Adam Kinney posts tagged with 'continuum'

TEWON35 prototype for Microsoft Surface from 2ndFactory

Adam Kinney — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:24:00 GMT

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.

Silverlight Christmas Cards for 2008

Adam Kinney — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:33:00 GMT

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?

XboxFriendsWatch Gamercard v2 has arrived!

Adam Kinney — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 21:21:00 GMT

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...

mixview on Zune.net in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 09:25:00 GMT

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

What can you make with 10k of Silverlight or WPF?

Adam Kinney — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 07:30:00 GMT

The problem statement is simple:

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
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.
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’s Deep Zoom multi-layered photo viewer

Adam Kinney — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 19:33:00 GMT

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.

Oh, Oxite, we love this open source .NET blog software

Adam Kinney — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:19:00 GMT

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 :)

Project Rosetta turns into a MIX09 workshop

Adam Kinney — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 22:22:00 GMT

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!

Extending the Surface experience in the BMW app

Adam Kinney — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:59:00 GMT

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 - Maps served using Deep Zoom in Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 07:59:00 GMT

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 :)

Windows FireStarter, free event on Dec 12th

Adam Kinney — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:41:00 GMT

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:

*Time*	Session	Presenter
8:30 - 8:45	Kick off	Mithun Dhar
8:45 – 9:30	Keynote/Why Vista!	Chris Henley
9:30 – 10:45	The Case of the Unexplained	Mark Russinovich
10:45 – 11:00	*Break*
11:00 – 12:15	Building Differentiated UI Applications Using Composite WPF	Glenn Block, Bob Brumfield & David Hill
12:15 – 1:00	**Lunch (Provided by Microsoft)**
1:00 – 2:00	Best Practices for Developing for Windows for Windows Standard User	Crispin Cowan
2:00 – 3:00	Windows Security and Bitlocker	Byron Hynes
3:00 – 3:15	*Break*
3:15 – 4:00	(Windows 7 + Windows Server 2008 R2) Teaser Session	Byron Hynes
4:00 – 5:00	Windows for everyone!	TBA

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

Manifest Digital wins PhizzPop Chicago with Five Star City

Adam Kinney — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:16:00 GMT

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.

XAML Power Toys from Karl Shifflett

Adam Kinney — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 22:13:00 GMT

XAML Power Toys - Instant Form Generation (28:10)

Karl Shifflett is someone you know you should know when you first meet him. He’s a super smart guy who builds great tools for WPF and is obviously having a good time while he’s doing it.

One of the first projects he was involved with was Mole for Visual Studio an object visualizer Add In. If you haven’t heard about you can check out the Mole Introduction video.

Karl stopped by the studio to talk about his latest project XAML Power Toys. A new Visual Studio Add In that can decrease your development time by generating hefty amounts of code. Similar to other code-generation tools, the Add In inspects a business object which then provides options for you to create input forms. XAML Power Toys stand apart though by the amount of control you have over what is created using a drag and drop designer that provides detailed property access like control type, max length and data formatting.

The Toys also include an awesome Grid Editor which can save you a ton of time when editing by inserting or removing rows. Roundtrip editing is definitely a feature that Karl thinks is important and has done a good job of implementing.

Along with all of this editing functionality is great customization. You can choose what XAML is outputted per control and you can even use your own custom controls.

And now for the big finish, both WPF and Silverlight are supported!

Check out the XAML Power Toys, Karl’s tutorial videos and Karl’s blog. In the video he mentions a larger framework he’s working on codenamed “Ocean”, which apparently marks “XAML Power Toys” as an appetizer to the upcoming main course.

Vectorform wins PhizzPop New York with Study Right

Adam Kinney — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 04:18:00 GMT

On the heels of my fascination with SurfaceDJ, Vectorform impresses again by winning the PhizzPop with Study Right, an innovative education application concept.

The application visualizes what the classroom of the near future may look like when students have Multi-touch laptops and the teacher has a Surface at the front of the room. The software provides tools for the teacher, students and parents.

Teachers can check attendance, student profiles and create lesson plans. Students use their own custom portal to to read and watch videos at their own pace while preparing for the next interactive test. Parent can login from home and see how well their children are progressing.

Its a great concept and I don’t want to ruin it, especially the ending. You should check out the Study Right video on the PhizzPop site. You can also find more information there like when the Chicago event is happening and how you can accept the challenge online.

