Monday, November 30, 2009

First looks: Microsoft Live Labs Pivot


I just got an invite to Microsoft Live Labs Pivot and I am currently testing it out. Although, I haven't found a practical use of it, it looks visually interesting. Other than that, this desktop application seems resource intensive.

Microsoft describes Pivot as follows: "Pivot makes it easier to interact with massive amounts of data in ways that are powerful, informative, and fun." It is difficult to pinpoint what exactly that means, because its doesn't seems like a search engine. Also, it is unclear if this has anything to do with the semantic web.

Pivot uses Trident, Seadragon and .NET. (In fact, this is quite apparent once you experience the app for yourself). It feels like a desktop version of Photosynth with images of data (as collections) instead of images of places.

Here are some screenshots:


Saturday, November 28, 2009

Fonts of the Web

Good typography is pretty important, even on the web.

The League of Moveable Type + Some cheap CSS hacking and a bit of work = Awesome looking site

Java 7

Java 7 JDK: September 2010
Here are 7 of the new features that have been completed:

* Language support for collections
* Automatic Resource Management
* Improved Type Inference for Generic Instance Creation (diamond)
* Underscores in numeric literals
* Strings in switch
* Binary literals
* Simplified Varargs Method Invocation

Read more about the new language features here...

Java 7 (Project Coin) is actually looking good! For a modern programming language to stay relevant, it is important to introduce new paradigms to make programming easier while maintaining a large degree of backward compatibility. It wasn't so long ago that Python made a gigantic leap from 2.6 to 3.0.