Now with just few clicks you can create your own secure push-to-talk network accessible from Windows and Linux PCs and Windows Mobile devices.

Give it a try and let us know, what you think!

“You don’t have to prove anything in the executive summary”

That’s nonsense. If you don’t prove anything, why bother writing?

The list of 50 finalists, which will present during 3 days event has just been published. All companies look good but I already sold on one of them — GoodRec, which offers twitter-digg style reviews service (via web or mobile) looks like the brilliant idea, and if execution is good they certainly going to be the winner.

The complete list of TechCrunch50 finalists.

It’s fantastic with the great user experience, wicked fast JavaScript (3x faster than Firefox and 75% faster than Safari based on Bubblemark test) and supports both ActiveX and Firefox plugins! Even Silverlight works although there is a minor issue with canvas updates.

I’ve been a out of this little project for a while, busy with things at Loudtalks and Metalink. I even haven’t had a chance to check out Silverlight 2.

Few people asked for it and I was about to go all the way through installing VS2008 but today I received a Silverlight 2 bubblemark port, implemented by Kevin Yang. On my machine it gets ~280 fps, which is 40% increase over 1.1. You can try it yourself here.

Bubblemark validity (correctly) questioned

I’m glad to see that more cross-RIA benchmarks appear these days.

Sean Christmann made the one, which is geared towards measuring complex UI performance. You can check it out here along with an explanation on why bubblemark is not particularly relevant for the task.

For me the value of bubblemark is actually more in education, than in measuring. You can take it and see, how things could be implemented in different platforms. Consider it a rich “hello world” for RIA, which shows the basics — text, graphics, animation, and interaction with the app from a webpage.

Some stats

Finally, I checked out website stats and here are some interesting numbers:

1. The site was visited 105,000 times by 81,000 visitors
2. Most users are from US and China
3. The most requested demo is Silverlight 1.0 closely followed by Silverlight 1.1
4. Microsoft was the most active “corporate user” of the site with over 2000 visits originating there

However, there is a problem. Here is how the feed looks in Reader’s list:

The actual search term is represented by the first letter only. Interestingly Google’s Russian rival Yandex makes the very same mistake (the line above Google’s).

Search term alerts feed name should start from the term itself:

Fixing that is easier than writing this post.

1. WPF controls
2. Cross-domain network requests and built-in support for REST, WS*/SOAP, POX, RSS and plain HTTP
3. Sockets
4. LINQ and LINQ to XML
5. HTML DOM access
6. 4.3MB runtime for Windows / Mac / Linux (planned) and IE, Firefox and Safari

Details are here — check it out!

Here is his list (with my comments)

1. Non-Standard GUI Controls (sometimes you have to use non-standard controls, if they can do the job better; otherwise we would stop the GUI design evolution in 60-ties)
2. Inconsistency (inconsistency is bad, but in the context vs consistency battle context wins)
3. No Perceived Affordance (agreed)
4. No Feedback (agreed)
5. Bad Error Messages (I would generalize this to include bad copy in general)
6. Asking for the Same Info Twice (who does that after all?)
7. No Default Values (agreed)
8. Dumping Users into the App (I didn’t understand this one)
9. Not Indicating How Info Will Be Used (hmm… I don’t suppose explaining everything is a good idea; it’s better to let user correct the mistake easily, when necessary)
10. System-Centric Features (I would call them useless features — pretty obvious)

The complete article, while being a bit on a linkbait side, worth checking out too.

1. Start from something interesting and intriguing. Ignore usual expectations at that point
2. Develop your vision fully before starting to think about standard features
3. Keep it fun, keep on trying new things. Otherwise they’ll stand up and go
4. At some point they’ll start crying about the missing standard features and asking to add them. Don’t!
5. Announce you will do that, but make yet another new and cool thing instead
6. That will make them really want it
7. Go ahead and add the standard stuff… wow

Apple executed it perfectly with the iPhone (and its SDK), why don’t you try it at home?

Happy Valentine’s day everyone!

Sounds familiar, does it? Just a couple of years ago every application had dozens of message boxes and confirmation dialogs popping up here and there. Now it’s changing. In Loudtalks we decided we won’t use any.

So how do you handle the above mentioned situation without throwing a message box?

Implement Undo for any action the user may regret a moment later. Sometimes it could be tricky but most applications don’t have to do anything irreversible.

There are several caveats of course:

1) Sometimes you really have to do something, which can’t be reversed (like format the hdd).
2) Blind users accessibility should be taken into account.

Even if the action does require re-confirmation, you could do it in more elegant way. For example, use in-place confirmation button. Probably the best way to address accessibility issue is to implement a handler, which will announce the undo keyboard shortcut along with the fact that the action is completed, when screen reader software is detected.

Do you still use MessageBox in your software?