AdamU's WebLog : Projects

Will it Blend? That is the question!

adamu — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 22:47:00 GMT

We're having fun watching the BlendTec commercials since we've announced that the product code named Sparkle is now Blend.

Since my last post 6 months ago in July where I visited a company in Raleigh NC, I've been amazingly busy.

I've visited Roxio in Santa Clara, CA.
I've done a recruiting trip to U Penn in Philly
I've done a recruiting trip to Shanghai

Most importantly, I've shipped the Interactive Designer Sep CTP, the Blend Beta 1 in Dec, the Blend Beta 1 Japanese in Dec, and the Blend Beta 2 in Jan.

I hope that everyone that's seen Beta1 and Beta2 come away with how deeply the product team cares about quality, and how hard we're working on delivering a great user experience. If you've visited the sparkle/blend newgroup, I hope that you understand that the majority of people answering your questions are people who've been working for years on building this product, and that they love hearing how you are trying to use the product, and are anxious to take your issues and try to resolve them.

We've got two more big milestones coming soon to hit for Blend: RC1, and English RTM. And then the RTM for an additional 8 languages (German, Japanese, French, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese). For me personally, I've also got two more recruiting trips planned in the next 3 weeks: MIT and CalTech.

So I'll likely be scarce for a while, again, but only because I'm working hard on hiring great people, and driving us to completion on a great product for Pro Designers to build rich compelling UI experiences.We fixed almost 700 bugs between Beta 1 and Beta 2. We added a couple key features that we were missing.

Adam

Father's Day Camping - Acrylic Style

adamu — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:24:00 GMT

I was camping this weekend in Central Oregon. Each year my wife's father's siblings (all 8 of them) and many of their children and grandchildren get together (50 to 60 people) and go camping just outside Sweethome, Oregon, which is about 30 miles east of Salem. I say camping, but with the facilities at Camp Koinonia, it's hardly camping; more like a retreat. It's always fun; swimming, the annual horseshoe tournament, wonderful food, and catching up on what everyone's been up to. I did a geocache (www.geocaching.com) while I was there, hiking to the top of the north butte (just north of foster dam), and brought my little minolta digital camera along, and got some great panoramic pictures by stitching them with Acrylic. The first picture is a complete 360, the second is the about the 3rd 8th of the first picture, more detail on the lake and dam area. Click on them to see them much larger. Acrylic did a great job, especially with the light to dark transitions. I was showing the photo stitching to several of the moderately tech savvy folks at the campout (one was an eastern oregon ranch realtor, another was a IT student at BYU-Idaho, another was a landscape architect), and they were ecstatic that they could get the beta to try it out. (www.microsoft.com/expression).

Acrylic Greetings from Beijing

adamu — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 15:26:00 GMT

From the 8th to the 14th, I travelled to Beijing to meet with 5 vendors who've been working on one of my projects for the last year. Yanchun (Tracy) Guo, who is a test lead for Microsoft in Beijing, helped me out by taking me out to lunch, and in general being my babysitter for a couple days at work. It was great to get face to face time with them, see their offices in Beijing, and meet with the vendor companies at their offices. And experiencing Chinese culture first hand was a great experience. I am looking forward to a visit again in a few months.

One of the projects I've been working on, code named Acrylic, went to Beta on the very first day that I met with them in Beijing. There's been quite a buzz about Acrylic since the release, which to me is quite surprising. The Expression site with the version 3.3 bits has been up for over a year now. Was seeing a new beta really surprising? The beta has a new coat of paint for the interface, has the ability to have pixel layers in addition to the vector layers, has live effects, photo stitching, and I'm sure there's a couple other features that I'm forgetting.

Anyway, I got to see the sites while I was in Beijing over my weekend there, and I used Acrylic to stitch my photos together for some great panoramic photos. The top photo is 180+ degree view of one of the many courtyards between gates at the forbidden city. The bottom 3 are from Tiananmen Square, the mausoleam where Chairman Mao in entombed, the Chinese National History Museum, the Monument to the People's Heroes, and the other building is the Great Hall of the People, where the congress and standing committee meet. Beijing is busy getting ready to host the 2008 summer olympics.