Vista Home Premium OEM, the ASUS motherboard system disc and the graphics card drivers.

Installation
Installing Vista took a mind-bending 10 minutes. This was quite surprising - installing XP on my old system took at least 4 times as long. And apart from my moronic accidental choice of Canadian French as the system language (which took me almost 20 minutes to rectify - guess I should have just started from scratch) the install was completely unproblematic and went smoothly. Once the OS was up and running I inserted the ASUS disc and installed all the drivers (onboard audio, networking etc). This required two reboots which were done by the computer - I could have just left the house but it only took 7  minutes to complete. Once the networking was in order Vista started downloading updates but the download and install of these was putting a negligible load on the computer and I could easily move on to the next steps. Installing the graphics drivers was just as easy and once installed my weird monitor setup was immediately recognized and set up properly. In XP I always had trouble calibrating the two monitors (one ViewSonic and one LG) but this was all done automatically. I don’t know if I should credit Microsoft or Nvidia for this but it was impressive none the less.

Graphics
This brings me to an interesting point: When Vista came out I read and heard a lot of complaints about how you needed a supercharged graphics card to run all the fancy new visual effects and such. This just isn’t the case. Like I said, the graphics card in this computer was a $69 GeForce 8400 and I had zero problems running the full Aero interface with all the bells and whistles AND rendering out Premiere video while having both PhotoShop, Firefox and numerous other programs in the background.

I did encounter one weird problem with the graphics that took a while to rectify: For some reason the video monitor in Premiere was severely aliased causing all sorts of crazy strobing and line effects in the output. This problem did not appear when playing back video in Windows Media Player or any other application which lead me to believe it had to do with the graphics drivers. After some fiddling I found the problem in the way the graphics card was set up. Because Premiere utilizes the graphics engine in the graphics card to render previews the card needs to be told Premiere is to be considered a 3d application even though it’s not. Once this was done the aliasing problem disappeared.

Networking
Once the system was up and running with all it’s components it was time to install all the external components we have. Most importantly we run a NAS drive as a server and this needed to be set up immediately. The 500GB Western Digital NetCenter comes equipped with a small program called WD EasyLink which I installed from it’s disc. The program went in and went active with no problems and the little WD icon appeared on the bottom right hand side of the screen as it should. On my XP machines I had to mount the two volumes on the drive by mapping them in My Computer so I did so without really paying attention only to find that Vista had already done it for me so I now had two links to each of the drives. Because I’m a curious guy I uninstalled the app and reinstalled it to see if Vista really did find my drives for me and I was pleased to see it did. This bodes well for future expansions of my server system. I will further explore the networking capabilities and functionalities once I find some extra time.

Drivers
Another thing people have been complaining about has been the lack of working drivers and incompatibilities with existing programs. I installed all the programs from the previous system (Adobe Production Studio Premium, Macromedia Studio MX2004, Microsoft Expression Suite, Firefox, DivX and a pile of other nicknacks) without running into a single issue. I am curious to see what happens when I try to install Nero Burning Rom 6 which already had some issues in XP.

The only driver problem I encountered was in installing our Canon N670U scanner. The Vista driver on the Canon site would not open properly and Vista just spat out a message about the archive being corrupted. I tried downloading it several times with the same result. Then I remembered that I’ve seen a similar problem before and I downloaded the scanner driver from a different country’s site (I believe it was New Zealand?). Not surprisingly this driver worked perfectly and the scanner turned up as a TWAIN source in PhotoShop.

Dual Monitor Problem
As I said before the system has two monitors. And with that comes one problem that makes absolutely no sense to me at all: When you right-click on something that is resting on the left-hand monitor, the menu appears in the gadgets bar on the right hand side of the right hand monitor. This problem is persistent and only applies to the secondary monitor. Needless to say it is quite annoying, especially when dealing with drop-down menus. I’ll need to do some further research into whether or not this is a screen driver issue or a bona fide Vista glitch.

Other Hardware
It took me a little bit of time to figure out how to mount and format a blank harddrive on the system - all the menus have changed and things are not where they “ought to be” but the integrated search function made quick work of figuring this out.

All my external components (WaCom Tablet, camcorder, several external hard drives etc) were identified and installed without any fuss.

The only thing I still haven’t figured out is the ReadyBoos function. The computer came with a special high-speed 4gb ReadyBoost USB drive that I plugged in when I fired it up for the first time. I vaguely recall setting up something with it but I was too busy figuring out exactly how the new OS worked to really pay attention. Now I can’t find any reference to ReadyBoost in the help files and I’m a bit lost. I’m sure it just requires some minimal research but here again is that time issue. I’ll get to it eventually.

Conclusion
Overall my first impression of Vista Home Premium is very good. I did not encounter any of the problems I thought I would, all the software and hardware works perfectly and I’ve not seen any plug-and-play issues as of yet in spite of the non-standard setup. I’m sure I’ll have more to say in a week but for now I am very pleased with the transition.

I’m shooting a short film for a local film festival over the weekend so I am drowning in prep work. Unfortunately my Expression odyssey is taking the bulk of the hit. I will however be back at it on Monday next week so stay tuned. There is more to come, I assure you ;o)

mor10