In general the interface has gotten a bit of a face lift.  Minimized apps look cleaner with a small app icon displayed next to the app name and the close button.  The transition animation that plays as you open an app folder is really nice.  All the new apps have a very clean and intuitive design.  This is probably the work of The Astonishing Tribe which joined RIM shortly after PlayBook was announced.

Messages

The best new app is the Messages app.  The first time I launched Messages I was taken to an account setup screen where I defined my Gmail, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts.  I also saw that I can connect to a Microsoft Exchange server.  Returning to the Messages app I saw that all my e-mail/messages had been imported from these different services.  The interface is really nice and I can see all activity across all of my accounts or look at just one account.  I did run into some problems where the settings button was initially greyed out and I also noticed that the Inbox for Gmail didn’t show all the e-mail that normally shows in my Gmail inbox.  I think the Messages app gets a little confused when you tag items in Gmail.  Once I did get into the settings, I was able to turn on the “group messages by conversation” option which helped organize all those Facebook messages.  I also turned off the stupid “Sent from my BlackBerry PlayBook” signature…Disco Stu doesn’t advertise.

Contacts

I was really impressed with the Contacts app.  I can see all my contacts from Gmail, Facebook, and LinkedIn.  I can even merge duplicates.  All of the information is there from each service.  The name start letter selection menu on the left is really slick and useful.  This app is awesome if you have a lot of contacts and use your PlayBook for business.

Browser

I saw that the browser now has some kind of Reader Mode.  I tested it on my blog and it does allow you to view the page in Reader Mode if you look at an individual post.  I’m not sure how useful this feature really is unless you’re visiting a site that doesn’t format well for  mobile devices and is able to load in Reader Mode.  Might be useful for e-book reading sites.

Calendar

The design of the calendar app is excellent.  You can view your calendar by week or month and instantly jump to today’s date.  It also automatically imported my Facebook friends’ birthdays!  When you create a new event you can select if you want to save the event to your local calendar, Google/Gmail calendar, or Facebook calendar…very cool.  I tried saving a new event to my Google Calendar and it popped right up when I refreshed the Google Calendar page on my PC’s browser.

App World

App World has a new design that reminds me a lot of the new Android Market, which reminds me a lot of the Windows Phone Metro UI design.  The layout is basically different sized tiles which you can scroll through.  It looks nice and seems to load a bit faster than the old App World did.  Still can’t view app preview screenshots full screen .  I also got a slew of errors when updating some of the apps I had, but updates have been buggy for some time.  I tried out the two apps I developed for PlayBook, flickr frame and flickr explore browser, and both ran fine under 2.0.

Print To Go

I also saw a new “Print To Go” utility that lets you configure your PlayBook to print to a printer connected to a PC.  Sounds a lot like Google Cloud Print that has come to Android.  The idea is great, but in my case my printer is connected over wi-fi and I don’t have a PC running all the time acting as a print server, so I’m not so sure how this app would work for me.  No biggie, I don’t really plan to print from my PlayBook.

Summary

What this update brought to the table is a bunch of really great productivity apps.  While most people are still using their tablets as portable gaming systems, RIM is offering up a bunch of really useful tools for people who actually want to put their tablet to work.  That is BlackBerry’s bread and butter, the business types.  If they could just get the PlayBook into more businesses we might actually see PlayBook thrive.

I’ve always loved the gestures on the PlayBook.  I think it was very innovative of them to take advantage of the bezel space and the gestures make working with PlayBook really smooth and effortless.  I really think that PlayBook has a superior interface to iPad and Android tablets, but BlackBerry was so slow in getting PlayBook to market that it really hurt their chances for success.  The same story with Microsoft’s Window Phone, really nice UI and nice devices, too late to the show.  Now that PlayBook sort of supports Android apps, we may see them make a comeback.  It’s not helping that Adobe is abandoning the Flex framework, which was/is the primary development platform for PlayBook.  Maybe RIM knew it was coming and that motivated them to adopt Android.

The 2.0 update was a step in the right direction.  I’d love to see more productivity apps from RIM along with more Android apps making their way to PlayBook.  We’ll have to wait and see if that is enough to keep the PlayBook around as the tablet market becomes more and more competitive.