Quickly Redesigning a Silverlight-based Twitter application

Adam Kinney — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:42:00 GMT

Celso Gomes: Styling a Silverlight based Twitter
application with Expression Blend 2 (10:28)

In 10 minutes, Celso Gomes redesigns a working Silverlight-based Twitter application using Expression Blend 2.

The fact that he is redesigning the working application without touching any code or breaking anything is awesome. Not only do you avoid the "throw it over the wall" model, but you can also run the application during design work, similar to hitting refresh when editing CSS.

Celso walks through some of the nicer features in Blend including:

Resources - similar to a CSS class in theory, but much more functionality available
Copy elements between projects - the beauty of persisting design elements in XAML
User Controls - encapsulating functionality into an object like a movie clip.
Custom Buttons - you can highlight a graphic element and the click "Make a Button" and you gain all of the functionality of a Button (visual states MouseOver, Click, etc.)
Richer Control templates - A ListBox is used to display the Twitter messages, and he restyles the item template once that then changes the appearance of messages.

If you like this video, you can find more Expression Training Videos on the Expression Community site.

Continuum on Channel9

Adam Kinney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:37:00 GMT

The Continuum on Channel 9 is now open for business. Its a central hub for the different online projects coming from myself and my team, including The Continuum Show, Project Rosetta and Continuum News.

What is the Client Continuum?
The Client Continuum is way to view all of the Microsoft UI technologies, currently focusing on WPF, Silverlight, Windows 7, IE8, ASP.NET and Surface. If you look at these different technologies along a line, the range covers very rich client applications to far-reaching web applications, as well as spanning across many different devices. Once you look at that and and realize you use the same skills, languages and tools to create these applications, then you start to smile.

What is The Continuum Show?
The Continuum Show is, not surprisingly, a show focused on the Client Continuum. The object is to create concise videos that show great applications, tools or demos that people are creating with Continuum technologies. The unwritten rule is if the video goes over 5 minutes, than we make an Essentials version that remixes the content down to 5 minutes or less. We're going for "short and interesting" and a little bit of "inspiring".

What are the Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials?
The Project "Rosetta Stone" Tutorials are focused on helping designers and developers build applications by taking advantage of skills they already know. The initial launch includes the set of lessons From Flash to Silverlight.

If you have ideas for more lessons and tutorials that will help you learn how to do WPF or Silverlight, head over to the feedback forum and make your suggestion.

What about Continuum News?
Fresh information about what's happening in the world of the Client Continuum. Currently this is generated by targeted posts from my blog and the site also includes a buffet of Recommended Reading. Target posting goal is around 0.7 - 2 posts a day. Quality high, quantity negotiable.

What's your conclusion?
If you are designing or developing applications for WPF, Silverlight or another Continuum technology than this mass of content will ideally be one or more of the following: relevant, interesting, inspiring, helpful and make you feel good to know there are others like you.

If its not, let me know. Send me an email or add a comment below.

New Controls and Tools - PDC2008 Cool Hunting finale

Adam Kinney — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:44:00 GMT

Monday was a blow out day for The Continuum Show. 5 videos from PDC were posted showing off new, unique and useful tools. As UI technologies improve and expectations grow control and tool vendors are adapting and changing in interesting ways. I'm loving the attention paid to enabling better experiences.

Here's the rundown:

Exploring Time and Space with Infragistics - Timeline, Map and Zoombar controls
Smooth Scrolling Datagrids with Xceed - Innovative Datagrid from the future
Dynamic 3D Charts with Telerik - flexible 2D/3D charts, you can even use your own 3D model
Shazzam - A Tool for Creating WPF Pixel Shader Effects - Useful tool for building and designing WPF Pixel Shader Effects
Smart Search and Replace with Aggiorno - Regular Expressions with custom AI that runs in Visual Studio

To finish up the Cool Hunting expedition at PDC2008, I present two more videos. First off, actual footage of the big 9 guy walking around. Don't get too close, he might challenge you to a dance off.

Next up is a quick clip of David Teitlebaum's "Multiple WPF Pixel Shader Effects applied to the input of a WebCam in real-time" demo.

Multi-touch enlightenment with IdentityMine and Vectorform

Adam Kinney — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 08:30:00 GMT

Something about companies with compound names...

