Steve Taylor's Blog

This book has quality in every direction, from the physical finish and type of paper used to the great authoring style. The book is very well presented with great illustrations and examples.

It starts off by demystifying the true meaning of what an Information Dashboard is and then goes into what I thought was the best chapter of the book – Tapping into the power of visual perception. This chapter was really interesting especially for me coming from a design background. It goes into the science of visual perception, the pre-attentive mind and short term memory. [More]

Live Mesh itself is part of what Microsoft calls Live Services, one of the building blocks of Microsoft’s new Azure Services Platform, unveiled in November at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles. The Azure Services Platform is a “cloud” platform hosted at Microsoft data centres. It’s designed to give developers and others the ability to easily develop and scale up applications that, among other benefits, can run on a wide variety of devices. [More]

This book covers all aspects of data warehousing and gives examples and downloadable source for Microsoft SQL Server 2005/08. It goes into quite a bit of detail in certain areas but in others it just skims the surface. It’s a great book to get someone started of in data warehousing as it does cover the main aspects well. [More]

Vectorform have developed another Microsoft Surface application for BMW. They started off with a prototype for a X6 configurator.

The prototype was such a success that they followed up with a much improved version for the 7 series that allow the user to fully customise the vehicle through the Natural User Interface(NUI). [More]