Clay's Blog

Have you been waiting to try out Microsoft’s newest operating system, Vista? Don’t want to install Vista on your PC until you know what you are in for? Now you have options.

If you already have an install disc or are lucky enough (like me) to have access to the Enterprise Edition through our campus agreement with Microsoft, you can install Vista inside a virtual machine using Virtual PC 2007 – and now you can get VPC 2007 for free. That’s right, Microsoft is giving away their virtualization software at no cost. And if you have a machine with a Core2Duo or one of the quad core versions of the processor and a couple of gigs of RAM, you won’t notice much sluggishness at all while you test drive Vista.

My Core2Duo machine at home runs Vista in Virtual PC 2007 noticeably faster than my Alienware FX-55-based machine at work. But it’s not so slow as to be unusable in any way. So give it a try. I am planning to use my virtual Vista install to test compatibility with various video codecs and utilities that I use on a daily basis. If I find that all of my apps run well in Vista, I plan to upgrade my Core2Duo machine.

Microsoft recently hit the news circuit with an announcement of a new class of devices that feature touchscreen interfaces that allow for multiple simultaneous touchpoints. The project is called Microsoft Surface. Here’s the ZDNet story on it. And here’s a nice video of the system.

I have been following the development of multi-touch display technology for a few years. I ran into the technology at SIGGRAPH a few years ago and each year have seen major advances. The project was based at NYU and was recently spun off into a private company called Perceptive Pixel. The NYU software ran on Linux (I seem to remember).

I wonder if they will be able to get their systems to consumers at a reasonable price sooner than Microsoft. Either way, I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these things.

If you haven’t seen this already, take a look. Mike Wesch at Kansas State University really boils down the ways the web has been changing over the last couple of years.

Just watched a demo of Adobe’s new Apollo cross-platform runtime environment. The developer’s release is due out in 1st quarter 2007. We have several projects in the works that will benefit greatly from this new tool. I can’t wait to sink my teeth into it. More information is available at Adobe Labs.On a related note, I am going to be doing a crash course into Flex Builder 2 and ActionScript 3 for a project with Tom Klingler (from Tulane) and Amanda La Fleur (from LSU). We’ll be building an online course for Cajun French. One of our target audiences is young Cajun musicians who would like to learn Cajun French to be able to practice their craft better.

I’d like to build the site with a combination of HTML and Flex with a MSSQL Server backend. I think Flex will be a nice fit, especially for the interactive exercises and multimedia presentation. I figure the less time I have to spend inside of the Flash 8 Pro IDE, the better. Looking forward to getting to know Flex Builder 2.

Carrie Lee Schwartz of Tulane’s University College Media Arts Program became the first faculty member at the university to begin delivering a course completely using Tulane’s Macromedia Breeze meeting server on Tuesday, May 19th. The class, UMAR-470 – Digital Portfolio Development, will be meeting exclusively using the Tulane’s Breeze Live server and other supplemental content in Blackboard. The Breeze server allows live meetings using text, audio, and video. It has tools for showing presentations (such as Powerpoint files), polling, quizzing, and shared whiteboarding. And finally, it has a very nice screen sharing feature (the current version supports only PC screen sharing, but the new version supports Macintosh screen sharing, as well). Take a look at the interface in action (click the thumbnail for a larger version). We hope to roll the server out for general use by the Tulane community as soon as we have the latest version (Breeze 5) installed and configured. I’ll keep you posted.