The absolute best way to improve your coding skills is to read the absolute best advanced MVVM book EVAR!

If you’re programming WPF or Silverlight, don’t pass up the opportunity to give Advanced MVVM a read. Written by one of the best WPF developers in the known universe, it’s sure to be useful and worth the mere pennies that he’s charging for this gem.

While the Microsoft Store was launching in Mission Viejo, CA at the end of October, the Apple store (360 feet away from the Microsoft store) was busily working on a remodel.  When I was there, the entire Apple store was stripped down – the drywall wasn’t even up yet.

Here we are, less than a month later, and Apple has reopened their store just in time for Black Friday (the store opened at 5AM that morning).  I wonder how the two stores faired for Black Friday…

Let the competition begin!

Toshiba just announced it’s upcoming mobile phone, the TG01.  It looks promising aesthetically, and the hardware sounds pretty good (minus the touchscreen), but the OS on the phone (Windows Mobile 6) sort of ruins the whole experience.  The user interaction is TERRIBLE.  Little quirks about the phone’s interface ultimately gave this phone a bad review.  I noticed that SlashGear started off the introduction with the dreaded “iPhone Killer” question, but then nearly every paragraph in the article starts with a statement about some disappointing feature of the phone.  Reading the technical specs of the phone unveils a myriad of different things that would instantly take it out of any competition with the iPhone:

1. Resistive touch screen – you actually have to push hard on the screen to make it register.  Traditionally, resistive touch screens also make it difficult to do any sort of dragging on the surface without the screen thinking your finger is bouncing along the surface, losing and regaining contact along the way.
2. No 3.5mm headphone jack – SlashGear actually recommends that you buy bluetooth headphones.
3. It’s running Windows Mobile.  Gross.  Because of this the entire interface of the phone is hard to use – buttons haven’t been sized correctly and the layout of the menus hasn’t been changed appropriately for this size of device.
4. The web browsing experience is sub par for a device of that form factor.
5. The keyboard’s spacebar is really… small.
6. The list goes on and on…

My, what a large spacebar you have!

It does have a few things that the iPhone doesn’t have (which usually correlates to things that you don’t need), but some might see these as perks.

Read the whole review over at SlashGear.

They’re only airing these online right now but depending on public perception they may make their way to the television.

Take a look at the rest of the videos.

I’m not sure what others have been saying about Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, but I just noticed that it was starting to make an appearance on my Google Analytics stats.  It’s referring the third most visits out of the 11 search engines that have made an impression on my blog in the past 30 days.   At the top of the list sits Google… then Yahoo… then Bing.  What’s interesting to me is that it’s almost as effective as Yahoo and it’s brand new.

Here are the stats:

1. Google is bring in just over 95% all my search engine traffic.
2. Yahoo brings in 2.3%
3. Bing brings in 1.3%
4. All the others (aol, ask, live, search, msn, altavista, cnn, etc…) bring in about 1.6%

Got your attention?

The sensor device that is used has an RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and can detect full body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition.   I’m surprised how well the sensors interpret the physical movement – it seems pretty accurate!

I would love to see the sensor device reach beyond gaming and make it’s way into productivity applications.  It would sure beat capturing gestures with a webcam like we’ve seen others doing.

For more complete coverage of the demonstrations of Natal at E3, check out my buddy’s new blog, Atom6. He’s got some more videos posted there as well.

iPhone OS 3.0 available worldwide June 17th

My weapon of choice this year for the Keynote stream was http://www.macrumorslive.com.  They have a good stream text feed, and an even better streaming pictures feed.  The pictures updated more often than the text, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they caught every slide…  I also listened to the audio stream at http://live.twit.tv.

Without further ado:

iPhone 3GS!

• Same external design, all new internals
• Faster than the 3G.  2.1x faster loading of messaging,  2.4x faster sim city load, 3.6x faster for viewing an excel attachment , 2.9x faster for loading the NYTimes app.
• Brand new Camera: 3 MP, autofocus camera.  Also captures video (finally).  30 fps.  640×480 video.  You can scrub and edit video and send it straight to YouTube, MMS, email, and MobileMe too.  These features are also available for developers to use in their applications.
• Voice dialing
• Digital Compass
• support for Nike+
• Better battery life: 30 hours of music playback, 10 hours of video playback, 12 hours of 2g talk, 5 hours of 3g talk time.
• $199 is the price for the 16Gb.  32Gb $299.  Black and white colors. 3G is still available for $99 dollars!!
• 3GS iPhone is available June 19th.

iPhone OS updates:

• there are 100 new features… Cut/copy/paste/undo (works across all apps), landscape mode in Mail/Notes/Messages, MMS support (send and receive photos/contacts/audio files/locations) in Messages app (29 carriers in 76 countries will support MMS at launch — AT&T not until later this summer), search (mail — even on server, calendars, media, notes), spotlight (search everything in one place — first page of the home screen).
• rent and purchase movies from your iPhone!
• Parental Controls
• Tethering: Share iPhone’s internet connection with your computer (but I’m sure it’s going to be expensive…) Works wired and wireless over bluetooth. Seemless experience.  BUT AT&T DOESN’T SUPPORT IT!!  GARBAGE!
• Javascript is 3x faster.
• Inclusion of right to left languages and others.  Now support more than 30 languages in the iPhone OS.  One of the big advantages of a software keyboard.  They all have portrait and landscape mode keyboards.
• FindMyiPhone.  MobileMe users will be able to log in to MobileMe and find their phone if they lose it!  GPS location and everything!  It’s crazy.  Tons of awesomeness there.  You can play an alert sound from the webpage, and even wipe the data from your phone so that people can’t see the info you’ve got on it.  Then when you find it you can just restore the phone from a backup.
• Peer to peer connectivity over bluetooth!  Available in any application!
• Turn by turn directions and google maps can be integrated into any application.
• Push notification

Updated Laptops: MacBook Pro spec update and the starting price dropped $300.  They also added a 13″ MacBook Pro.

Expose has been updated (the dock at the bottom of the screen): The functionality is more like Windows 7.  You can click and hold an icon in the dock and Expose will show all of the app’s windows.  The same works for dragging things into an application – you can drag items to the dock, have the app’s windows pop up, and the drop it into the correct window.

Exchange 2007 (latest version) is now supported in Mail, iCal, and Address Book!  This is big for all the Mac users that work in large corporate environments that use Exchange. You can even see previews of Microsoft Office documents if you don’t have Office installed.

Microsoft is going to release a TouchPack for Windows 7 that will come bundled with the Retail version of Windows 7. This pack includes some multitouch applications, including some games.  Looks like it should be fun times at your nearest Win7 machine.