Tamchuen’s Blog

What is Flickr Map

Flickr Map is a free and excellent web application for exploring geo-tagged Flickr photos inside a map viewer which you can enjoy here.
It is an Ajax mashup built by rich internet technologies and powered by following open APIs and toolkits:

• ESRI ArcGIS Web API
• Yahoo Flickr API
• Google Maps API
• Google Charts API
• Wikipedia API
• TIBCO General Interface

What you can do

• Explore the photos around the area where you clicked on the map.
• Find a location in the world in a flash.
• Search flickr photos with your desired keywords or user name.
• Click on the area name to show population data and wikipedia article about it.
• Click on the small thumbnail to enjoy the whole picture.
• Auto play the photo list in your preferred manner.

Click to read more »

According to the road map of Microsoft, the time for releasing the Windows Phone 7 SDK is Sep . 16th. Now the Microsoft WP7 developer community has released the RTW version of the developer tools.

The WP7 SDK will help Windows Phone 7 developers to build gorgeous applications, and at the same time provides more feature and performance tuning. This will be of help for the release of WP7 application store at October. The games and application projects that are planned to be completed by October will be finished in a shorter time by developers.

Microsoft upgrades the simulator into the code base of WP7 RTM version released at the beginning of this month, and add the two most important controls in Metro UI: Panorama , Pivot and Bing Maps Control. Microsoft also claimed that applications built by Twitter、Netflix、OpenTable、Travelocity and Flixster will appear in Windows Phone 7 in future.

Besides the release of the final version of SDK, Microsoft also introduced a brand new version of
Advertisement tool and Bing Map, with the purpose of helping the developers to benefit from their WP7 applications and improve user experience.

The Windows Phone 7 Developer tools RTW can be downloaded from here.

Every time when we talk about how to design the Multi-touch user interface, we will talk about iPhone/iPad sooner or later. We seem to lose sight of another great product utilizing Multi-touch technologies most of the time.
 

What is Microsoft Surface

Microsoft Surface is a surface computing platform that responds to natural hand gestures and real world objects. Users can interact with the machine by touching or dragging their fingertips and objects such as paintbrushes across the screen, or by placing and moving placed objects.

Actually I believe that many people have seen the advertising video of Microsoft Surface. I was deeply impressed by the large scale screen, multi-touch technology, intelligent recognition of real objects and the changes of the way how human interacts with computer brought by those technologies.

Though it was not widely used by personals due to its early stage, I found Microsoft already made a fantastic preparation for all of the designers and developers who want to have a deep look at Surface.

Click to read more »

There is a big news these days that the SDK for the next version of the Android platform has come out. This new version which is called 1.5 is based on the cupcake branch from the Android Open Source Project. Version 1.5 introduces APIs for features such as soft keyboards, home screen widgets, live folders, and speech recognition. At the developer site, you can download the Android 1.5 SDK.

Changes have been made to the developer tools and the structure of the SDK. Future Android SDK releases will support multiple versions of the Android platform. For example, the new release includes Android platform versions 1.1 and 1.5. It is very comfortable for developers because they can target different Android platform versions from within a single SDK installation. At the other hand, it enables developers to install Android SDK add-ons to access extended functionality that might be provided by OEMs, carriers, or other providers such as the add-on for the Google APIs.

I’m sure everyone looks forward to seeing the great apps that use the new capabilities in Android 1.5.

Blizzard Entertainment, a division of Activision Blizzard, and NetEase.com, a China-based Internet technology company, say that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft will be licensed to an affiliated company of NetEase in mainland China. It’ll be for a period of 3 years following the expiration of the current license agreement.

Both companies had also announced a partnership on Blizzard’s Warcraft III, StarCraft II, and Battle.net gaming platform last summer.

World of Warcraft, also known as WOW, is a subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). It became a very popular online game around the world soon after it has been released by Blizzard.

There are many localized versions of World of Warcraft, such as the English, French, German, Spanish and Chinese etc.

Now, it’s being promoted for gamers in China.

“We appreciate the enthusiasm that Chinese gamers have shown us over the years, and we’ve always worked hard, in collaboration with our partners, to ensure that these players receive the same high-quality service and gameplay experiences that we deliver in other regions,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment.

“By combining Blizzard Entertainment’s expertise in developing world-class games with NetEase’s strength in online-game operation in China, I am confident that we will be able to deliver the best gaming experiences in the world to our players,” says William Ding, CEO of NetEase.

Resently We have conducted a research on the comparison between two main stream enterprise Ajax Toolkits available in the market, which is Backbase and Tibco General Interface. Following is a table listing the differences and similaries between them. Hope it can be helpful for those who are deciding which one to use for RIA development:

Click to read more »