Although many alternative search engines, like Quintura and Viewzi, have tried to make search a more visual experience, Google has been quite cautious when it comes to visual search.

An interesting new YouTube feature, however, shows that they have been experimenting with it behind closed doors, and – more importantly – they’re ready to use it on one of the biggest search engines out there, the YouTube search. It’s called the Wonder Wheel, and it’s a way to browse videos through association; similar to how another cool visual discovery engine, Liveplasma, lets you discover new artists through connection with the artists you know and like.

Wonder Wheel appears in the top right corner of your search results, but it’s present only when you get a lot of results. For searches with less results YouTube will not suggest other searches, and the Wonder Wheel option will be absent, too.

As with most other search experiments, the Wonder Wheel will not substitute the regular YouTube search, but it can be great for discovering new videos or simply killing a little time – and we all know that’s what YouTube is really for.

Wonder Wheel is not all that’s new at YouTube; in fact, Google has been diligently adding new features in the last couple of weeks. Advanced search has also recently been updated, offering users the ability to narrow down their search with time of upload, as well as its location and length.

Tags: Search, Wonder Wheel, youtube

ASP.NET is a stable and mature platform for building Web applications. Personally, I can hardly imagine a revolutionary set of new and  compelling features to be added to it. So what's new in ASP.NET 4.0? Beyond AJAX stuff, there are some interesting enhancements in the Web Forms area. As I see things, all changes in ASP.NET 4.0 can be catalogued under the label of "more control". You get more control over viewstate, script references, ID generation, output caching and even, but in very limited form, over HTML generated by some controls.

Let's briefly focus on the viewstate extended control. In ASP.NET, the viewstate is optional but it is enabled by default. In addition, the viewstate is not simply a way of reducing your bandwidth. It is rather functional to the implementation of the Web Forms model. So just dropping the viewstate in a new version of ASP.NET is simply out of question: either you get a new ASP.NET platform such as ASP.NET MVC or you stick to Web Forms with the viewstate on board.

However, there's a subtle aspect of the viewstate management that has been fixed in ASP.NET 4.0. I said fixed because, well, from my perspective it had to be considered a bug-by-design in previous versions.

All server controls (the Page class derives from Control) have the EnableViewState property through which you can disable the viewstate for that control. What is little known ais that the EnableViewState property is ignored for child controls. In other words, if you take the default value (true) for the page, then whatever value you assign for it to any controls in the page... it is ignored. You can have have TextBox1.EnableViewState = false but still have the text box to read/write state from the viewstate if the viewstate is enabled at the page (or container) level.

This will change in ASP.NET 4.0 thanks to the new ViewStateMode property.

This property indicates whether the viewstate for the control is enabled|disabled|inherit. You can use the ViewStateMode property to enable view state for an individual control even if view state is disabled for the page. This is the great news. Finally, you can now disable the viewstate on the page and decide which controls will have it enabled (opt-in). In earlier versions you could only do the reverse (opt-out): enable the viewstate and then decide which controls will not support it.

XNA Game Studio 3.1 has just been released!  Download XNA GS 3.1 and check out the walkthrough for upgrading your old projects to v3.1!  For a more in-depth overview of what is new in 3.1, head to http://creators.xna.com/en-us/article/xnags3.1whatsnew.

A quick overview of what is new:

• Avatar Support: Render and animate Avatars to use in your game to represent gamers and other characters within your game.
• Xbox LIVE Party Support: Enabling gamers to communicate, even when each gamer is not playing the same game in the same multiplayer session. LIVE Party supports up to an eight-way group voice chat for gamers and keeps gamers connected before, during, and after a gameplay session, persisting across title switches.
• Video Playback: XNA Game Studio now supports the ability to play back video that can be used for such purposes as opening splash and logo scenes, cut scenes, or in-game video displays. This set of XNA Framework APIs supports the following features:
• Full screen video playback
• Video playback to simple textures in game
• Control of playback such as pause/resume and stop
• Retrieve properties of the video, such as playback time, size, and frame rate
• Determine the type and usage of the audio track, such as if it has music, dialog, or music and dialog
• Play back multiple video streams at the same time
• Audio API: 3.1 has a new usage pattern of SoundEffect.Play. Sound instances created by Play calls are disposed automatically when playback ends, and SoundEffect.Play returns a Boolean to indicate success or failure.
• Content Pipeline Enhancements: improvements making it much easier to add customer types (custom attributes for run-time of an object and run-time type version of an object, and the ability to determine if deserialization into an existing object is possible).
• XACT3 Support: includes support for XACT3 with new features including the ability to enable a filter on every track, and support for the xWMA compression format.
• Visual Studio Changes: XNA Game Studio 3.1 supports both 3.0 and 3.1 projects, and it includes support for upgrading projects from 3.0 to 3.1.

Mozilla has teamed with Infectious, a startup that lets users easily customize iPhones, laptops and even cars with high quality stickers of commissioned artwork.

From time to time Infectious works with corporate partners to create custom stickers. Here’s an example of an iPhone with a Wordpress theme, for example. We’re also talking to them about designing custom stickers for the CrunchPad.

The Mozilla project brings art from five Infectious artists that you can buy now. iPhone skins cost $15, laptops skins are $30 and car decals are $35. 25% of the proceeds go to the artist and the Mozilla Foundation.

In a couple of weeks Infectious will also open up the project and let any artist submit work. One or more winners will be selected by user voting and input from Mozilla and Infectious, and users will then be able to buy those skins, too.

More info on the Mozilla blog.

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