Being a UI guy, one of the biggest impressions PDC2008 left on me was Multi-touch. This is the first time I've seen it done in so many forms. There were Surface tables everywhere, in the Lounges, Hand-on Labs, Exhibitor booths, in the hallways and even in rare cases under the escalators.

Along with the abundance of Surface tables came the abundance of applications written specifically for Surface. Multi-touch at this scale presents a new design challenge and opportunity, these aren't your basic data entry apps.

IdentityMine's multitude of Multi-touch apps (3:26)

Surface beats with Vectorform (5:26)

IdentityMine had all of the Multi-touch bases covered. On a whirlwind tour of their booth, provided by Kurt Brockett and Meg McAllister, we get to see their Photo Sharing app running on Surface, their Photo Slideshow app using NextWindow touch screens and their AirHockey game running on an HP Touchsmart running Windows 7.

As an added bonus, Gilbert Corrales and Laurent Bugnion make a quick cameo in this Hollywood worthy action film.

You can see more IdentityMine's Surface work on their Surface technology page.

In this video, Vectorform performs using their SurfaceDJ application. Not only is it Multi-touch, WPF-based, Surface-enabled and spouting out fun electronic beats; it is also a great example of a new collaborative type of application. This app makes me want my own Surface table.

Check out Vectorform's Surface blog to see some of their other Surface applications. Yes, they are the ones behind NBC's Electoral application.

With the video interviews and the working and the talking and the more talking, I missed every session but one. Here a few of the relevant Multi-touch sessions, pulled from Mike Swanson's PDC2008 Sessions page, I plan on catching up on.

PC17 | Developing for Microsoft Surface (Brad Carpenter, Robert Levy)
PowerPoint
PC03 | Windows 7: Developing Multi-touch Applications (Anson Tsao, Reed Townsend)
PowerPoint
KYN04 | Day 3 Morning Keynote (Rick Rashid)

Did you get access to the Surface SDK? Are you building something with it? If you are, I'd love to hear about it.

Cool hunting at PDC - Conchango's Tesco project

Adam Kinney — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:39:00 GMT

PDC2008 was an awesome show with a great turnout. This was the first year I was involved so much with the event crew so it was very interesting to see it from the logistics side. A lot of great work done by a lot of people, congratulations to the whole PDC team!

Conchango and the Tesco project (15:52)

Busy the first two days I was able to take time the next two days to run around with the camera and go cool hunting. Being a UI guy, I was really interested in capturing the new work done with Windows 7, WPF, Surface and the HP Touchsmarts. I ended up with 9 videos to post and I thought I'd lead off with Conchango's Tesco project. The WPF-based application is redefining how you order groceries online and the preview was so impressive it was shown during the Day Two Keynote (starts around 94:00).

After working and then shooting videos, I realized although I had gone to many events I hadn't made it to a single session yet. Luckily the realization came just in time and I was able to attend David Teitlebaum's WPF Pixel Shaders and DirectX talk.

Now having missed almost every session, I have quite about of catching up to do with the online PDC2008 videos on Channel 9. Along with the page on Ch9, I've also found Mike Swanson's PDC2008 Sessions list to be quite useful, especially when you know the title or speaker of the session you are looking for.

My goal is to release the rest of my PDC2008 videos this week, so expect to see an unusual flurry on the Continuum Show page.

Day 0 at PDC2008 - on inspiration and creativity

Adam Kinney — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 06:20:00 GMT

Here I am in my Moroccan hotel room at the Hotel Figueroa ruminating over the first day at the Conference Center for PDC2008 thinking, who works on a Saturday? Many people do, of course, and some people work really hard like those setting up the Conference Center for the PDC so that the attendees can enjoy the wonderland that it is and will be.

Other people are working hard on a Saturday, like Rick Barraza who shot a video of his latest work, Project Touchstone.

Touchstone is a lobby Surface application written in WPF that takes advantage of Effects and I believe the WPF Effects Library. Its always fun to see when people try new things with new capabilities.

Now I am going to be coy and say "I believe there might be a Surface at PDC". Maybe. Possibly.

On the note of trying new things and being inspired by design. I've recently found two other things I'd like to share. The first is an intriguing slide deck, which Don Campbell thankfully bookmarked, by Chris Wilson that discusses change in design.

