sentient beings

After twiddling around with the AIR UI, I found a few tiny bits that bothered me and as I continued using the AIR UI, they only bothered me more. The bits that bothered me are actually basic parts of the FLASH UI but they never bothered me there.

The problem is the way UI items are styled. While I can live with, and certainly appreciate, custom icons for maximising, minimising and hiding windows, I have a hard time dealing with the custom scrollbars, the dropdownboxes that simply look and feel different ...

Somehow, it never bothered me while running in a browser because my mind was set on "it's Flash, it's in a browser, it's a plug-in, it's not running on your O/S so it doesn't have to behave like it's running on your O/S".

But now, we have AIR and, from a user POV, AIR is at least making it look like the application is running on my O/S. It's a detached window, floating around on my desktop and so I expect it to look more like it belongs on my desktop and not in a browser.

The whole UI thing is also a lot less bothersome on the MacBook. On the Wintop, it seems ... out of place. It makes all AIR applications look like a gadget instead of an application. It's okay for an application like Thwirl which I consider to be a gadget, but it may actually make life just a little more difficult for full-blown AIR applications to make it onto the commercial market.

In the past few months, I have met people that, for one reason or the other, wanted to share their views on Silverlight. This inevitably started out with things like "It's going to kill Flash" and always continued with me throwing a very lighthearted "oh, really".

They then started claiming that Silverlight had a lot of options and possibilities that "Flash didn't have". I'll name a few of the more humorous ones.

• Silverlight can read XML documents
• Silverlight can interact with databases
• There's something new and it's called Silverlight and it'll be cool

I kid you not, those were the most serious comments I got on Silverlight. The usual "Oh, but Flash has had that since <insert random year here>" on both occasions resulted in a "Well, I must admit I don't know anything about Flash".

I don't understand people that will religiously follow any technology whatsoever. If people follow technology "M" and "M" tells its followers that their Truth is the Only Truth and the followers of "M" blatantly believe this, then I have no idea what to think of technology "M".

Technology "M" is currently holding "Dev Days" in the Netherlands. I'm almost afraid to hear the stories my colleagues will be having next week ... Probably something about Silverlight being better than AIR

I have been looking for a WordPress plug-in that would allow me to change the text you'd get when you place part of a post behind a cut. I couldn't find a plug-in and the struck me as funny ... I couldn't possibly be the only one that wanted to have witty "read on" oneliners.

I took to the sourcecode and found out that you can actually just add your own "more" text to the more tag. Guess that makes sense. But in case you're wondering, here's the gist.

<!--more The first cut is the deepest ...-->

As Peter Elst points out: Adobe AIR is not the same as Microsoft Silverlight. Where he uses words, I will use technology to prove my point. Clicking the button below will answer the question in a simple way.

On to the source code »

In an effort to keep things more user-friendly and to make sure you don't miss any of the available visualisations, I decided to enhance the demo player.
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