Thursday, September 04, 2008
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Here's an interesting slide deck I found on User Centered Design.
One of the key points the deck makes is that analysis, designing, and testing are all critical steps in achieving great results.
Do those steps sound familiar?
Chris Cavanagh came up with this cool little application in WPF.
You type in a web page address and you see the web page mapped onto a cube.
While you can't interact with the page just yet, there's a lot of potential here for everything from screen savers to creating a browser with surfaces on a cube instead of tabs.
Fortunately, the source code is available so you can get to experimenting with it as well.
Technorati Tags:
WPF,
YouCube,
Devigner
The F# developer center is now live, along with the September 2008 F# CTP.
What is F#?
Don Syme describes it as:
F# is a simple, type-safe, efficient, scalable language for the .NET platform that supports both functional and object-oriented programming. One of the key things about F# is that it spans the spectrum from interactive, explorative scripting to component and large-scale software development. In this release we’ve made major improvements to the language, libraries and tools across this spectrum.
In other words, F# is a functional language for the .NET Framework.
Functional languages have succinct, expressive, and compositional style that have their origins in lambda calculus.
F# provides all the benefits of functional programming on top of the familiar of .NET runtime, libraries, interoperability, and object models.
Here are some great F#/Functional Programing resources:
I look forward to the day when a recruiter calls me about opportunities for "F Pound" developers. ;)
Wednesday, September 03, 2008
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Here's a little bit of a sneak preview of the next generation Zune:
The third generation of Microsoft's Zune portable media player product line has been talked about and speculated for quite a while now, but very little has managed to leak out of Redmond, until now. A Canadian has supposedly somehow gotten his hands on both 16GB and 120GB flavors of the Zune, both of which are expected to be released under Zune 3.0
[found via Chris Williams]
Technorati Tags:
Zune,
Zune 3
I've made the VA to NJ drive so many times, I've lost count.
One thing I always took notice of was this sign on I-95 between the Beltway and Baltimore, which shows distance to various cities.
Not a big deal, but it just so happens that 212 is the area code for New York City, specifically Manhattan.
I wonder if the person(s) on the highway commission did this intentionally and this is some kind of road geek Easter Egg.
Just a random thought for this Wednesday afternoon.
Here's an insightful slide on what design is.
Most provocative statement: "Design is the principal difference between love & hate" (slide 24)
Very interesting.
As promised, here are the links from my talk last night at CMAP.
Slides from the talk (link coming soon)
Bill Hill's Homo Sapien 1.0 talk. (transcript)
Kuler, a color swatch generator
Smashing Magazine
PSDTuts - Free Photoshop Tutorials
VectorTuts - Free Illustrator tutorials (many are applicable to Expression Design)
Nibbles Tutorials - Free Blend, WPF and Silverlight tutorials
Paint.NET - Free .NET Open Source Image Editor
Electric Rain - Makers of Swift 3D and ZAM 3D.
Community Megaphone Map
United States Map in XAML
Crossing the Usability Chasm, a great session from MIX08[PPTX|WMV|Zune]
Books by Jakob Nielsen - usability guru
Books by Stephen Weyer - usability guru
Story of the Office 2007 Ribbon
Thanks to everyone who came to my presentation!
Local Flash user group "Flash the District" is hosting a webcast tonight at 7PM EST with Stephen Carp on Flash Animation Cartoon Techniques.
This is a good opportunity to see how the other half lives animates.
Please join Flash the District on September 3rd as we present Flash Cartoon Animation Techniques with Stephen Karp. Stephen presented at the DC Flash UG earlier in August and we have asked him to re-present for the benefit of the entire community. This is very insightful and not a meeting you should miss.
**This meeting wil be hosted via Adobe Connect. Therefore it will be conducted virtually. Read more
Tuesday, September 02, 2008
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Today, the siding went up at the new house.
It's loud and the yard is covered in old siding, but the benefits of new siding and better insulation are worth it.
This marks the last of the major outside projects.
In just under two months, we've pretty much gutted this old house.
So much so, we barely recognize it.
Technorati Tags:
Home Rennovations
Being a developer isn't easy.
And, as this video points out, developers could use a hug.
[found via the Blosma Code via Kevin Israel's Twitter feed]
Google Chrome's website is now live.
Google Chrome is Google's entry into the browser market.
Released just Beta 2 of IE8's release, it's safe to assume that the browser wars are back on.
[found via Shawn Wildermuth's Twitter Feed]
I'll be speaking tonight at CMAP on Graphic Design for Developers.
Frank La Vigne will be presenting "Graphic Design for Developers" The rise of a RIA and enabling technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, and XAML makes the 'battleship gray' UIs we are so familiar with look like the green screens of the 70s and 80s. The old cliché is that developers make poor designers and many developers needlessly tremble at the site of designer tools such as Expression or Photoshop. Graphic design is a process, just like software development. If you learn the basics, you'll soon turn out better User Experiences and find inspiration in the world around you. While I can't make you a design guru overnight, I can help you make your apps look a bit less like they did when the Spice Girls were on the pop charts. Turtlenecks and berets optional.
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Sunday, August 31, 2008
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Thursday, August 28, 2008
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Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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Here's an interesting tutorial on how to make a shiny pencil graphic in Photoshop.
The tutorial shows you how to create Web 2.0 style gradients and, while the tutorial specifically mentions Photoshop, you could easily apply the techniques to your design tool of choice.
As an added bonus, the site has tons of tutorials and how-to's in Photoshop.
Last week, I blogged about our home renovations nearing an end, but I know deep down they'll never really end.
This week, though, we hit a major milestone when we had the new windows put in.
Left: The new Windows in the driveway waiting to be installed. Right: New picture window. Clean and not cracked.
Left: New windows in the kitchen. Right: New window in the "trashed" room. So clean you can actually see through it!
Thursday, August 21, 2008
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Rob Relyea points out one of his pet peeves: applications with window titles like this:
I agree.
Nothing says amateur quite like leaving this at its default value for released software.
Fortunately, this is an easy fix:
XAML:
1: <Window x:Class="WPF_Fun.Window1"
2: xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
3: xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
4: Title="CHANGE ME!" Height="300" Width="300">
Code:
1: this.Title = "CHANGE ME!";
In the cosmic scheme of things, this probably isn't a big deal, but if you want your app to have a professional polish, then this tiny step is a must.
Just when we thought we were done, a "plumbing malfunction" in the master bath on Monday morning meant we had to do more work.
There's nothing quite like being at Lowe's bright and early on a Monday morning without having had a shower or coffee. 
Left: Drywall dust everywhere.
Right: Nothing was behind the tub/shower insert.
Left: A new coat of paint on the shutters makes a big difference.
Right: Old paint and new paint for comparison.
Left: Powder room: Finished! Right: Current state of master bath.
And it's still business as usual in the woods behind the house. 
Almost done!
Flickr's welcome page rotates greetings in various languages.
Imagine my delight to see a greeting in LOLSpeak.
Technorati Tags:
LOLSpeak,
Flickr,
Funny
Thursday, August 14, 2008
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Bill Hill works at Microsoft Research and gets philosophical about which OS is the most important.
Think it's Windows? Unix? Linux? Mac OS?
Not even close.
It's the human mind or "Homo Sapien 1.0" as Bill Hill calls it.
Bill Hill - Windows is not the most important OS
I mentioned this in my talk last night and linked to it, but the message is so good that it bears repeating.
When you're building user experiences, remember what OS you're really developing for.