The Blend team recently posted an August preview on the Microsoft Expression web site. Download it here. Among the changes are an updated Storyboard picker (replacing the older Storyboard combo) and XAML Editor improvements (you can now customize fonts, font sizes and tab sizes).

Sometimes an idea strikes and immediately you know it should be forgotten, discarded, but you just can’t help yourself. The Image to XAML converter is the product of just such an idea. I was looking at some bitmap patterns that I use as tiled textures and thought I should just convert them at a pixel level to a XAML representation. THEN I thought I could just convert entire images on a pixel-by-pixel basis to Rectangles in XAML! What a fantastic idea! This little app is a model of what you should not do with XAML, but it’s still entertaining to use. And yes, I’m sure I could make it more efficient using DrawingGroups and RectangleGeometries, but that’s just not the point is it? So, download the app and watch a 16KB png grow to a 1600KB text-based monstrosity.

Download: Image to XAML Converter

(Warning: start with small images, then test your luck with larger ones)

If you haven’t checked it out yet, or had a reason in the past 2 days to hit Google Maps, it’s time to take a look a Google Maps Streetview. I can already tell I’m going to waste a lot of late night hours clicking through streets I’ve already walked down. This is currently available only for select cities, but I’m sure they’ll be adding more in the future (at least they say they will). I thought the whole thing was javascript - then I right-clicked the 360 degree view and saw they were using flash. Slick slick.

Read about this earlier today, just now checking out the video. Check out Microsoft Surface — looks like I’ve just found my new coffee table!

Not sure what made me think of this earlier, but I remembered trying some of the earlier experiments that let you use your gmail account as remote storage. I downloaded and installed Gmail Drive a few hours ago and it’s working really well. It installs as a shell extension and adds a “Gmail Drive” item to My Computer. You can copy/paste files directly to the drive and it behaves just like you would expect it to. I have it set it to “store” files in the drafts folder of my Gmail Inbox. Behind the scenes, Gmail Drive is just creating a draft message, attaching the file I’m storing, and using a simple syntax in subject to store the filename, filesize, and path. Pretty clever. Now to see what the attachment max is…