Rapid Change in Design: The Changing Landscape & New Rules for Design Project

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: social media)

I really like his thinking and especially the packaging - "3 Rules of Rapid Design".

I don't want to give any more away, but its worth the 2,3, even 10 minutes you may find yourself thinking about the slides.

One of the things that really gets me about the slides is that I feel Chris Wilson, the author, may be watching TED talks like myself. If he hasn't that might even be better. It could be a clue that we're heading towards the singularity.

The second item comes from TED Talks, which have become my most recent passion.

I might be late to the game, but that doesn't matter. The reruns are great. Watching TED Talks are entertaining and they fill my head with ideas, give me a different perspective on some of my older thoughts and make me feel like we are not just a collection of gangs, tribes and countries, rather that we are also one human race. Just a peaceful, "ah yes, this is what life could/should be about".

Anyway back to design and being inspired by new things and big conferences in Los Angeles that start with a "P" and end with a "C... ya there", in one the recently posted TED talks Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses creativity, fulfillment and flow. I would recommend the talk to anyone who thinks about what they are doing with their time. I'm not quite sure the following the slide will have the same effect without listening to the talk but I wanted to end this post here because I'm still meditating on it. I think its a great way to think about the work you do. Simply put, aim to spend as much time in the flow as possible.

The PDC flow begins tomorrow with Registration, PDC Marketplace, Pre-Conference Sessions and the WomenBuild Workshop.

"C...ya there!"

QuakeLight, the Silverlight port of Quake, is coming...

Adam Kinney — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:12:00 GMT

QuakeLight Preview (3:00)

In the first post about QuakeLight, many people were interested and some just couldn't quite believe what they saw. I was pretty impressed myself and contacted Julien Frelat the man behind the scenes. He was more than willing to provide information on the story behind QuakeLight, the coding techniques and access to run the actual demo.

(And to save you the time of reading through the whole interview, a public demo is not available yet. This is a "When-I-have-free-time" project for Julien.)

I've recorded a video of the demo running on my machine and the text-based interview is available for your viewing and reading pleasure. "Shenanigans", although fun to say, is apparently not appropriate in this situation. Enjoy.

Hello, sir, please tell us a little about yourself.

I am Julien Frelat, a 31-year old french developer. In real life, I work as a project leader for a software company called Assima. We work on unique technologies to improve and accelerate the work of end-users in companies (training, performance, translation...). In my very little spare time, I work on emulation and videogame software projects (InnoveWare Solutions). I am the author of several emulators including BoycottAdvance, a famous Gameboy Advance emulator that was able to run games even before the console was available in the US or in Europe. I also developed demos and a 3D game (Space Racer) several years ago.

Where did the idea for writing Quake in Silverlight come from?

I saw the leaked video from Adobe MAX 2007 showing Quake in Flash running in fullscreen (they cross-compiled the C code into Flash bytecode and plugged a few AS3 functions). Since I was curious about Silverlight (as an alternative to Java), I wanted to experiment with it. To my great surprise, a quick port of an emulated Z80 arcade game in C#/Silverlight was running about 2.5 times faster than the same code in Java. Given this, I decided to attempt a Quake port.

When you released the first demo video, some people couldn't believe it. What's the secret? Is this all custom code?

I first tried automatic conversion tools and ended up doing the job myself, abstracting highly-optimized C code into C# classes. I did not use any existing 3D engines, apart from the original Quake code. So you can say it is custom ported code ;)

From a technical perspective, I was not really convinced by other 3D experiments in Silverlight (Kit3D or Balder for example) so I turned to a traditional pixel-per-pixel 3D engine (they use scanlines in Quake and a simple Z-buffer). The keypoint was to heavily optimize the bitmap rendering and blitting. I think I reached the limits of what it is possible to do in Silverlight at this point.

It sounds like you've had previous experience writing games. How does Silverlight and C# compare to previous projects?

I wrote several C/C++ handheld emulators (Neopocott, Boycott Advance) in the past and then I decided to focus my work and experiments on Java projects.

I was especially interested in applets and I wanted to see full applications or operating systems running straight in a Web browser (RIA are not far from this now).

Java is a good platform but there are several drawbacks to port or develop emulators: lack of signed/unsigned types, no jump tables, no gotos, no good development environment prior to Eclipse...

