I recently decided to try this whole Bluetooth headphone thing to get wireless headphones for my laptop and cell phone. The idea is simple enough: Have wireless headphones to listen to music and podcasts.

The worked without any effort on my cell phone, which I was mildly surprised by. The laptop, however, was another matter. Windows 7 would happily pretend to connect, only dropping the connection a minute later without any error message. I was only able to fix it by downloading some random driver off a sketchy website. Now for my big complaint: I understand the goal is to make the headphones small, but is it necessary to overload each and every button? Press the lock button to change the EQ settings, press and hold the lock button to lock, press the power button to stop playback, press and hold the power button to turn it off, press and hold the power button longer to enter pairing mode, etc, etc. It's crazy.

I suggested I'd play with turning my Morphing Ticker into a Silverlight plug-in. You should be able see the results of my work next to this post. Well, assuming you have Silverlight installed, and are running some browser that understands it.

It was an interesting conversion process. This was my first real foray into XAML, and it was a bit of a mind shift coming from the Windows Forms background I'm accustomed to. Even with that small hurdle, I was pleased with how easy it was to implement. Now I'll just have to find some practical use for Silverlight.