TEWON35 is a Travel Agency prototype application for Microsoft Surface from 2ndFactory.

The linked video shows interaction thought on how to take advantage of multi-touch along with physical objects.  Here's a few highlights from the prototype video:

• 3:30 - the circular calendar begins the experience
• 3:50 - the curving timeline is shown
• 4:30 - attractions are loaded using the wooden figures (I like the organic material touch)
• 6:00 - building on the familiar scatterview of photos to represent attractions, they use the backside of the photo to display text and videos about the attraction
• 8:10 - using a smooth casino dealer gesture, the selected attractions are spread out for resorting order
• 10:00 - the itinerary built is then saved to an encoded card for reuse

This reminds me of the Margie's Travel Hands On Labs, but a way smoother version.  A nice additional feature would be if the attractions would take up space relative to the time allotted to check out the attraction. I look forward to seeing this in a production form.

Hat tip to Ken Azuma for passing this along.

Following Tim's lead for 2007, I've created a list of all the Silverlight-based Christmas cards I could find.  Deep Zoom was the big winner this year as the implementation feature for card creation.

Please let me know if I missed any.

• ObjectSharp - Deep Zoom
• ContentMaster - Deep Zoom
• Jobi Joy - parallax fun, with source code!
• Karen Corby - home sick
• Shine Draw - 3D Image Flipping Effect sample
• SilverlightShow - create your own tree and gather ornaments
• Jim Lynn - "just because it's fun"
• John Bruin - Snow Effect, with source code
• Microsoft Portugal - Deep Zoom, with text effects
• Expression Holiday Deal - Not a card, but a nice present.  Great deals on upgrades and what I found really interesting was how you qualify for an upgrade:

Chances are good that you qualify for the Upgrade pricing if you have any existing web design or creative software, or Microsoft Office software, including any ONE of the following:

• A licensed copy of an earlier version of Expression Web
• Adobe Creative Suite (any version)
• Adobe/Macromedia Flash or Director (any version)
• Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver (any version)
• Adobe GoLive (any version)
• Microsoft Office (any version)
• Microsoft FrontPage (any version)
• Quark QuarkXPress (any version)

Happy Holidays!  I'm taking votes on a rocking 2009.  Who wants one?

After much anticipation version 2 of the XboxFriendsWatch GamerCard is available for your enjoyment.

The whole goal behind this release was to update to Silverlight 2 RTM and make it more of a blog-friendly badge or widget.  In order to do that I've added Themes along with a Build Your Own Theme option.

The Gamercard currently has three themes to choose from: Light Gray (default), Classic (looks like v1) and Channel 9 (making it easier for the Ch9 to deploy to their site).

If these themes do not look right on your site, you can build a Custom Theme by editing a variety of properties on the Gamercard Script Builder page.  Colors are hexadecimal and support ARGB, images must be absolute URLs.

If you create a Theme you'd like to share, post it to the XBF Gamercard Themes forum.  I'll take the best ones and add them to the Script Builder page as another Theme option.

If you have suggestions or bugs reports, please post them to the Gamercard forum.

Now to take a look at that Sidebar Gadget again...

I noticed a little Silverlight pop up on Zune.net today. The mixview seen in the 3.0 client software is available on the site in Silverlight when looking at an artist's page. Visit The Crystal Method's page and click "mixview" in the sub navigation.

Music: Happily Ever After by The Walt

The problem statement is simple:

1. What is the problem?
   There is an empty 10k of code sitting out there between you and some cool cred and great prizes.
   
   "The grand prize winner will live large at MIX09 with a free pass to the MIX09 event, three nights at The Venetian Hotel, and a $1,500 Visa gift card. The community choice winner will receive a USD $1,500 Visa gift card. And, three runners-up will each receive a $500 Visa gift card. Winners will be notified after the close of community rating on February 13, 2009. All participants that have their entry accepted into the gallery will receive a limited edition MIX 10K T-shirt." - MIX09 News
   
2. Who has the problem or who is the client/customer?
   The challenge is yours to fill up the 10k with killer code and/or design.  The client are the judges who will be judging your entry on Originality, Graphic Design/User Experience and Functionality.
   
