I won’t!

I’m sitting here, it’s about midnight on Wednesday, and I have a post due for tomorrow. The problem? I can’t decide what to write about. That is to say, I can think of at least one thing to write about, but I really don’t want to write about that. What is that you ask? The iPhone SDK. Yeah it’s great, finally after a year of the iPhone Apple gave in to the community and announced the SDK. However, I’m getting a little tired of covering Apple. I talk about their events, I talk about their new products, and I’m starting to become concerned that this blog might be turning into the unknown Apple propaganda site of the internet. I don’t want that.

So what am I going to write about? Well, I watched an interview from Microsoft’s Mix ‘08 event this week, where-in famed Apple stalwart was Guy Kawasaki was invited to poke and prod one Steve Ballmer. Now, I like Ballmer. All else aside, I think he’s a charismatic guy who’s very passionate about Microsoft plus he’s a straight shooter who avoids giving BS answers when at all possible. He did a good job defending his company (including Vista and the potential Yahoo acquisition) plus gave a lot of information about where Microsoft is heading in the future. To be honest, I really liked a lot of what he said and he got me excited about what they’ll do next. I think at this point Microsoft realizes they can’t just rest on the laurels anymore. They see Apple gaining market share and popularity because they are very good at delivering what their customers ask for. Now, of course, that’s a much easier job for Apple as a proprietary hardware OEM, but I’ll expect Microsoft to act much in the same way in the future.

He also got me excited about Silverlight. Up until recently, Silverlight just seemed to be yet another browser-based flash video player. Some of the stuff that was shown off at Mix though, particularly the Hard Rock Cafe demo (if you watch this video in particular, skip about halfway through the video to get to the goods), has me genuinely interested in where the project will go from there. They’ve integrated Silverlight 2.0 to have a lot of .NET functionality and tools, so we’ll see where that goes. Microsoft has partnered with NBC to have rights to the upcoming Olymic Games website, so I’m interested to see what they’ll be able to do with that. Honestly, just watching video on the Mix website with the Silverlight video player is pretty nice. The most important thing about all this is that it doesn’t matter unless Silverlight becomes a standard and it still has a whole lot of competition – Flash, in particular. Still their commitment to NBC shows that they’re trying to promote Silverlight as a viable development platform and in the future as a “quasi web developer” I’d love to play around with it. If you haven’t yet, go download and install it and then search around using The Google for some Silverlight web apps. If you get a chance to watch the Hard Rock demo, all the better. Actually scratch that, just got to Hard Rock’s website and try it out for yourself. It’s worth it.

See, now that wasn’t so hard was it? Sure Apple dominated the news this week, but I only had to mention them in glancing and I feel kind of good about it! Anyways, this is my last post from Spring Break ‘08 so the next time you see a new post it will be straight back to business. I swear.

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Dropkick Murphys – Skinhead on the MBTA
Hellgate: London