Tag Archives: Developement

Microsoft Store Kiosk

Check out this article about the Microsoft Store Software Kiosk over on MSDN. They interview my colleague David Kelley, who was part of our Wire Stone team that helped build this WPF application.

You can watch the video interview here:

Video: MVP David Kelley shows us the kiosk Wire Stone built for the new Microsoft store in Bellevue, Wa.

WPF Sonar application using Arduino and PING))) sensor

I’ve been playing around with the Arduino more and more lately and really wanted to find a way to make it work with my other world of C# and WPF.   The idea was to make an application that changes the screen based on how far away the user is.  The only way that I could easily think about doing it was to use an Arduino as a serial device to help communicate with the sonar sensor. 

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Working with Sketch Flow

The official release of Silverlight 3 and Expression Studio 3 was last Friday and I’m really excited about how these products have been evolving. My favorite new feature is Sketch Flow, which I’ve been playing around with for a little while now and have found it to be a great way to build dynamic prototypes.  From my previous post on Wireframe Prototype Fidelity I would have added a bit on Sketch Flow if the product had existed at the time.  I think it fits a gap in the tools of the UX professional who works on rich interactive applications.  For myself I was either building static images in OmniGraffle or Adobe Illustrator or I was mocking things up in HTML with JavaScript.  Sometimes I’ve built stuff using Flash or even modeling and rendering an animation in 3D tools like Maya to best get the concept across. I think Sketch Flow really brings it all together for a quick way to rough out the experience. My favorite part is how Sketch Flow lets you put in fake data driven content. It’s hard to explain how awesome this is, to get a good understanding check out the video below.

Check out this great video introduction to using Sketch Flow from Mix earlier this year:

To keep up to date be sure to follow the Silverlight team blog, Soma’s blog and Scott Guthrie’s blog

Play

CodeRun – Online Development Platform

CodeRun is a browser-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE), built on top of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It allows programmers to easily develop, test, deploy and publish code online, without requiring powerful hardware or complex software.

Twitter Affiliate Ad Network

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days now and what we really need is a Twitter affiliate ad network like service.  I often post tweets about products I like or things that I find interesting.  In most cases that is valuable to those companies.  I’ve done some small tests with my twitter account @futileboy and found that my click through is very high for each post about 7% of my followers click my links.  Which is a much higher number then online ads get.  Of course that’s because my links are not always trying to sell something.  On twitter if you stop being genuine the people see that and stop following you.

Aside from all that, it would be great if there was service for users of twitter to make a little money off of their recommendations.  What I would like to see is a service that’s sort of like Google Adsense, but instead of suggested ads, a user would type in the product they are about to promote and then if available receive a URL with their code and the clients in it. along with a short URL version that’s easy to post to Twitter. 

Companies could go one step further with this, on demand adverting, and even offer discounts to top influencer’s followers.  Which in turn would give the tweeter more street cred.  Just imagine a tweet from someone you follow pointing out a product you’re interested in and a discount if you click the link now.  This may be just enough to push someone in to purchasing.

Would this service get abused? OF course it will.  However the natural filtering process of over advertising will ultimately make authentic influencers stand out.

Sure it’s a little evil, but if someone is willing to pay for it and someone is willing to take that money in the offer then the service should exist.

I’ll be at PDC

Microsoft PDC 2008

Microsoft PDC 2008

What’s PDC? It’s the Professional Developers Conference put on by Microsoft. It’s one of the biggest events they put on for developers. I’m really excited about this one because of the Windows 7 announcements and sessions. I’ll do my best to live / semi-live blog the event. I’m going to do a test an use my OLPC for blogging at the event since it’s so much easier to lug around. Of course maybe someone from MS will see me running Sugar as the OS and help hook me up with the version of Windows XP that runs on it instead :P.

If you’re reading this and you’re attending PDC then hit me up on Twitter @futileboy

If you want to learn more about PDC then check out this sites: