It's been a while since I switched from an HP to a MacBook Pro to start digging into the iPhone and OSX development. It took me quite an effort to get used to OS X and now I can see there's no point of comparison with Vista, nor good or bad - they are just different things with different purposes. An interesting fact, the MacBook Pro is performing really nice with two partitions and I use BootCamp to boot a Vista partition. Performance is amazing in Vista but energy is less optimized than in Leopard. I love this machine and the unique purpose it serves to me, I would recommend it to anyone. Anyway, not everything is as cool around Apple products as people tend to think; there are lot of issues related to usability, accessibility, design and even development.

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A couple of days ago, I was watching this small Silverlight vs. Flash: Stray Sheep sample and perceived something strange in the rendering. If you pay attention to the Silverlight implementation you'll notice that the sheep gets blurry in one of the frames. So, as many of my clients asked me a lot of times about this issue with bitmaps in Silverlight and WPF applications, I'll try to explain the technology concept behind this "undesired" side-effect of device rendering.

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Yesterday evening I had the chance to attend an interesting event in northern Madrid. It was the presentation of The 4 Hour Work Week book translation into Spanish and author Tim Ferriss was there chatting with attendees. I was invited by the friends at El Canasto, an Spanish blog about personal productivity, to write a Guest Post about the event. It's been an amazing opportunity to reach a new range of people and to meet an incredible person, Tim, focused on living a life.

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It's been some weeks since the last post about starting the summer holidays. I'm finally back in Madrid but no just arriving, I arrived like 2-3 weeks ago and started to create some "legal" personas for my new projects. So let's talk a bit about what's going on and get back into the activity train.

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I'll be on summer holidays for the next four weeks, but this holidays are quite special. During the last months I redefined my personal and professional life so this trip is going to serve as the starting point of my new projects, goals and expectations. I'm not sure about what to expect of it but it's surely a personal experiment mixed with some social component.

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It seems that nowadays we have two big players on the RIA framework/tools market willing to win the battle: the older and experienced Adobe and the newer but powerful Microsoft. Sometimes it's quite difficult to see the differences in both of them, but it's even harder when they have more than a single framework tool for it. After looking through my visitor statistics and search keywords I've decided to write a bit about some of the differences and how I see them so it may keep simpler for some of you to decide or clear your mind.

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I've just finished my presentation at CLM.NET User Group and I've uploaded the presentation to SlideShare so all of you can enjoy it. It would also be uploaded to the Presentations section of this web (when I finish it) with the video, audio, slides and demos all together in a pack.

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I've been thinking about how we, engineers and computer related people, design products and software. Usually we have what we think are great ideas, we tend to create create a kind of business strategy and then start developing. Usually, when things has gone this far we almost have a prototype or design to show off and start a process to enhance interaction and improve usability. In terms of thinking about a new product (let it be software, a book, a drawing or anything we can create) we should always think on the users and how will they really be using product. It's not only much smarter than simply adapting users to the product, it's a matter of simplifying the experience so learning is not required to use it.

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Next week I'll be speaking at an special event organized by the CLM.NET User Group held in the context of the Quijote Party 2008 in Albacete, Castilla La Mancha.

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I've been reading a lot about how to enhance user experience in daily tasks performed by users. And reading is almost 20 books on different topics ranging from sociology, psychology, usability and design. Most of you already know my point of view regarding user experience (UX) and usability, and that's the reason why I've thinking a bit on how people interact with the environment and, recently, urban architecture. This post starts a new category to host thoughts on what I've labeled "Analog Experiences" to represent user experience facts in the "real analog world" that we interact with through our senses :)

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