Activity for June 20

Review - Adobe Media Player
1.8 (May 18, 2010)

Adobe Media Player has been my media player of choice for watching their product videos, tutorials and occassionaly my FLV's. Its name could be misleading as it is not designed to be a general media player but a player targeting creative professionals. It is also a small cross-platform media player for its UI. Any claims about bloated probably have not done any objective research or even known anything in terms of that level of programming. Adobe Media Player is able to work responsively on my 1.6Ghz laptop with jazzy UI animations, and flawless content playback, something that Windows Media Player or Quicktime could not even come close.
Review - Google Chrome for Windows
5.0.371.0 Beta (Apr 12, 2010)

Chrome has been my default browser and I am loving it everyday of my life. I launches faster than Firefox, browses faster than IE/FF, and its minimalistic approach saves more precious pixels for contents.

However, the latest version 5.0.137.0 crashes a lot on sites such as news.com, smashingmagazine.com, while the rest of Chrome deserves 5 stars, the crash sets it back 2 ponies.
Review - Google Chrome for Windows
4.0.302.2 Beta (Jan 23, 2010)

I have been using Chrome since its initial public appearance, and decided I would obtain Chrome through dev channel.

Chrome is blazingly fast, after using Chrome for a while, I noticed that IE crawls in many web apps while Firefox would take forever to launch.

For those who bash Chrome's privacy invasion, turn Wireshark on, and see the network traffic yourself before you posting hoax and rumors of all the concerns.
Review - Microsoft SyncToy
2.1 (Nov 12, 2009)

Sync Toy is simple and easy to use, it saves me a lot of hassle cross syncing both my home computer and work computer. SyncToy was noticibly missing and missed when I migrated to Windows 7, I am happy that Microsoft finally has released this powertoy for free again.
Review - Google Chrome for Windows
4.0.223.9 Beta (Oct 23, 2009)

After I first got my hands on Chrome in the pre-1.0 days, I suddenly noticed Firefox took forever to load (trust me, my Firefox is not laden with any add-ons); and IE is too slow to render or execute anything. Chrome's minimal list UI and the integrate search have instantly convinced me that it should be my default browser.

Version 2, 3 and 4 of Chrome have never failed me from their speed and stability. I am glad the last two beta's of Chrome have got rid of theme from the blank page as the themes are utterly terrible.

For those who complain about Google big bro -- well, what's the proof? Have you ever turned on Wire Shark, Fiddler or any http proxy and see how much Chrome has big brothered your usage?
Comment - Adobe tackles cross-platform iOS/Android app creation with Flash Builder 4.5
4.0.223.9 Beta (Jun 20, 2011 - 10:36 PM)

I am very impressed by the latest Flex. I have been working on a big Flex application for sometime which involves tones of controls and real-time visualization. Flex made it possible to run across browsers without the hassle of cross-browser nightmare. Last week I successfully compiled this application for iOS platform, and it ran pixel-to-pixel perfect on my iPad and iPhone 4. It even worked with my webcam on iPhone 4 too. No other technology could rival this including HTML 5, performance of Flash is consistently better than HTML 5.

With Flex, I can take advantage of its rich framework for enterprise application, or I could write lean-and-mean AS3 components when performance is more important.

Way to go, Adobe!
Comment - Why is John Hodgman smiling? Data loss isn't the only Snow Leopard problem
4.0.223.9 Beta (Oct 13, 2009 - 12:31 PM)

"This is Mac for God's sake!" -- apparently a lot of people have a short memory of the System 7.5 age where Macintosh is a short for "Most Application Crashes, If Not, The Operating System Hangs" -- Just because the first few generations of the OS was a success does not mean the later releases would inherit the glory. In fact, this is a classic growing pain for OS to have stability and backward compatibility. Windows went through that, Mac OS is going through that, and guess what, have we heard of the latest fiasco of iPhone OS 3.1.1 crashing many 3G model, and Apple had to put up a new release to fix those issues.
Comment - DC Metro begins wireless signal improvement in underground stations
4.0.223.9 Beta (Aug 19, 2009 - 5:21 PM)

This means more ppl yapping loudly in the train about nothing. :)

More than a year ago Metro already posted cellphone courtesy with only VZ accessible in the tunnel ... well, the noise level hasn't really come down. I would imagine they will have to try harder to get people to respect the noise level, not to share their dinner plan.
Comment - Microsoft removes the blinders from the front end of VS 2010
4.0.223.9 Beta (Feb 25, 2009 - 1:02 AM)

The link to Zander's Blog is broken, it should be
http://blogs.msdn.com/ja...visual-studio-2010.aspx
Comment - Adobe claims 100 million AIR installs...Where's Silverlight?
4.0.223.9 Beta (Jan 29, 2009 - 1:02 PM)

Ultimately content is really what drives adoption. Flash 9 adoption was mostly driven by Youtube. Even Microsoft themselves have decided to use Flash for their Soapbox video service, announce Vista via Flash video (not Silverlight). As a .NET developer who happens to have years of experience with Flash and Flex, I can only say Silverlight still needs iteration(s) to be mature. Hopefully content developers would help drive the product forward.