Today’s Media News

Version 2.0b.20070415 of SoundManager2

The Schill mania never stops! Version 2.0b.20070415 of SoundManager2 dropped last April and a Songhay System demo page of my remix is in order. Work is under way.

Songhay System Remix of tinyMCE Is Live

My YUI-based remix of tinyMCE is live. My previous assumption was that tinyMCE could work with one of my applications. But just like tinyMCE in WordPress.org forms, it’s turned off. My number one pet peeve is my inability to keep   in its raw, invisible glyph.

VSTO 2005 SE

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the 2007 Microsoft Office System is installed in the Songhay studio and it’s not as scary as previously assumed. What’s less scary and more a bit depressing is that those sloppy get_*() methods are still there for C# users. VSTO SE projects do away with document-level applications and focus exclusively on the Application-level Add-in. More on this in “Upgrading Document-Level Projects.”

WPF

Remember WPF? Is everything Silverlight now? A WPF application is actually needed for my job that brings in the most income right now. So now the WPF band wagon has come to give me a lift. WPF trivia: there is no WPF equivalent to the Notification Icon, you still need to use Windows forms! More WPF trivia: you can load old-fashioned web pages with WPF using the Frame Control—however, check out, “What are some of the ‘gotchas’ with using the WPF frame control?”

Silverlight!

The AllowsTransparency property is very important when you want to build something that’s similar to those fade-in-fade-out, pop-up notifications in Outlook (or the latest version of Thunderbird). More on this in “June CTP and Transparent Windows.” Way back in August 2006 Tim Sneath slipped us some the typographic features in WPF/Silverlight in “The Power of the One Line Demo.” When you see stuff like Typography.HistoricalLigatures and Typography.DiscretionaryLigatures, it’s time to get back to thinking about serious typography on the web! Adobe/Macromedia of all places disrespected this for so, so long in Flash by barely supporting Unicode.

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