After working all this week on a Flex demo I decided to take today and take a look at the competition – Microsoft’s “Avalon” (Or, as the creative team at Microsoft now call it, the “Windows Presentation Foundation”). Unfortunately it isn’t running on my machine. When I try to open the XAMLPad the program crashes. I may need to uninstall everything and reinstall it but it takes a long time to install on my machine.

In lieu of actually being able to create some Avalon examples, I’ve been doing some research and I’m not sure what to make of it. In a lot of ways, I think that Avalon and Flex are on a collision course. Flex can become what Avalon will be – a way to bring rich internet functionality seamlessly to the desktop space. The goal with Avalon and Indigo seems to be allowing developers to easily create rich interfaces for Windows. Those interfaces could (in theory) be run without installers, access data over the web, and in make life in general very nice for the user. This is essentially what Flex does.

By leveraging the ubiquitous power of the web and the flash player, Flex has a big head start. In the argument of rich vs. reach, Flex really has the best of both worlds. Everyone with FlashPlayer 7 can use Flex applications and the developers/designers know it’s going to behave the same way for everyone regardless of their browser or operating system.

I’m a little curious as to why the Macromedia blogsphere doesn’t talk about Avalon more. I don’t think it’s a Flash-killer, but I think a discussion of the possible impact of Avalon on Flex would be worthwhile. Maybe as we find out more about Avalon people will start talking about it.

I saw a great post by Mark Kruger about what he doesn’t like about Dreamweaver. If you haven’t switched to Eclipse yet, then maybe you’ll see some things from Mark’s rant that you don’t like about Dreamweaver and decide to take the plunge.

I saw a sweet example of the new Flash 8 video codec in action. I’ve seen the two side by side, but not like this. I think we need to bring Flash Video to the Learning Lab site.

Edit: There are also some really cool general Flash 8 examples over at flahsguru. Enjoy.

Well Not only was the next version of Flash released today, but they also released the upgrade for the whole Studio suite. If you Pre-order it, you get a nifty “limited edition backpack”. How cute. There’s a list of reasons to upgrade but I don’t think any of them really make me want to dance.

I’ll probably try it out when we get it just to see how it runs. I’m curious to see what enhancements they’ve made to FlashPaper. Especially considering it’s probably going to go bye-bye.

I have wanted to start a scripophily collection for a while (since before college) but wasn’t ever really that serious about it and hadn’t actually seen any old stock certificates for purchase anywhere. There are sites like scripophily.com where you can basically buy any company you want, but it seemed like kind of a shortcut to starting a collection and doesn’t involve any “hunting”.

This weekend I found a place that sells old stock certificates. We went with my parents to ride the train in Strasburg, PA and at the gift shop there they sell old railroad stock certificates. I picked up two from The Pennsylvania Railroad Company. One is for 23 shares dated 1903 and the other is for 20 shares dated 1930. Now that I officially have a collection I won’t feel so guilty about buying them off of scripophily.com.

There is a great article in this issue of Educause Quarterly that outlines what we do here at the Learning Lab (where I work) and also talks about how our simulations are used in the classrooms.

“Web-Enabled Simulations: Exploring the Learning Process” [PDF] [HTML Format]

The potential for e-learning is really endless and with more advanced tools coming out we’re better able to create rich, unique experiences for students. Comparing the kinds of things we can do now with what could be done a few years ago shows how much growth is possible. It’s an exciting time for e-learning.