MIX07: WPF Comics with Identity Mine

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I just came from a session given by Nathan Dunlap and Robbie Ingebretsen entitled “ZAP!, WHAM!, KAPOW!”: WPF and the Next Genertion of Online Comic Book Reading.   And yes, it was as awesome as it sounds like as it should be.  They presented an experimental WPF app designed to create a great on screen reading experience for comics.

I'm a fan of comics and enhancing reading experiences especially online, and this type of conceptually was similar to something Ernie Booth and I had dreamed up.  Immediate improvements include a visual index of pages which you can use to navigate and preview, different display modes depending on the context of the display currently used and an authoring environment allow content creators to author a very rich path of navigation through the content.  They did mention that the Sample should be available online soon once they have chance to clean it up for distribution.

A few technical items of note; each page that is presented can be a .jpg (they were using actual comic book pages from the 24 comic, 1000x2000 pixel images) or a xaml file.  Once I heard that I thought "moving backgrounds!" (think DreamScene type movies).  Which in due course, they demoed a cover page of their comic with a pulsating plasma-like image in the background.  Nicely played Dunlap and Ingebretsen, nicely played.  It was also interesting to see that they had chosen to use a Silverlight player within the WPF application to show their extra editor's clips.

Overall the two presented with excitement and obvious love for their science project.  Both had previously worked at Microsoft building WPF and now they are both off apparently having a great time at Identity Mine.  Towards the end they mentioned that their demo comic "Identity Men" had been actually printed (sure to be found on Flickr soon) and that they were releasing a collection of controls called Blendables, Nathan posted more here.

Great session guys, now I need to try and catch their next session Booyah! Designing and Developing Line-of-Business Applications That SIZZLE

posted on Apr 30th, 2007 | Permalink | Comments (2)

2 Comments »

  1. Oh, can you read frame-by-frame. It's always kinda annoying to focus on text in small frames reading comics on my PC - but you can't just zoom in because frames vary in size and position.

    A reader which would transition from one frame to another (and be aware of when the 4th wall was being broken so as to not cut things in half when they overreached the limits of the frame) would be awesome.

    Naturally it would have to have swooshing animations as it moved from frame to frame.

    Comment by Massif - May 09, 2007 @ 5:57 AM

  2. Naturally it should and naturally it does! It's got everything one could hope for in a two week production period.

    The frame transitions are smooth and the zoomed in frames are 100% dynamic - they'll work with any frame size/shape.

    The comic reader could theoretically even have custom functionality, such as a page shaking when zooming to the next frame where something is blowing up, for example. In their 2 week production version that they showed off at mix07 this feature wasn't present, but it easily could be...

    Comment by dev'in - May 17, 2007 @ 6:25 PM

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