I think I adopted Silverlight in a matter of few hours: a powerful language that supports exactly what Java was missing, very fast development and debugging in Visual Studio, a powerful API ala Adobe Flash, a tiny plugin to install, and very good performance.

Of course, we are only at the second release of Silverlight and there are important missing features for people developing games or emulators. No raster bitmap support, no dynamic sound generation means you need to find some tricks (use images and transparent images for tiles and sprites, encode sounds in mp3, etc.).

I am pretty sure Microsoft will extend the set of WPF features supported in Silverlight in the future (WriteableBitmap, 3D api...) and I am convinced Silverlight will become a great platform for demos, games and rich applications in general.

I want to emphasize that QuakeLight was developed in about three weeks during my holidays, given that I was babysitting/watching my son in the meantime... So you can code in Silverlight very quickly and very efficiently!

We've seen the demo of the game now, what's left before we can play it?

I need to finish the 3D engine as there are still clipping issues left that prevent me from displaying correctly the main player weapon.

You can also notice that if you turn on JavaScript exceptions, the demo actually crashes (this occurs when the first bad guy attacks you) due to unexpected negative texture coordinates... This one will be a bit difficult to fix.

Regarding the game engine itself, you must be aware that id Software created a Quake C compiler. This is actually precompiled code with opcodes interpreted in the C code.

I have to implement this Quake-C interpreter and handle everything related to it (memory, stack, variables). This is very similar to interpreter cores used in emulators. This may be a long task.

There are other developments planned: add sound support (mp3), try network support for multiplayers. It really depends what it is possible to do with Silverlight.

Optimizations would be interesting too, to have a higher framerate for higher resolutions. As a reminder, the original Quake game was heavily optimized with assembly code (only a few cycles needed for a texel) and there are many optimizations not applicable here (especially no unsafe code is possible due to security reasons in Silverlight).

On the other hand, nowadays strategies could be interesting like a multi-threaded rendering to benefit from dual or quad-core processors.

What next from InnoveWare after QuakeLight?

I would say Quake II logically, as the source code is very similar. With this first Silverlight experience, I could also work on tools or libraries for similar developments.

This could be a 3D library, a graphics library, an emulation library... Maybe I can work again on emulator projects (Silverlight running Silverlight ?)...

As you can see, there are endless possibilities and it also depends on what Microsoft has in the hat for Silverlight 3.0.

I created a poll on the InnoveWare web site to see what people would prefer as the next InnoveWare project. 3D is the great favorite as for now (a sign for Microsoft ?).

So, do not hesitate to vote!

Thanks for the interview Julien!

I've also posted a few QuakeLight screenshots if you'd like to check them out.

Rounded Windows and Blur Sample Code

Adam Kinney — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 09:03:00 GMT

Tonight I saw this distressing tweet from @tsjordan:

#wpf: Window.AllowsTransparency, Background="Transparent", WindowStyle="None" ALL A DIRTY LIE. I NEED ROUNDED WINDOWS!

And I thought, "I know that works. Let me try it real quick."

So I did and I ended up with this RoundedWindow sample pictured to the right. Once I busted the dirty lie by having rounded corners and double checking that I could click through the window bounds to application beneath, I took it a step further.

With WPF Effects still firmly on the mind, I thought I'd a BlurEffect to the image so even more transparency could be demonstrated. I linked the Radius of the Blur Effect to the position of the Window in relation to its the screen. If the window is at the top of the screen the Blur is 0, at the bottom its 100.

The end result is pretty interesting as you drag the Window up and down your desktop. Effects are certainly fun. The sample also includes code for other tasks like setting the position of the Window and finding its position relative to the screen.

Now, I'm not sure if this will solve Jordan's problem, but it was a nice little coding break, from my other activities. PDC is only 5 days away!

SilverlightContrib is taking off

Adam Kinney — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:30:00 GMT

Congratulations to the freshly expanded SilverlightContrib team for the work done on their Alpha 2 release! They've overshot their original release goals set in September by quite bit.

Straight from their site:

Silverlight Contrib is a collection of Silverlight Controls and API enhancements built for and by the Silverlight developer community.
The current release is compatible with Silverlight 2 - RCW and consists of the following features:
Controls

Color Picker

Gauge Control

Star Selector

Enhanced Metafile (EMF)

Cool Menu

Library

Zip Compression

Byte Utilities

String Utilities

Simple Text Parser

Animation Tweening

Wheel Mouse Listener

Clipboard Helper - (Internet Explorer Only)

Data Context Extension Method Wrapper

My favorite features include the Color Picker and the Tweening Library, which you can use to do non-linear dynamic animations.