3. What form can the resolution be?
   This is the cool part.  You can submit a Silverlight 2 app, a WPF running as an XBAP in partial trust or as ClickOnce WPF app.
   
   Counted against your 10k is the code you've written and your embedded resources.  This doesn't include build files (.sln, .csproj).  You can't include extra assemblies or libraries.  You can reference web services and remote data for data not functionality.

For more details, check out the official rules.  Apologies to my friends in Quebec, you can't enter.  A few countries are in their too.

For ideas on ways to get the most out of 10k, check out Bill Reiss' post Thoughts on the MIX 10k challenge.

To see how excited, Amy and I are about running the contest check out our appearance on the Countdown to MIX09 show below:

Oh and if you're interested, you better get cracking.  At this time there are already 5 submissions posted!  The contest ends on January 30th, but the sooner you enter the more community votes you could garner.  Its a double-edged sword!  Use it, don't fear it!

NEC Biglobe Deep Zoom Album Viewer adds a nice effect to the Deep Zoom photo layout concept by adding a ripple and z-index effect based on mouse position.  I really like the look of this as it adds a bit more to the browsing experience.  Its like the photos jump up because they want you to look at them.

Oxite, an open source, standards compliant, extensible CMS was "hard-launched" today, much to the delight and excitement of quite a few people.  We "soft-launched" it Friday night but you probably didn't hear about it. 

When the time came to relaunch MIX Online the new team met with the Channel 9 dev team and a new opportunity was born.  The MIX team had a few themes in mind; Content, Bits, Design and Standards.  (For the full story check out Nishant Kothary's Web Design from the Gut article on the design process from the beginning).

Oxite, an ASP.NET MVC based blog (6:48)

The Channel 9 dev team saw an opportunity to take all of what they've learned from building sites like Channel 9, Ch8, 10 and TechNet Edge and mix it with the goodness that is ASP.NET MVC.

You can hear more about the dev team's thoughts from Erik and Nathan in this interview. (I apologize for the lack of "So" filter and my sleepiness in this video.  I had little sleep the night before. I know, I know, no excuses...)

Not quite a few people are excited about this sample, which is what it is.  Its not a product, but is a working sample/starter kit that you can use as a blog like the MIX Online site or you can use to learn ASP.NET MVC.

Here's a few of the posts on Oxite today:

• MIX Online - Web Design from the Gut
• Mary-Jo Foley - Microsoft develops open-source content-management system
• Ed Bott - Microsoft takes dead aim at Wordpress...
• Joe Wilcox - Oxite: Just MIX and Serve
• Jeff Sandquist - Supporting Web Standards With Microsoft

In Jeff's post he mentions this came from a side project that Duncan and I had been working back when I was on the team.  This is true in some sense, we did have our own blog software called Oxite with highly configurable XHTML output.  I'm actually still running it today with this post.

But, I believe that the Channel 9 dev team has mainly inherited the name along with the spirit of a simple easy to configure blog.

KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid...or in this case Smartie.

I've been tracking the project as the guys have been working on it and I'm excited to crack it open and replace my correct blog with it.  Now that we all have a single code-base and format we agree on, I'm looking forward to what comes next.

I want to start adding next release features and cool components.  Now I just need to join the Oxite CodePlex project and get the import code from Duncan :)

I’m excited to say that the spirit of the Project “Rosetta Stone” Tutorials, which is “using what you know” has become a MIX09 workshop.

The workshop is entitled “Shio o Totte: Using What You Know” and the description is as follows:

Have you just started working on your first Silverlight project and wondering how it compares to Flash? Are you trying to figure out how to take your assets from Photoshop or Illustrator and turn them into XAML? And what’s really the difference between ActionScript and C#? This workshop is going to cover all of those topics and more. The goal is for you as an experienced web developer or designer to learn how to use your skills and toolset in the world of XAML, Silverlight and WPF.

A MIX Workshop is a half day session given before the conference.  That means I have three and a half hours to fill with content!  I’m not anticipating it being a problem, though, since there are many cool tools and useful things you can do with them to build Silverlight and WPF apps.

