Very cool programming environment for kids!

If they only had stuff like iMovie and GarageBand when I was a kid...

Scratch is, well, just go get it! One of my kids refuses to stop actually building (instead of just playing) games... MIT does it again!

The Rise of Silverlight

I can't imagine that there's anyone doing media that hasn't seen Microsoft Silverlight (or at least heard of it) by now. Gotta admit, it's pretty slick. Cross-platform (ok, Win and Mac right now, but thet've got Linux on the radar), integrated with Visual Studio, .NET implementation. I went to a MSDN roadshow last week, and the evangelist coded up a very cool vector-based button with gradients and animated hover states using SIlverlight lickety-split. The multiple-videos-streaming-at-once was pretty cool, too.

Don't have to name the specific target ot this MS initiative, and it may not be a killer-app for that space, but it does open up the media "door" to the mainstream development world. Certainly worth keeping an eye (or both) on.

I tried out the Mac version. The installer crapped out on 10.3.9 (the disk image didn't even pass the checksum stage). On the brand new MacBook Pro, 10.4.9, the installer worked, but (and I guess I'm not really shocked here), the Silverlight pages didn't recognize that the plug-in had been installed. Not the ideal customer experience.

CSS take-out

Can't argue that CSS is great. But, you can do pretty much anything, and make it look any way you might like. Trouble is, you could be futzing with your layout for like 23 years, and still not have covered everything you wanted to do. What to do, what to do?

Well, starting with templates seems to be a fine idea. I really like some of the templates available at freecsstemplates. Clean, simple, basic designs. And, they really are free (Creative Commons!)Always a good place to start...

The folks over at Project Seven produce a number of quality site designs at reasonable prices. That, and some really cool Dreamweaver stuff, like animated menus and plenty o' extensions. Worth a visit.