Well, I can't preview, but at least this has code highlighting (eclipse). I figured today, 'hey, I could maybe use Eclipse (hereifyouwannaknowwhateclipseis to produce my (raw, hand-edited html) blog entries. See, my little home-brewed CMS for boveribit takes html as input. It's much easier this way. Trying to enter my thoughts into a 350 pixel wide form field using HTML doesn't make me want to type for very long. Maybe now I'll actually get a post up that has...more words.

I've been working with WPF now for a little over a month. I've made some posts about it. WPF's Biggest win? Hardware accelerated rendering pipeline. *No rain dances or speculation required. Adobe has some mysterious window modes that supposedly enable gpu support for the web version of the flash player, and zero support whatsoever for AIR, their desktop runtime. Microsoft already has good GPU support across both their desktop and web runtimes, attributed in no small part to Windows and DirectX. This means, you can make it shinier in WPF. That is, if you need a Rocket Ship and know how to build one.

WPF's design allows for a wide range of developers to work with it but it is heavily skewed toward the formal engineering lot, and has the complexity to match. Put it this way, out of 100 WPF or SilverLight developers, how many can also create a shiny button in PhotoShop that doesn't suck? I say five. How many Flash developers can? I'm not saying engineers can't make pretty things, I'm saying designers make prettier things on average than engineers. Adobe has the creative mindshare now, but you can make shinier stuff with WPF, and design is all about shiny. Once the Flash faithful really start exploring WPF in earnest I think there will be defection. The extent of the exodus depends on how much of WPF Senior's rendering and features make it into SilverLight, and how long it takes Adobe to get full fledged OpenGL support for general rendering. There is also the possibility that javascript openGL libraries will get open standards into the mainstream shiny app show, but that's another discussion.

Good Flash people will pick up WPF in short order. AS3 is practically identical syntactically to C#, though C# is more complex. XAML is close enough to MXML, though it's...more complex. In fact, WPF as a whole is a lot more complicated than Flash. More so, I believe, than is warranted by the performance gap. A lot of WPF reminds me of that story about NASA spending millions developing a pen that would write in space, while the Russians used a pencil to solve the problem. Data Binding is a good example of this, animation is another. Since these are the two features Flash developers will dive into right away, I could see many just shaking their head and backing slowly away after one brief foray into WPF land. Though, with some patience, there is a whole new world of performance and power on tap for execution of interactive creativity.

The best thing Flash has going for it is great approachability, and of course ubiquity. There are professional flash people out there who can't explain why you want to use an interface, and they don't care. There are also flash developers out there that can write custom pixelbender filters that execute fast enough to apply per frame effects on running high definition video (believe it!). Flash runs on Windows, Linux, and Solaris, and soon will run just about everywhere else, thanks to Adobe's Open Screen Project. Phones, TV's, touch screens, monitors, dvd players, everywhere. WPF is faster, and runs on Windows. It is so Frustrating.

If you have the engineering prowess, you don't care about Microsoft Platform Lock In, and you are building a nuclear powered RocketShip than WPF is your huckleberry, good luck finding some interactive design talent to work on the project though. Otherwise, Flash is good enough, runs practically everywhere, and has a reasonable number of devsigner types who can do it the shiny way.

*I ran some tests to try and see if I could sort out how to utilize the GPU effectively with flash 10, because switching it on didn't seems to have any effect on a variety of flash content. I didn't spend a ton of time with it, but this 'real world' test, animating a varying number of images around the screen only indicated that GPU degraded performance. I didn't find any definitive information online about how to optimize flash content for the gpu so I call shenanigans until proven otherwise. Links below.

• results
• direct mode test
• gpu mode test
• opaque mode test
• normal mode test

I heard some people naysaying the wii today. I know nearly nothing about the current state of video gaming, however, so I could not interject with my customary nugget of gaming info. Alas, I realized that my once formidable bank of gaming information has been replaced by..by..um..nothing. Its just a vacant space in my brain now. Maybe the gaming knowledge that used to reside there sortof salted the fertile soil of my cerebellum, and resulted in a thought no fly zone. I can only hope that work will slow down so I can get myself some fancy new gaming machine and zap those dead brain cells back into (gaming) shape.

The little bit about the wii I do know, besides the really funny name (weee, fun) is that funcky controller it's got. It's, like, gyroscopic man. It can sense tilts and pitches and yaws and direction, so you can use that magic stick to control games in 3d space. Ergo golf swings in your living room to send that little digital golf ball towards your little digital green.

That, combined with the inevitable crop of new generation dating games, will mark a 'revolution' in gaming goodness...

happy hallowiin

I was sitting here wathing robot chicken, and realized it's been a while since I posted. then, I thought to myself, 'self, I wonder if I can post an entry to boveribit from my treo...'. and we will see if that is so