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:
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
I think it’s really wonderful when a company share’s there process like this.
There are two excellent Silverlight 2.0 books now on the market:
If anyone out there has any recommendations let me know and I’ll update the list.
I’m posting this message from my iPhone using the new WordPress client app!
I’ve got a problem. A problem with Outlook and Exchange. You see I have two exchange accounts on two different servers. This is problem that I thought was rare at first, but I’m finding more and more that folks who work in the consulting space are having this challenge when their clients are using MS Exchange.
On my mac, this isn’t really a big problem because I Entourage actually supports multiple Exchange servers.
On the PC side though, Outlook wants nothing to do with my multiple Exchange servers accounts.
To set up support for two accounts I had to go in to the control panel and locate the mail icon.
Then from there users have to figure out the very abstract user interface of what to do next.
Nope not “E-mail Accounts” I need to create a new Profile.
I’ve already created a new profile, but this is where you’d click Add.
Give it a name that explains the account to you
Then you have to fill out this for and will try to auto configure your account
These seems to work most of the time.
So now you have two profiles. Here’s where it gets annoying. These profiles have no awareness of each other. So if you get a meeting request in one and accept it, it will only be visible in that accounts calendar.
Then when you switch profiles you have no way to take that information with you.
Here’s where I’m using Google Calendar Sync.
It’s not perfect, but it does help.
Once set up it will sync my Google calendar with my Outlook calendar. Then when I switch profiles from one Outlook session to the next. Google’s Calendar Sync stays active. It will then begin syncing the information from my current profile.
Of course the big issue here is that I have to continue switching my outlook profiles back and forth during the day to make sure all the information is up to date. It’s still possible to receive a meeting request for the same time in both accounts. Accept in one switch profiles. Then accept in the other before Google get’s the calendars synced and I can create a conflict.
What Exchange really need to do is offer this a service feed directly from the server so that I don’t have to go through Outlook to activate all.
Phew! That’s a lot of work just to make sure I don’t double book myself.
Of course this all gets much worse once you start to open yourself to other scheduling services like evite and upcoming.
Sometimes I have to remind myself that computers are supposed to make life easier not harder.
Looks like some “Windows 7″ multitouch is starting to, er, surface.
Video: Multi-Touch in Windows 7
personally, this doesn’t seem that special. WPF has had the ability to author multitouch for a little while now. There just hasn’t been any hardware except the Wii hacks and the Surface.
Oh and a side note. This is the first time I’ve seen someone use MSN’s Soapbox.
I’m not surprised too much by the idea of putting interactive technology in every place imaginable. I don’t think it will be too long before we find games in urinals at bars.
The example on the right is demonstration of an interactive floor that was created for Swarovski Kristallwelten called Ice Passage. There’s a nice video on the site if you follow the link.
It was made possible using vvvv
vvvv is a toolkit for real time video synthesis. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.
It seems to me the current technology coming out of Microsoft such as Seadragon, Deep Zoom and Photosynth have created a foundation for doing extremely rich real time data driven visual experience that can be extended to any medium.
I could see something like a “mirror” at a shoe store that could put virtually any shoe on your foot as you walk by and even learn from you as you shop. All you would have to do to see a specific shoe would be to hold it as you walk by. It could also update based on what shoes you currently have on and what parts of the store you’ve been browsing.
There are so many uses, not just sales related, that it boggles the mind. I think we are on a precipice of a new level of interactive technology.
There’s a new version of the ASP.NET MVC presentation online. I much prefer this side by side method of displaying presentation based talks. The Silverlight interface is little bit visually chunky, but it works well.
MVC is a framework methodology that divides an application’s implementation into three component roles: models, views, and controllers.
- “Models” in a MVC based application are the components of the application that are responsible for maintaining state. Often this state is persisted inside a database (for example: we might have a Product class that is used to represent order data from the Products table inside SQL).
- “Views” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for displaying the application’s user interface. Typically this UI is created off of the model data (for example: we might create an Product “Edit” view that surfaces textboxes, dropdowns and checkboxes based on the current state of a Product object).
- “Controllers” in a MVC based application are the components responsible for handling end user interaction, manipulating the model, and ultimately choosing a view to render to display UI. In a MVC application the view is only about displaying information – it is the controller that handles and responds to user input and interaction.
Watch and enjoy. I can’t wait to get my hands on this to try out. I’m really interested to see what it would be like to develop for. I’m also curious to learn more about the Unlimited Potential group inside of Microsoft.
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