Sunny greetings from Switzerland. I’ve just finished interviewing Urs Muller, Matthias Rambold and Kalle Vänskä for a nice report for either Channel 9 or Channel 10, or wherever it fits in. The first interview was about the MWPSK, -my web pages starter kit - an ASP.NET Starter Kit application to build and manage websites online with all common pages types, forms, user management, rich text editor, html editor, events, news, downloads, guestbook and a ton of other features. I sat down with Urs Muller and Matthias Rambold and we discussed this fully functional Content Management System. Agreed, there are hundreds of CMS platforms out there already, but this one is a little bit special. As soon as the editing is done, I’ll publish the video here.
It doesn’t use a database, comes with a 1-2-3 easy setup, it’s open source AND it comes with 16 starter design templates out of the box. Reason enough to go have a little chat with the creators of this experiment.
The other interview was with Urs Muller and Kalle Vänskä about UniveRSS, the three dimensional RSS reader that has been built as a showcase for WPF. UniveRSS leverages the Windows Presentation Foundation and provides a stunning way of visualizing RSS feeds and their content. It introduces a full-screen 3D universe where galaxies represent the folders of your RSS feed directory, and the stars are represented by the spinning cubes that hold the feed information. Size and position of the feed cubes indicate how many unread items they contain.
This cool thingy just got upgraded and now plays Flash movies that are embedded in blog posts, so for instance when you subscribe to a blog that posts DailyMotion or YouTube clips, you can play the content right away without leaving the application. In the demo (also online soon, when the editing is done) there’s also a part where Kalle shows the real-time integration by means of an earthquake tracker. The RSS lists all recent posts, and when you click on a post a small application is loaded inside UniveRSS which shows a globe with a pinpointer where the event took place. Clicking that pinpointer will load Virtual Earth in the application so you can easily see the map of the region. A click on an icon opens up an browser window where you can see more Virtual Earth details and use the navigation better.
After the video interviews I went to the Microsoft headquarters in Zurich to meet up with Christian Frei, and we talked a little about a future project of which I can’t say much but it’s going to be really cool to help set it up. It’s not really my project, but I’m very excited about it and I’ll help out wherever I can.
Then I went back to the hotel. I managed to reschedule my flight to tonight so I don’t have to leave tomorrow at noon, because I really have to finish the laptop project I’m working on. Damn, I love this job.