Nicely done, I look forward to the next release!

WPF Effects and Transitions Library Applied

Adam Kinney — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:35:00 GMT

WPF Effects Interview (8:46)
WPF Effects Interview - Essential (5:35)

WPF Effects Demo (5:35)
WPF Effects Demo - Just Effects (3:36)
WPF Effects Demo - Just Transitions (2:32)

Last week we posted the WPF Effects Library on Codeplex along with an David Teitlebaum interview and a demo video showing the library in action.

The library includes 23 Effects using the new PixelShader class ShaderEffect available in WPF 3.5 SP1. Effects range from BandedSwirl, ZoomBlur, InvertColor and my favorite to say, GrowablePoissonDisk.

I have a few Effects screenshots on Flickr, if you'd like to see them. Greg Schechter has a great blog post talking about Effects in WPF.

The library also includes 33 Transitions in addition to the Effects. Transitions range from familiar concepts like BandedSwirl, Pixelate and Slide to more exotic types like Crumble, MostBright and Water.

All of the Transitions are based on the abstract TransitionEffect class, which builds on the framework ShaderEffect class adding the concept of two inputs and a progress animation. This now allows you to use an Effect in a very applicable way. The Effect is not only applied to an element but you can use the Effect as a way to animate between two elements. And the animation itself is handled by a WPF Storyboard demonstrating the tight integration between the WPF Framework and Pixel Shaders. The more you dig into this architecture the more you find out how much work has been done by the WPF team to make using Shaders simple.

Using the WPF Effects Library

In order to start using the WPF Effects Library for your WPF Applications, there are a few simple steps involved listed below:

Ensure you have VS2008 and .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 installed
Install the Shader Effects BuildTask and Templates available on Codeplex. Grab the .ZIP file and follow the steps in the readme.txt
Download the WPF Effects Library and open the ShaderDemoApp.
You will see "custombuild" warnings when opening the projects. This is due to the Shader Effects Build Task being hooked up. No worries here, click Load Normally.
Now try to run the ShaderDemoApp and if it looks like it did in the demo video, you're all set.

Now that you're up and running you can start using the Effects. One thing about the ShaderDemoApp that comes with the library is that its great to demo with, but as a starter application it can be a little complex.

Let's walkthrough a very simple application called TransitioningImages that makes use of a TransitionEffect to navigate images in a folder.

This is a very simple application where all of the action happens within the Window1 class.

Choose a Folder - After the user selects a folder using the OpenFileDialog, the code retrieves all of the .jpg images from the folder and instantiates a new collection of BitmapSources for the custom PhotoSlideShow class. The initial image is then loaded into an Image element.
Navigating the Images - Hitting the Next or Previous buttons then cycle through the PhotoSlideShow image collection and cue a Transition to move from one image to the next.
Transition Applied - A new Transition Effect is instantiated (the default is a RadialWiggle (pictured above)) along with a DoubleAnimation that animates the Progress of the Transition until completion.

One of the very cool things to point out here is that we are Transitioning between images which is an obvious choice. But as the ShaderDemoApp shows the multiple inputs for the Transition are Brushes and in WPF we have an array of Brushes to choose from. One of those Brushes is the VisualBrush which allows you to take any Visual element including Buttons, MediaElements and the like allowing you to create some really interesting applications using these Effects.

Below is a link to the source code for the TransitioningImages application. The executable will run with WPF 3.5 SP1 installed, but in order to modify and build the application you'll need to follow the installation steps above.

If you use the Effects Library in your own application, let us know. We'd love to hear about how well they worked for you and see what kind of applications you've come up with.

Seattle's own Developer/Designer Group

Adam Kinney — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:50:00 GMT

In exciting local news, a few of us having gotten together and taken note from the Chicago Designers and Developers group and started up the Seattle Designer Developer Interaction Group or as we like to abbreviate it - sd2ig.

The purpose of the group is to bring together developers and designers and discuss how we can improve user experience along with the design and development of those experiences. We're not focused on a single technology but will be covering an array of UI related topics. And ultimately the direction of the group depends on input from everyone who attends, so come by and let us know what you're interested in.