The quality of the recording and mastering of this album are top notch.  Each instrument and vocal comes through in perfect detail and blend so nice.  You feel like you’re sitting in the middle of their performance.  Acoustic guitar on my left, another on the right, bass somewhere in between, drums in the back, and lead vocals center stage.

Of course the performances were excellent as well.  All 13 songs are great.  If you’re a fan at all, you owe it to yourself to check this album out.  I’m hoping to some day get the DVD as well and try it out on the surround sound

One of Double Fine’s latest projects is a new adventure game that they are funding via Kickstarter.  Why Kickstarter?  Because classic adventure games are old school and game publishers aren’t interested in funding them.  There just isn’t any money to be made in making adventure games…right?  Take a look at the Kickstarter project.  They’re at over $2 million as of this writing.  They hit their target of $400,000 within 8 hours and I believe they hit $1 million within 24 hours.  They’ve still got 22 days left for people to donate and the money is still trickling in.

When they hit $1 million, the gaming news sites picked up the story which is how I heard about the project.  I went ahead and pledged $15 just so that I’d have access to the game when it came out.  Honestly, when I read “adventure game”, I thought it was going to be something like Psychonauts which I consider to be an adventure game.  I was wrong, this is going to be a game more like The Secret of Monkey Island or Full Throttle, a game where you click through an interactive story and solve puzzles.  I never actually played any of those old adventure games, but they look like fun to me.  Plus my laptop sucks and I probably couldn’t play anything 3D on it.  Monkey Island was updated with new graphics and is now on XBox Live Arcade, so I’ll be grabbing that soon just so that I can get into the adventure game mood.

It’s totally worth the $15 just to check it out and get access to the behind the scenes documentary they’re making.  If you’re into creative games that tell a good story, I’d encourage you to pitch in your $15 and check it out!

“In the past, features were added to Flash Player and AIR specifically to support the needs of Flex applications. Going forward, features will be added to the runtimes to support Adobe’s vision for the Flash Platform. The Apache Flex Project may choose to take advantage of those features; however, new features will not be added to the runtimes specifically to support the Apache project’s efforts.”

That bit there is really what will kill Flex.  The SDK can continue to evolve, but only as far the runtime will allow it.  We’ll no longer see the real significant innovations come to Flex because the runtime will never change to support them.

Also mentioned in the document is that Flash Catalyst is going away along with the design view within Flash Builder.  This is a clear indication that Adobe doesn’t really plan to continue building tooling around Flex, they just want to support basic coding features until they can quietly put Flash Builder to rest.

Adobe has abandoned Flex and is now focused on HTML, which makes a lot of sense for them.  Mobile changed everything.  Apple was never going to play nice with Adobe and there were too many technical hurdles to getting Flash to be performant and fully featured across so many mobile platforms and devices.  With HTML, Adobe no longer has to worry about getting the platform in place…HTML is supported out of the box.  All they have to worry about is doing what they do best, creating design tools.  Adobe Edge is looking good and my experience with PhoneGap has been positive.

I think that I am still far more productive developing with Flex than I am with HTML, but as the technology and tooling evolves, that could change very quickly.  When it comes to enterprise development I’m still not convinced that HTML is a good solution.  I’ve been working with Microsoft’s WPF framework along with their Visual Studio and Expression Blend tools and I’m very impressed.  Right now I think Microsoft’s offering is very good for enterprise development if you are targeting the Windows desktop.  For mobile, I still think native development is best, but I would love to see HTML based apps really come together with some nice design tools and a way to package your app for multiple platforms (a la PhoneGap).  As for Flex, I wish you a long life and I will miss you.

Ever since Netflix decided to eliminate the ability to share and compare movie ratings with other members I’ve been on the lookout for a site that filled the void.  I’ve been patient and I think my patience is finally about to pay off.  A new site is due out soon called Letterboxd which allows you to rate and review movies, create movie lists, create a watch list, and follow your friends movie activity.

The design of the site is exceptional.  Nice dark background to contrast with the movie cover art.  Great use of fonts, great layout, just a really clean site.  The only part I don’t really like is that the default search is “add a film” instead of just a search…you have to toggle on the search box to do a basic search for a film or actor if you want to get to that item’s page.

