The Art of the Possible : Silverlight

Photosynth on CNN & Presidential Inauguration

dsumner — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 14:06:53 GMT

Earlier this week I posted a note about how a silverlight version of photosynth was now available. You can now see that tool used in the context of the Presidential inauguration on CNN.com.

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/themoment/

I think its great example of how images from different photographers using different cameras were able to capture a scene and link those images together to form a single view of a moment of history.

Photosynth viewer in Silverlight

dsumner — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 12:12:02 GMT

Many of you will now have had a chance to try out Photosynth which can be found at http://photosynth.net/

Photosynth can essentially stitch images together while maintaining ( if the image is shot correctly) the relative position of the image in relation to other images in three dimensions.

It you can then view these images using the photosynth viewer.

Earlier this week Microsoft announced the ability to playback photosynth images in a silverlight player.

The biggest impact of this is that photosynth viewing is that it is no longer dependant on the local machine. Therefore photosynths can now be viewed on PCs and MACs.

You can find more details about Photosynth and Silverlight here:

http://photosynth.net/silverlight/about.aspx

Take a look at the great barn in the sliverlight viewer.

Expression Experiments 101 – the hunt for triggers – part 1

dsumner — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 10:15:46 GMT

As you well have already gathered. I am not a developer in the “live to code” sense. I have built site in the past using various technologies. I am one who always looks for quick and easy, as opposed to powerful yet complex. I just don’t have the time to learn how to be a developer in order to produce a site or create an experience I want to create.

It was with that mind set that I approached the Silverlight & Expression tool sets. You find plenty of far more comprehensive resources on the Web if you want to look at more detail, I would suggest you start by looking at the blog by Scott Guthrie that provides some excellent tutorials and this Expression site.

For me I wanted to see how quickly and easily I can simply add a piece of dynamic content to a site, with as little code written by me at all.In fact, I don’t even want to see code!

So I installed Silverlight & the Expression 2.5 June preview from here.

First off I just wanted to make something move across the screen if I clicked it.

What do I need to do I want to that? Fire up expression, then I simply followed a brief video in the training site. here on time lines objects.

All well and good but I did get a confused over something called ‘triggers’. In programming for example, when you click on something – that ability to click is the trigger, and what happens next i.e. something prints – is the event. When you use expression to create a WPF application – you get a nice long list of triggers to choose from and by clicking you can create an event. i.e,” if I click this button go and do…”. But going through the process trying to create a Silverlight 2 project, the were no triggers listed – even the function of triggers wasn’t there. Where were they?

So I took the “who wants to be a millionaire” approach and phoned a friend..

A World of Silverlight

dsumner — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 01:50:15 GMT

It never ceases to amaze me how developers from across the globe can take a technology from Microsoft, build on it and extend its abilities to a level nobody had considered before. Often people don’t realize just how much partners and developers efforts drive forward a technology adoption into a market place.

I came across a great demonstration from Angus Logan’s blog by an Australia partner called cynergysystems by Jose Fajardo. Its a great set of little demos, well worth watching. You can see it here.