The first meeting will be held on October 15th at Bellevue Place (more details on the Inaugural Group meeting). If you think you're going to stop by, let us know. Leave a comment here or on the sd2ig blog and we'll save you a spot.

UPDATE: Adding links for Facebook event page and Upcoming event page

Quake in Silverlight with 3D and Texture Mapping

Adam Kinney — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 16:26:00 GMT

QuakeLight, a Silverlight-based version of the classic game Quake, is a new project from Innoveware Solutions. Reading through Innoveware's news stream you can see that they just started working with Silverlight around 2 months ago and they already have a pretty cool version of Quake up in running shown in the video.

Granted they appear to have some experience in porting games, but its pretty impressive when you read through the list of game features:

Correct BSP support.
Texture mapping rendering (with mipmapping and surface cache).
Faces rendering (no polygons or triangles yet).
Submodels rendering (moving walls, floors and doors).
Particles rendering.
Simple sprite rendering (no animated sprites yet).
Warp effect.
Sky and turbulent (water, swamp, lava) rendering.
Palette effects.
Client/server support (loop network protocol).
Demo playback.
Very preliminary game engine.

Next step is the skin models and the game engine. And then after Quake is up and running, maybe they'll go for HALO :)

3D Views for WPF from Xceed

Adam Kinney — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:33:00 GMT

3D View Controls for WPF (11:24)
3D View Controls for WPF - Essential (3:20)

I remember a while ago in a blog entry that has been lost due to time and many blog redesigns, I posted about building a 3D Windows Explorer allowing you to search files by driving a Manta. I'm pretty sure this was a UT-induced pipe dream and really not a good idea, but the idea of using 3D to enhance software applications is still a good one.

Luckily others than myself have taken the idea of 3D and run with it (in a good direction). I spoke with Marc Laroche from Xceed who has been working on one of their latest products 3D Views for WPF.

Using their controls you can easily display your data in multiple 3D views. There are many preset display themes available, but you can also see in the screenshot you can easily customize the look of the display in the Settings dialog. Another cool feature to keep it simple is that you can customize each view (front, back, angled right, angled left) of the display card individually.

Learning about WPF Effects

Adam Kinney — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 21:51:00 GMT

WPF Pixel Shader Parts (12:41)
WPF Pixel Shader Parts - Essential Edition (2:27)
Zoom Blur Shader clip (1:01)

Last week I spent some time with Nikola Mihaylov talking about WPF Effects and how Pixel Shaders work with WPF. Shaders are written in HLSL, which are then compiled and made available to your WPF application.

The nice part is that the WPF framework is doing a lot of the work for you that has been pretty manual previously to set them up. Being fully integrated with the framework also means you can use the DependancyProperty and animate those properties using Storyboards. This functionality along with the fact that Visual Studio has design-time support Effects makes it pretty easy to get moving on your own Effects or just using existing ones.

Nikola has a simple list showing how to get started along with a custom VS project template to use. From there I would recommend taking a look at Greg Schechter's informative Series on GPU-based Effects for WPF. Greg's articles have a ton of details, code and even a few sections marked with"<Geek-Out-Alert--Somewhat-Esoteric-Stuff-Here>" tags.

Barnes Begins Project Nexus

Adam Kinney — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:32:00 GMT

Late last night, Scott Barnes introduced Project Nexus where the goal is to provide a vicarious experience for those who wonder whether the tagline "learn once, apply anywhere" really fits Microsoft's Rich platform story. Can you really take advantage of your .NET skills, code and tools across our multiple offerings? This where Scott steps in and says:

Well, I’m going to answer this and I’m not going to do it via lip service either. I’m going to write a complete end to end solution from scratch, in that I’m going to write code that I will be able to use throughout our entire Rich Platform. It will be a complete ACME style solution that is a living breathing application as well.

I think its great idea and I hope to help where I can. That's where this first post comes in. Scott's started the project by opening up with a Contract for the project, open for discussion. Currently his plan is to span the technologies of ASP.NET MVC + AJAX, Silverlight, WPF, Windows Forms, WCF and SQL Server. Is there something missing you'd like to see? Leave a comment on his post and let him know.

Sounds like a Continuum episode(s) in the works to me...