I’ve started going through and rating all the movies I’ve seen and overall it’s pretty quick and easy. I think it’s strange that you can select “I like this movie” and then also apply a star rating…I’m wondering what the point is of the “I like this movie” button.  I found that there was a “Link to Netflix” button that used to say something about importing your ratings from Netflix, but when I got the button to work, all it did was allow me to jump over to Netflix from within a movie listing.  They’re still working on this feature, so I’m holding off on rating everything until I can try out that button again since I’ve rated so many movies on Netflix.

The lists are really useful…you can see lists like “Reddit top 150 films” or “IMDB top 250″.  This I think is the primary movie discovery feature.  What this site is really lacking is what Netflix has, a recommendation engine.  Some people like to work their way through the top 250 on IMDB, but I’m more interested in those hidden gems that never made it to the top the charts.  Netflix has an uncanny way of finding stuff I’m into and I would love to see that make it’s way over to Letterboxd.

The site also has a “People” section which lets you see what movies other people have reviewed.  It reminds me of that little section in the VHS rental place where the local critic would share their picks o’ the week.  If you happen to share their taste, you can follow that person and find new movies that way.  I’m currently following my friend Dan and I can see his recent reviews and ratings.  If I dig in a bit, I can look at all his ratings and sort by number of stars which is really nice.  Currently there is no way to recommend a movie to a friend or see what movies you might like that they’ve rated (like Netflix used to do), but some of that is on the development road map.

Overall the site seems really promising.  The biggest missing piece is the recommendation engine, but I’m sure that is not a simple task considering Netflix offered up a $1M prize to improve their recommendation algorithm.

Last but not least, I have a couple of invites to the site I’m all out of invites.  If you happen across my blog and want an invitation, just post a comment with your e-mail address.  I’ll updated this post when the 2 invites are gone.

http://kotaku.com/5882961/minecrafts-creator-wants-to-put-up-money-to-make-psychonauts-2-a-reality

Working with Control Templates

One of the biggest roadblocks I’ve run into is “how do I customize the default look and feel of a control?”.  This might seem like an easy task, but once you try to do something like apply a theme to your application, changing or extending the look of controls becomes problematic.  Say you’ve chosen to force the use of the Aero theme in your application, when you go to define a style based on the default Aero style you start running into weird situations like not being able to define the style in app.xml or issues with circular references.  I’ve found that the simplest approach to extending the look of themed controls is to just edit a copy of the control template.  Visual Studio really has no facility for pulling up a controls template.  In Blend you can create a copy of the default template and customize to your hearts content.

Managing Resources

Another big question I had before watching the training videos was “how can I define styles, brushes, and colors that I want to re-use throughout my application?”.  The training videos show both the simple approach of putting those things within app.xml, but they also show you how to break them out into separate resource files.  Through the Resources panel in Blend you can see the resources available to your application as well as resources defined within the window you’re currently working with.  Most properties are also easily converted to resources using the Convert to New Resource option.

Using Sample Data

This feature was probably the coolest of any that I saw during the videos.  You can define a new sample data collection or even import sample XML data.  From there you can easily define your properties including their data type and format.  For example, you can make a collection called customers, then define properties like name and phone number.  You can then tell Blend that “name” contains company names and “phone number” contains phone numbers and Blend will automagically create a bunch of names and phone numbers for you.  It even works with things like dates, URLs, and a bunch more.  You can even just choose to fill in “lorum ipsum” values.  Of course you can drag those properties onto controls to bind them and it just works.  This functionality is a huge time saver.

Animation

The animation facilities within Blend seem really good.  The videos show you how to do some basic things like animate the different states of a button, but you can tell that you can really do a lot with the animation editor.  Later on when you learn about triggers the video also mentions how you can animate things as a result of an event.  I was also impressed with how you can use all the different easing algorithms and even define your own custom easing using this cool little visual editor.