Look for new content on the Project Rosetta as a build up towards the Workshop, we may even have a few guest authors show up there again.

I want to give a quick shout out to my other “Advanced Tools and Processes Workshop” Track brothers, Robby Ingebretsen and Jaime Rodriguez, who will be giving the “Hiking Mt. Avalon” session.

Hope to see you at MIX09!

Although quite a few people have linked to this video already, I wanted to point out something interesting.  Not that you wouldn’t catch it if you watched the movie. But with the comments of “familiar resizing, option selecting interaction”, you may not take the 2 minutes to check it out.

First off this is important because its a valid real-world usage of the Surface.  It’s really fun to watch these pop up more and more.

Secondly, what I liked about the application was the added vertical surface (seen at 0:58).  Not only does this create an editor and viewer screen available at the same time, it also works in the favor of the user.  You’re used to manipulating things with your hands on a vertical surface.  But the viewer showing the accompanying video is familiar as watching TV.

Nice inspiration for creating new applications, congrats to BMW and Vectorform.

DeepEarth is a prototype of an interactive map using the Deep Zoom functionality of Silverlight.  The project is developed by the community and the code is available on CodePlex.

You may have seen the previous demo video before but the current demo site has been recently updated to reflect the latest changes, including a enhanced interface along with the addition of a few new services.

Along with the original Virtual Earth data you can choose from different data sources including OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap (Now we just need OpenPedestrianMap (I checked, the domain is available)).  This is interesting not only because you can compare data, but it also shows the richness of the application switching services and data without inconveniencing the user.

Although drawing and routing functionality looks like its starting to show up in the application, the viewing experience is worth taking the time to check out.  We all know by now that online maps use the Image Pyramid method to provide multi-scale resolutions of maps.  Serving up the image tiles via Deep Zoom smoothes out the perception of the images loading.

This is also a prime example of using the full screen as resolution independent very effectively.  How cool is it talk about the world with your kids using an interactive map that spans across 64 inches?  They're so lucky :)

On December 12th in the grand Kodiak room of the Microsoft Conference Center, there will commence a free training Windows event of the greatest proportions seen in the area for awhile.

Take a look at the line up:

• Mark "Inside Windows" Russinovich will be there to explain Windows oddities.
• Glenn"Prism Fingers" Block will be there to discuss MEF and Prism or Composite WPF.
• Crispin "Standard User" Cowan will be there discussing the right and wrong way to perform privileged operations.
• And much more...

Here's a glance at the official schedule:

Register on the MSEvents site, tell your friends you are going on Upcoming and then send Mithun Dhar a thanks for organizing the event.

For PhizzPop Chicago, Manifest Digital was tasked with creating a digital strategy for Chicago's bid to become the host city for the 2016 Olympics.  Their winning entry was Five Star City, a digital scrapbook allowing the people of Chicago to express themselves and explain why think Chicago would be a great place for the Olympics.

The Silverlight-based application has a few interesting features worth calling out:

• Custom Profile Page - users are allowed to post photos and videos on their page to give their personal view.  I love that video has become so easy to do use now that it has become part of the UI, integrated among photos and other UI elements.  Let's hear it for increasing the 4th dimension aspects of application development.
• Avatar Editor - following a current trend in avatar creation users are able to plant their face on a cartoon body.  maybe we'll get to do that in the next Xbox Dashboard update.
• People Plotting - Plotting points using Silverlight and Virtual Earth is even cooler in 3D view.  The more I look into Live Services, the more possibilities I see.  I can't wait for this stuff to explode.
• Tug of war comparison - Groups can organize and compare member count with a classic game of tug of war.  Its a fun visually, especially with the shrunken avatars.

You can see the application in action by checking out there video presentation.

I'm really enjoying watching what the applications coming out of PhizzPop this go-around.  I'm not sure if I wasn't paying attention as much before, but actually I believe its because their doing a fine job of holding the contests and training the contestants.  To get an idea of what the contest is like checkout the Chicago Highlights video.

There's five more stops left in the current tour - Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin.  I'm expecting five more inspirational winners.