PxlDan

I can totally relate -- I had the same Tegan and Sara tune stuck in my head for about three weeks. It's like peanut butter on the roof of your brain, that song. It has since been replaced by two equally inspidly catchy songs; "Hellodrama" by a band called What Made Milwaukee Famous (sounds like something by The Knack) and "It's Business Time" by The Flight of the Conchords. If you and Shana haven't been exposed to the Conchords yet, you should check out their recent DVDs. HILARIOUS. You'd both love them, I think. Unfortunately, my dreams of working on a Mac on the job flew the coop, as we just entered a development partnership with Micorsoft for their new Silverlight Application. Looks like I'll be Bill Gates' bootlicking man-servant for at least a couple more years. Ugh.

Shanna had picked up The Flight of the Conchords DVD last week. Great series. If you haven;t seen the HBO series they did a couple years back it's also worth tracking down. I'm checking out What Made Milwaukee Famous now. I'll be interested to hear what you thoughts are on Silverlight...

From a browser-compatibilty standpoint, Silverlight has been pretty amazing, to tell you the truth. Up until now, the only option to get streaming radio to display and function idenitcally on Macs and PCs, in Safari, FF and IE, was to use a grossly inefficient ond overpriced all-Flash solution. We have boatloads invested in a Windows Media streaming network, so replacing everything with Flash Communications Servers just wasn't realistic, and the sound quality is terrible, not to mention really unreliable. Now with Silverlight, we've been able to build players that give the same user experience to everyone. Period. In-Stream banner ads display the same, artist and title data appear the same, player controls appear the same, synchronization works the same -- for everyone. It's a HUGE improvement. From a technical standpoint, Silverlight has really delivered big-time for us. However, as the company's Creative Director, it will be a LONG, LONG time before I even considering adopting any of their companion "Expressions" tools. Silverlight may rock on a technical level, but the accompanying front-end design tools are just awful. They bill Sliverlight as the "Flash Killer", and it may eventually prove true as a media delivery application, but they are decades behind Adobe in terms of design tools. As MS's tools stand now, I can't possibly imagine a scenerio where a designer would freely choose to use Expressions over Flash as a design or animation tool. It works great for playing back video, but in terms of vector graphics, it's just atrocious. I think Microsoft is a little irritated with us that we'll still using Flash controls and animations in our Media Players, but until they make some gigantic improvements to their creative tools, we're gonna stick with Adobe. In short, as a back-end application, Silverlight really seems to deliver. As a creative tool, not so much.