Using SketchFlow

Before watching the videos I really wasn’t too sure what SketchFlow was for.  The coolness factor on SketchFlow is right up there with the sample data stuff.  SketchFLow allows you to create a working prototype of your application.  The controls are styled to look like rough sketches which help your project stakeholders focus on the functionality and workflow of the application instead of the aesthetics.  Flex had a similar idea where you could swap out the default theme with a prototyping theme.  What I didn’t see was an example of how you can take your SketchFlow project and convert it to a real WPF or Silverlight project, so I’ll have to do some googling on that topic.   One of the coolest features was being able to publish your SketchFlow project to a SharePoint site or your web server so that people can view the designs, export their comments, and send them to you.  You can even export your SketchFlow project to Word which takes screenshots of all the pages and outlines the entire project.

Beyond those topics, I also gleaned a few other interesting tidbits about Blend:

• Unlike Visual Studio, within Blend you can change the visibility of different elements which is especially useful if you’re using z-index with overlays or to mask off portions of your UI.  Within VS, elements that have their visibility set to hidden or collapsed still show up on the design surface which is really annoying at times.  In Blend you can simple toggle the visibility off.
• Not only can you embed fonts, but you can choose an option called “auto fill” which only embeds the characters used within any static text you’ve defined throughout your application.
• The Windows Phone section was really interesting.  Having played around with Android development within Eclipse, I can confidently say that the design experience within Blend is much better.  If Windows Phone picks up some more market share I’d definitely love to design some apps in Blend.

This video tutorial series was one of the best I’ve watched.  At just over 3 + 1/2 hours it was enough to get through in a weekend within having a mind meltdown.  The series covered exactly what I wanted it to and I feel like I have an understanding of all the pieces of Blend that I would actually use.  If I had to nitpick (which I obviously do), I wish Shawn didn’t say “make sense?” all the time.  Other than that the videos were top notch and I’d highly recommend them to other developers interested in learning Expression Blend.

Today I called Logitech support because my little mouse was on the fritz and would occasionally decide to register single clicks as double clicks. They had me perform a couple simple troubleshooting steps, decided it was a hardware problem, and told me they’d go ahead and swap it out. I asked if they’d advance ship me a replacement since I use the darn thing nearly every day. To my surprise she says “we’ll send a new one out to you…don’t worry about returning the old one, just recycle it”. Now that’s good customer service. Not the first time either…I have a Dinovo Mini keyboard/mouse that seems to have developed interference problems with my wi-fi. I thought the unit was faulty and Logitech swapped it out for me, no problem.

The film opens with early footage of Mother Love Bone.  I had known that some of the members of Mother Love Bone had later formed Pearl Jam, but I didn’t know anything about the death of their lead singer Andy Wood.  Interviews from band members and Chris Cornell go over his life and final days and at one point Chris is nearly in tears.  You really get a sense that these guys were extremely close.

Next we see Eddie Vedder come into the picture, this shy dude with tremendous creativity and that distinctive voice.  It was awesome watching some of their early shows.  Eddie seems like this tortured soul just putting everything out there through his music.  Then things get weird…you see Eddie start to transform into this intense sometimes chaotic character…climbing the stage and diving into the crowd.  As the band begins to gain popularity and merge into the mainstream you see Eddie starting to question if the band is growing into something he didn’t want to be a part of.  I remember watching another band documentary on Green Day and they struggled with the same issue, dealing with alienating their core audience and trying stay true to their music.  As the band starts to come apart at the seams, Neil Young reaches out the them and becomes somewhat of a mentor for Eddie.  Seems like Neil deserves some real credit for keeping the band together and getting them back on the right path.

The second half of the film goes into the stories behind the band’s other players, Mike McCready, Stone Gossard, Jeff Ament, Matt Cameron, and a brief overview of the other various drummers they’ve had.  We also see the tragedy of Roskilde Festival where 9 people were crushed and killed when the crowd pushed forward during Pearl Jam’s set.  I’ve skipped over a few bits, like the Ticketmaster dispute and some of the humanitarian efforts the band was involved in, but I wasn’t interested in that stuff…I was more interested in the personal side and watching the band and the music evolve.

Overall I loved the film.  What I took away from this movie/film/documentary:

• Pearl Jam is the real deal, they believe in their art.
• Gotta listen to some Neil Young!
• Time to queue up Ten and be 13 again, if only for a little while