About a year ago I was having a little chat with a developer of a application that we were interested in purchasing for work and he informed me that they were no longer focusing their development efforts on that application since it was based on the Web ADF and the Web ADF was dead… He informed me that they were  moving towards Flex and Silverlight . I was excited at least about the Flex application having spent some time with the ESRI Flex Sample Viewer.  I have a couple of applications out there that are based on the Web ADF one of which will be a lot of fun to migrate and the other we paid a lot of money for this company to develop. The app itself does many things and is useful but it has been holding up our migration efforts for some time. Whenever ESRI releases another version I’m like crap we have to migrate that thing… The fact that it has become that thing says a lot as well. It’s not interactive, its not fun, icons don’t fly across the screen like in the Flex apps and we’re like boring… We’re already tired of the look and feel and want to change things but behind this behemoth are some pretty useful tools that we still can’t replicate on the Flex side with some serious programming effort and money both of which is lacking in our “shop.”

Thus, when I read today that ESRI plans to deprecated the Web ADF…

Based on customer feedback and technology trends, we see the Web ADFs playing a decreasing role amongst ArcGIS Server developers in favor of alternatives such as the ArcGIS Web Mapping APIs.

The Web ADFs will be deprecated in the next release after ArcGIS Server 10.

I was reminded once again of our beloved app. I can migrate the others with not much loss but this one, not sure… the whole thing will have to be re-worked.

I’ve got this Dock on my desktop that looks good with certain backgrounds only and I find that wood or cork is pretty good. Anyway, I was looking for a wallpaper for my desktop for the longest time since I was getting bored with the Map of Middle Earth. I was very glad when I found “My Workplace Desktop Pictures” He’s got a nice selection of desktop wallpapers on there including a lot of wood and cork. Now I have so much fun with these things I just pick and choose til my desktop’s content. I’m currently sporting this one. Very nice. If you are interested in more wood. Vladstudio has a bunch of Siberian wooden houses on his site. I liked the details on many of these houses but some of them really creeped me out and made me sad. I don’t like to see houses abandoned and in a bad state as some o these are in.

I do all my web development on a Mac. This has worked out quite well so far as most of the tools available for Windows Based PCs are available on the Mac platform as well. One problem that I often run into though is browser compatibility esp. with Internet Explorer 7. Today I was showing a colleague a website that I just finished up and all was well until I went back to my desk and open the site in IE 7. A letter that should have been in my sidebar was floating over to the right just a wee bit much. Anyway, I came home and decided I would see what was up since all was well in the other browsers that I tested. As it turns out I had an image fighting with some text because I did not explicitly specify the alignment of either. Since Microsoft dumped IE development for the Mac platform I went searching for some tools to help. After a bit of googling I came across Netrenderer. This tool allowed me to type in my URL return a screenshot of my site within seconds. I know it works because I tested the site before and after I made the changes and noted the difference. Anyway, Netrenderer allows you to see how your site will be rendered in Internet Explorer 5.5 to 7. Its fast and it works that’s all there is left to say.

Dell has launched an official blog called one2one. They have some video highlights of their new products and explain them in great detail. I checked out the video of the Latitude D420, their 1″ thin take this on the plane with you goodness. Have to admit that I got a bit impatient coz I was wondering about the price the whole time. I went to the Dell site and checked out the price and it started at ~ $1400 under the Government employee section (usually some sort of discount). Anyway, after looking at the specs I wasn’t impress and having just seen a Macbook last week I was like that ain’t a good deal. I can get a 2 GHz Core Duo as opposed to a Core Solo, 80GB hard drive @ 5400 RPM as opposed to the D420′s 60GB HD @4200 RPM (this is an upgrade), plus by the time I added the CD/DVD player to the D420 I have about the same weight anyway. Not to mention I get a nice shiny 13″ (not 12.1″) screen and the ability to run Mac OS X and Windows on the same machine. Gosh I wish I could get a Macbook before Apple realized the sweet deal its giving away and take it back. Anyone care to donate one to me go ahead.

macTV has a new look. Only reason why I know that is that I visited it from my favorite mac Blog. I’ve never visited macTV to be honest until today. I started checking out a few of the ads and was pleasantly surprised that I liked em. The first was the Ellen Feiss ad. She’s been getting a bit of ink on my fav blog of late and had no clue who she was. Sorry didn’t get back into the Mac World until last Fall. The ad was from 2002. I really liked the ITMS ad by this kid name Jacob (pictured above). Its the only Eminem song that I like (the clean version) and I thought the kid looked a bit like him. If you haven’t given the site a look through before here is your chance.

I was getting kinda bored with the look of my website so I decided it was time for a redo. To help me in my endeavor I used the Blank White template from 11 Mystics and concocted my own links. The hardest part was having to redo my photos since I had a lot on there. I still need to port a few of my older photo albums but maybe I’ll stick to the photos I have up there now for a while. I realized that a dual monitor system would have been helpful here. Too bad my Mac Mini doesn’t have another graphics card in it for that sort of hookup. I suppose I might be able to get a splitter but with only 32 MB VRAM don’t know if it would be worth it all that much. That’s about all for now its getting late and I need to get some relaxing on while the night is still young.