Silverlight is Microsoft’s cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in that allows the creation of interactive web applications that employ high quality streaming media, vector graphics, images, and animation. Deployed as a plug-in for the major browsers on the Windows, Mac and Linux (supported by Novell) operating systems, web developers can craft interactive applications that have an identical user experience on the vast majority of web browsers deployed today. Silverlight addresses a disconnect that exists today in web development workflow where the design intent of graphics designers and interaction designers cannot be faithfully communicated to and crafted by the web developers. In Silverlight, this intent is created in design tools like Expression Design and Expression Blend and passed off to web developers in XML-based XAML data files. The fidelity of the designers’ ideas is kept as there is a clear separation between the design in XAML and the code in JavaScript.
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Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
WPF provides a unified framework for building applications with rich user interfaces and interactivity. It is built on top of the .Net Framework and makes use of the managed and unmanaged code. WPF programming model allows the developers to write code once and deploy it as a standalone installed application or in a browser.
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If you’ve been watching the technical news or attended MIX ‘07, then you’ve probably been hearing about Silverlight (f.k.a. WPF/E). The idea behind Silverlight is simple — provide a cross-browser, cross-platform technology for 2D vector graphics, animations and DRM high-definition media. Currently, Microsoft is targeting the Mac using either Firefox or Safari and Windows using IE6/IE7 or Firefox.
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By now, everyone has visited a website that utilizes Flash multimedia within its design. Since 1996, the use of Flash has grown in popularity thanks to its ability to add animation and interactivity to websites. More recently, Flash has become an essential component in the prolific distribution of intrusive “pop-ups,” or web-based advertisements. Flash also grants designers the ability to integrate video into web pages, and this has led many within the Web 2.0 space to use Flash to develop rich Internet applications. Many companies, including my own, Denver interactive agency Fusionbox, offer streaming Flash Video Solutions to clients in need of online video.
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The JavaFX Script programming language lets you create modern looking applications with sophisticated graphical user interfaces. It was designed from the ground up to make GUI programming easy; its declarative syntax, data binding model, animation support, and built-in visual effects let you accomplish more work with less code, resulting in shorter development cycles and increased productivity.
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We present a purely functional implementation of the computational differentiation tools — the well known numeric (i.e., not symbolic) techniques which permit one to compute point-wise derivatives of functions defined by computer programs economically and exactly (with machine precision). We show how the use of lazy evaluation permits a transparent and elegant construction of the entire infinite tower of derivatives of higher order for any expressions present in the program. The formalism may be useful in various problems of scientific computing which often demand a hard and ungracious human preprocessing before writing the final code. Some concrete examples are given.
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The Java 2D™ API enhances the graphics, text, and imaging capabilities of the Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT), enabling the development of richer user interfaces and new types of Java™ applications. Along with these richer graphics, font, and image APIs, the Java 2D API supports enhanced color definition and composition, hit detection on arbitrary geometric shapes and text, and a uniform rendering model for printers and display devices. The Java 2D API also enables the creation of advanced graphics libraries, such as CAD-CAM libraries and graphics or imaging special effects libraries, as well as the creation of image and graphic file read/write filters.
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YouTube, Podcasting, Blogs, Wikis and RSS are buzz words currently associated with the term Web 2.0 and represent a shifting pedagogical paradigm for the use of a new set of tools within education. The implication here is a possible shift from the basic archetypical vehicles used for (e)learning today (lecture notes, printed material, PowerPoint, websites, animation) towards a ubiquitous user-centric, user-content generated and user- guided experience. It is not sufficient to use online learning and teaching technologies simply for the delivery of content to students. A new “Learning Ecology” is present where these Web 2.0 technologies can be explored for collaborative and (co)creative purposes as well as for the critical assessment, evaluation and personalization of information.
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