Two days after the VBug presentation,  Simon and I have been asked to do a similar presentation at the Conchango offices in London

Promises to be a high-profile event with a good mix of developers and designers attending

 http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/07/21/uk-silverlight-user-group-date-confirmed.aspx

It's happening on the 14th of August and they're still filling designer spots.  Pop Michelle an email if you're a designer and wish to attend :¬)

Plenty of the CJ team will be there

A very interesting video on new Live search features, at time of writing not available in the UK (only in the US). Well worth getting your ecommerce SEO up to speed to be able to be part of these features.

Heres a quick comparison of the <font> tag with a 'size' attribute and a <span> tag with an inline style. This shows what size in pixels the 'size' attribute actually relates to. This only works if the browser text settings are set to display text at medium size and have a DPI of 96, I'm not going to go into the benefits of EM over PX in this post - this table is what it is. Especially useful when attempting to create a HTML email that correctly renders in Outlook and GMail.

Microsoft have just created a case study detailing our winning competition entry for the 'Be all you can be challenge'

http://www.microsoft.com/casestudies/casestudy.aspx?casestudyid=4000002403

Nice to be featured on Microsoft.com, big props to all involved :¬)

So the builders have been into the studio and taken out the wall in the Technical room, now Directors Billy and Al are taking out the remaining bricks where the wall used to be. Keep up the good work lads!

Some very interesting presentations from the Mix 08 session earlier this year. From developer presentations to best work practices.

The videos are the full session presentations, so can last for at least an hour.

http://sessions.visitmix.com/

It's Monday afternoon in the studio, our attention turned to the donuts sat in the corner of the room teasing us.
A quick discussion on how many someone could eat within a minute soon turned into a competition.
We timed eachother to see who could eat a donut the quickest.

Times are as follows:
Alex - 24
Nat - 33
Alexy - 32
Tim - 49
Rob - 42
Matt - 36

Can you beat Alex's time of 24 seconds?

Uuuuurrrrrrrgh I feel like DEATH! Had far too much too drink... but it was a very good night in the land of Wycombe!

Anyways heres something that looks much better than I currently do... over at Smashing Magazine theres a nice list of
70 beauty-retouching photoshop tutorials.

Now, don't get me wrong, i love all the new stuff Microsoft have release this year.  Silverlight has inspired me immensly, SilverlightStreaming has amazing potential for all the new ideas people are coming up with, DeepZoom is about the most amazing and usable thing I've seen for a long time.  The question really is this : how many people that i write software for (IE the General Public) have any idea on how to use it?

Jesse Liberty just wrote an amazing post that sums up that entire concept

http://silverlight.net/blogs/jesseliberty/archive/2008/07/11/the-5-levels-of-technophilia-and-silverlight.aspx

He descibes people's technical acceptance in a set of 5 percentiles, ranging from the uber geeks to the people who still record Eastenders on a BetaMax.  The CJ team are all sitting in Percentiles 1 and 2, while the majority of the internet users are more like 3, 4 and 5

Point is : it's all very well writing stuff in the latest technology but if the target audience is in the fouth and fifth percentiles then all that technological brilliance is wasted to a certain extent as the user will only use 5% of the functionality anyway. 

Not that it will stop me writing DeepZoom based e-commerce this year of course.  People are exposed to new tchnology all the time and it become the 'norm' as more people are exposed and learn to use it to their advantage. I hear they have installed the Microsft Surface app in a Las Vegas casion so how long before we're operating meetings at a table with Surface installed?  or using a touch-screen device to operate our home devices?  That may be a long way off but things like the DeepZoom application are moving people up the Technophile Percentiles all the time, adding more aspects to the user experience and expoingthem to new ways of doing onlice activities. This is exciting for the people writing these things as we can then push our apps even further :¬)