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• Flotzam: Mashing up the Web

  Have you seen Flotzam ? It's a fun mash-up that Karsten and Tim put together that aggregates a bunch of different data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and indeed any general RSS feed. You can install it either as an application or a screen saver, and it's a nice way to see what's going on out there on the "tubes". Karsten has coined the term panopticon to describe it (from the Greek, meaning all seeing ); to me, this feels like it has the potential to form the first step of a project to build the ultimate, pluggable, modular social networking client. Being a WPF application, Flotzam can be easily restyled. From the enter/exit transitions for new items to the overall visual look and feel of the Flotzam interface, you can do almost anything you want just by tweaking the XAML mark-up. And with MIX08 selling out quickly (hope you've registered), the team thought it would be fun to put together a little contest that gives you the chance to experiment with WPF by creating Read More... Posted Friday, January 25, 2008 6:08 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, XAML, Design, flickr, RIA, twitter, blend, mix08, contest, digg

• The New Iteration: A Whitepaper on the XAML Revolution

  Whenever we run a WPF or Silverlight training event or lab, the one question that is guaranteed to come up relates to the designer / developer workflow on a project team. In the old days of Win32 or Windows Forms, the workflow was straightforward (albeit extremely limiting). A lot of desktop application development teams I've seen, particularly in the enterprise, don't even include a formal role for a user interface designer. Although the development team might include a business analyst or someone in a interface development role who would be doing some basic interaction design and application flow work, the actual interface would be mostly designed and implemented by the same programmer who was writing the underlying logic. On the other hand, for the projects where design was taken more seriously as a core element to the success of the application, the design and development teams were separated into different silos. The design team would often present their output in the form of a color Read More... Posted Friday, December 07, 2007 8:26 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, XAML, Design, silverlight, blend, whitepaper, user interface, workflow

• nibbles: snack tutorials for hungry designers

  Celso Gomes has a new site up called nibbles : snack tutorials for hungry designers . In his words: The concept of nibbles is simple: snack tutorials for hungry designers. The tutorials will teach a few steps at a time, so they will be short and easy to follow - the perfect creative snack. There are a few tutorials on using Expression Blend and Silverlight already up, with content on Blend and WPF coming soon. New additions will be announced on the nibbles blog . Read More... Posted Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:57 PM from Even a chimp can write code | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, Design, Windows Presentation Foundation, Expression Blend, silverlight

• Hours of Free Training on Expression Blend and Design

  Arturo Toledo (one of our ace designers) posted a reminder on an internal email list that lynda.com have heaps of free training on Expression Blend and Expression Design available as screencasts. The Expression Blend material is presented by Lee Brimelow (author of the well known blog thewpfblog.com ) and progresses through from a basic overview of the tool to specific techniques for dealing with text, animation, 3D, media, layout, controls and data. There's just over sixty individual nuggets - Dr Sneath prescribes that you take two a day for a month and you'll feel great! I haven't looked so closely at the Expression Design material , but it's similarly comprehensive if the syllabus is to be believed. Ted LoCascio is the author of the six and a half hours of material available here. They also have paid-for material on many other topics, including Expression Web. My only frustration is that they missed a trick by producing the material in QuickTime format. Hopefully they'll see the light, Read More... Posted Tuesday, June 05, 2007 4:15 PM from Tim Sneath | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, Design, Expression, silverlight, silverlight streaming, blend

• Software Branding

  I was pleased to see the updated Windows Vista User Experience Guidelines introduce a section on Software Branding . I firmly believe the secret sauce behind every successful software application is the emotional chord it strikes in the end user. Too often we, the sausage makers, focus too much on the technical aspects and too little on the emotional aspect of the software we build. For something that is frequently overlooked or gotten wrong, this article on software branding is chock full of common sense. Although the examples use Windows artifacts, the guidelines apply very broadly to software we all create. On another note, I am happy to see this idea dawn on folks across Microsoft. Now if we can strike the right balance between the whole technical v/s visceral v/s behavioral v/s reflective aspects, it'll portend good things to come. The innovations in the Shell in Windows Vista , and platforms such as WPF and WPF/E will surely help. Read More... Posted Saturday, March 17, 2007 11:00 AM from Even a chimp can write code | 0 Comments Filed under: WPF, Windows Vista, Design, Windows Presentation Foundation, wpf/e, UX, Branding