Also cross-posted on my company blog

After three days of the Microsoft Mix10 event the brain tend to overflow. So I sit down at a Starbucks and try to summarize my thoughts before my mind explodes.

It’s easy to get caught up in positive buzz during events like this but I really think Microsoft is doing a lot of things right here with Windows Phone 7 series, the next level of .NET and Silverlight and Internet Explorer 9, among other things. Some of it, I believe, accounts to all the focus on User Experience and the influence that Bill Buxton have on this.

Also if you want to catch any of the sessions most of them are up at the mix10 site already.

Silverlight release pace

This was a big surprise to me; Silverlight 4 is going to be released as early as next month end the release candidate (RC) is out now. I was more in the lines of a beta and the an RC in the summer and a release late 2010. But it seems they try to align and do a big release with .NET 4, VS2010 and Silverlight 4. As a bonus the Pivot control will be in the controls toolkit so that’s going to be fun to play with.

Silverlight 4 Tools RC | .NET 4 RC | VS2010 RC

About the Windows Phone 7 series

The development platform for Windows Phone 7 series was, of course, one of the biggest news on the starting keynote and lot of sessions around it followed. I think they are on the right track with the platform. A few surprises surfaced, like the inclusion of DirectX to utilize HW backed video decoding and the Windows Phone development tools being released for free.

But a few questions and problems surfaced as well, as you can se all over the web it seems they are not including cut & paste and market place being the only application deployment channel. Other things I thought about was:

• How is the user interface is going to perform in right to left markets.
• What the possibilities are to hook in other services, like for example Pandora, to provide music streams for the native Zune player.
• And I still have a few issues with lag in the interface as well as accidental clicks, lets just hope the will get this issues out the door before they release it.

The user experience work that has been put into the new OS is really cool, the decision to remove all chrome and go for a real clean and consistent look is really fresh. And the decision to let the back button work on all levels across the phone, in-applications as well as between was a stroke of genius.

Windows Phone Dev tools | UI Design guidelines

What about HTML 5 and IE 9

It was pretty obvious that they should release some news around Internet Explorer 9 and its take on HTML 5. It is just an early technology preview but I have to say I’m impressed by the results. They did tone down the JavaScript speed issues but quite frankly they were on par with the other browsers and at those speeds it really is less of an issue. What still is an issue is standards, and anything but a 100/100 score on Acid3 is a failure in my eyes.

What they did show was the brilliant work they have done on the GPU acceleration part. This really was amazing 720p HD video streaming on a netbook was blazing fast, they even manage to pump two 720p streams without a glitch, impressive. And rendering HMTL5, CSS3 and SVG with hardware acceleration really looks promising.

If anything it shows that the Internet Explorer team is still in the game and might really get a decent browser out the door.

IE9 platform preview

Expression Blend 4

The things I saw done with blend was quite cool, this tool has come a long way from the first release and is now a potent tool. The tight integration with Adobe was finally in place, just point to the assets and start editing it in Illustrator or Photoshop. What’s more impressive, if I got it right, was that you were able to bind to a text object from the imported Illustrator assets directly to the object in your ViewModel! This really puts design control back into the hands of the designer.

Expression Blend 4 beta

Get real

So what’s left for me now is to find the time to play with all these new toys and and experience for myself what they are capable of before it’s time to Get Real and start creating.

Have fun // Håkan Reis

Just backing up the last stuff on my computer before shutting down. Checking the flight plan once more and packing the last items. Tomorrow I’ll get up early to catch a plane to Las Vegas and Mix10. This is really going to be fun. Especially I look forward to the HaaHa show, the key note, and of course the stuff on Windows Phone 7 Series (still a really bad name).

Of course its not that bad that its in Las Vegas, but well that’s just a bonus. You could of course expect some kind of report here from my visit when I had some time to digest the impressions.

See you // Håkan Reis

For some time I have bee using Spotify as a music service. And it have worked out very well. With one account as a premium account and then some extra free accounts its easy to play around and create some playlists and the connect and play from the premium account.

The other thing I use a lot at home for music is my Soundbridge, when I bought it, roku labs was making it. Then it was sold through Pinnacle, unfortunately I think its discontinued now. Anyway, when Windows 7 came I could also just look up a what music I like to play, and just send the along to play to my Soundbridg. Compared to other locked in standards, that is just brilliant.

The problem

But now that I have one device and one service that I really like, I would want them to play nice together, I want the full catalog of Spotify accessible from my Soundbridge. What I really would like is to have Spotify as a uPNP server implementation, then you could easily search the full database and have the playlists ready directly. But that’s maybe for the future,

The second best thing, however, would at least to be able to stream what you got from your server to the Soundbridge, or any other streaming device for that matter. After reading several hacks and looking at a lot of solutions I found two that works for me.

Two streaming solutions 

The first is for my work computer, where I alternate from OS X and windows 7 and when I’m on OS X, I can use a commercial app called Nicecast from rogue amoeba (the also make airfoil). It’s very easy to set up but you need to start Spotify from Nicecast and you can't just execute it as usual. What more is that it doesn't code the current song name and artist to the stream. Aöpart from that it works well, it even supports streaming to the world so it means more than one receiver. But for my setup I have Windows machine as a server, so why spend $40 to only stream from my work computer?

So I go with the second and even simpler solution, a little DirectSound wrapper called dsbridge. What this does it taking the output, encode it using lame ENC and then streaming it out. It even shows the current playing song and artist together with the source (Spotify). It’s quite intelligent to, if a receiver connects to the port it silences the local output and if you stop the streaming it just restores the normal output (can be configured). It's an early hack - single stream only but sound quality is ok, and there is something to its simplicity I really like. Very nifty. 

Hope you will be helped with this if you are looking for a similar solution.

// Håkan Reis

PS: Is there anyone with a solution on how to remote control Spotify from an iPhone? :)

Update:  Spotify Remotless is an iPhone app that works together with a helper and remote controls Spotify ($4). Doing a decent job, but the effect is a bit delayed due to the re-coding dsbridge needs to do before it streams it out. It even enables you to tweet the current song, nice twist.