Monday, March 22 2010
I’m suing American Airlines in the amount of $977.25 for failure to provide services. That includes the $427.25 cost of my round-trip ticket plus ten hours of my time wasted at my average consulting rate of $55.00 / hour. Logistically this involves a forthcoming small claims suit in the City of New York listing their office at 100 E 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017. The $35.00 fee (that I’ve paid before) is a small price to pay for the satisfaction of holding accountable a company that embodies everything that, in my opinion, is leading to the collapse of the American economy.. Why do you ask? It will become apparent through a series of incompetent events that mostly transpired in a couple of hours. Let us start at the beginning though.
This past fall my friend suggested that she, some mutual friends, and I make our way to Austin, TX for SXSW, an incredible indie music, film and interaction festival celebrating its 23rd year in operation. It was pretty much a no-brainer decision for me and I almost immediately booked a round-trip from New York, NY to Austin, TX on American Airline on Travelocity.
Fast forward to 3/1/2010 when my phone records indicate I made a call to American Airlines customer service at (800)433-7300. I called American Airlines to change my round-trip from New York, NY –> Austin, TX to a one-way from Austin, TX –> New York, NY. You see, in the interim my company had asked me to represent them at a large industry conference in Las Vegas, NV. The dates of this conference happened to overlap with my flight to SXSW. So instead of going New York, NY –> Austin, TX I was now going New York, NY –> Las Vegas, NY –> Austin, TX –> New York, NY. The woman I spoke with about this issue told me that this wouldn’t be a problem and that I was all set for my 3/21/2010 flight from Austin, TX –> New York, NY. GREAT!!! … so I thought.
Monday, March 15 2010
Although the software announcements made today were somewhat disappointing (no releases, just more betas, CTPs, and RCs) the cross-platform functionality offered by XNA 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Visual Studio 2010, and Windows Phone 7 were compelling. A number of partners gave demos today that showcased some of the really interesting new features of Blend 4 Beta [download here] that I will be discussing more later tonight:
- eBay demos Desktop Simple Lister (with help from Cynergy)
- Netflix demos Smooth Streaming on WP7
- Foursquare demos location aware services WP7
- Other great demos: Seesmic, Major League Soccer, and Shazaam
Another big announcement was that they’ve open sourced the Silverlight media framework, that was used to deliver the smooth-streaming HD experience for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games. The code is available at http://smf.codeplex.com
The focus was very strong on targeting multiple platforms that support Silverlight or XNA with a single code-base. This ubiquity of development has always been a major goal for Microsoft and so-far the case they’ve made is very compelling. I can’t wait to dig into the nuts and bolts of it and post more developer and designer focused analysis.
Monday, March 15 2010
Microsoft made a flurry of announcements this morning via press release (link to come). As I watch Sterling Quinn, the 16-year-old Yo-Yo champ (20 minutes is too long for a warm-up FYI) I’ve read that Microsoft has:
“Announced the availability of comprehensive tools”
- Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone
- Windows Phone 7 add-in to use with Visual Studio 2010 RC
- XNA Game Studio 4.0
- Windows Phone 7 Series Emulator for application testing
- Expression Blend for Windows Phone CTP
“Available for download today”:
- Silverlight 4 RC
- Expression Blend 4 Beta – “New features such as Path Layout enable developers and designers to build and animate innovative user interface design via a groundbreaking visual layout mechanism, without the need to write code.”
“Several leading companies will be creating exciting applications and games for Windows Phone 7 Series.”
“Silverlight adoption has continued at a rapid pace with installations approaching 60 percent of all Internet devices worldwide – an increase of nearly 15 percentage points in just four months.”
More to come. Stay tuned in here or follow me on Twitter @indexzero.
Friday, March 12 2010
MIX10 gets started this Sunday. Looking forward to seeing what Microsoft et al. have up their sleeves for Windows Phone, Silverlight 4 and WPF 4. There also seems to be a stronger focus on web standards and Javascript this year:
Here’s a list of some of the talks that I’m planning on attending:
You can read more about my adventures on the floor at MIX10 by following me on Twitter, @indexzero, or checking back here periodically. Hope to see some of you there!