Shidonni, interactive drawing fun for kids

Adam Kinney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 08:20:00 GMT

I just recently found out about the Silverlight-based site Shidonni which describes itself as:

...a virtual universe, where kids and their parents can create their own imaginary world, play games, have fun and interact in a friendly, non-violent environment...

After checking out the site two things caught my eye, first you can draw your own animals. The tools are simple pencil and fill drawing tools but its all done in Silverlight which is very interesting. The paths created work out pretty well and I was even able to use my Pen on my Tablet to draw.

After drawing the animal, it then starts to bounce around your scene. From there you can add a background, food for the animal and eventually play games. Of course its not quite as complex as the other creature creation game I've been playing around with, but it is cool to see your creature "jump" and "eat".

The site just recently went into beta and you can follow along with them on Twitter. Looks like an interesting place for kids and a great technical example of creating a drawing tool in Silverlight 2.

Now I need to draw some food for my gorilla... I feel like Harold with the Purple Crayon :)

Fall Events Schedule

Adam Kinney — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:50:00 GMT

After a quiet summer, I thought I'd post up my schedule of conferences for the next 3 months.

Heartland Developers Conference
September 28-30th
Upcoming Event Page

I'll be speaking at this event about the Client Continuum, what it is, how to choose which technologies and what are some of the new features available in WPF and Silverlight. It should be a lot of fun and I'm also planning on shooting video for The Continuum Show while there.

PDC2008
October 27-30th
Upcoming Event Page

Possibly attending the SoCal Code Camp as an appetizer, PDC2008 is going to be a great time to "Capture the Brainpower" of those behind the new technologies coming form Microsoft. PDC is always a massive show and we haven't had one since '05 so the energy has been building up.

I'm helping out with the PDC Lounges, Big Room, advising on the MicrosoftPDC.com site and Channel9's involvement. I'm also working on another program called PDC Badges which we haven't quite announced yet (feel free to speculate). So along with the technology news and announcements, there is quite a bit of fun to be had.

Adobe MAX 2008
November 16-19th
Upcoming Event Page

With such a cool conference site, how could you possibly resist the Adobe MAX conference? In actuality there some interesting session lined up including the much talked about Designer/Developer Workflow, Thermo (the Blend-like Interactive Design tool) and all the new features coming in Flash.

Maybe I'll even shoot some video there as well...

Great way to start the fall...39 Days till PDC08!

Desire is the name

Adam Kinney — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:31:00 GMT

I noticed A Website Named Desire was live today.

The content of the site includes an intriguing poster encompassing the world of the keepers of the web. Along the edge you'll find all the familiar web titles like Software Architect, Interaction Designer and Information Architect. From there you can play "Where's Waldo?" and hunt for them in the poster. There's a lot of humor embedded within the poster and its definitely worth the time to try and find a few of the "inside" jokes.

One of my favorite scenes includes a Nerf gun shoot-out which includes Capt. Kirk and an innocent Accessibility Test Engineer caught in the crossfire. Nearby a Front End Web Developer contemplates his h1 tags. (below)

To get your own 25X33" poster to hang on your wall, check out the event list on the site. The team will be floating around the conference offering their goods. Be the only one in the office with Donkey Kong, Godzilla and Guitar Hero in the same poster!

Project Rosetta, From Flash to Silverlight

Adam Kinney — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:42:00 GMT

Project Rosetta (13:33)
Project Rosetta - Essential Edition (2:46)

One of the most requested resources we're asked for, is tutorials showing how to use Flash skills when creating Silverlight projects. Friday we launched Project Rosetta, which is a new site dedicated to helping designers and developers take advantage of their existing skills.

In the first article, Rick Barraza has written 9 tutorials that include familiar topics like Inertia, Trigonometry and Image Sequencing. Overall his goal is to promote having fun with Silverlight. Be creative, even exercise "creative recklessness" as he puts it.

New articles are in the works for the site and will continue to focus on helping designers and developers learn Silverlight and WPF. If you have new ideas for articles that you would like to see written, please add your suggestion to the discussion thread.

We've already received a fair amount of posts and comments about the project (Gilbert's take on the designer/developer workflow, Shawn Wildermuth has interesting discussion going on in his comments) but my favorite so far is from Florin:

Excellent stuff! Keep up the good work! Never thought I could do so many things in Silverlight.

To track Project Rosetta you can subscribe to the RSS feed or follow the project on Twitter.