Expression & UX in Asia

This is cool. 50 short web casts on Silverlight.

Wow, I haven't blogged in a while. Even my mother is probably getting a little unhappy since I haven't posted on my family blog either. But this was pretty neat and I thought it would be fun to share.

Shiverlight.net is a Silverlight experimentation site by some talented folks in a company called Huge Flow in Korea. The site hosts few of their experiments.

The most recent though is one where they have created a DeepZoom viewer for you to post in your blogs. I am not sure how to make it work in my own blog yet, but I'll get to that in my next post. :)

Arturo Toledo my co-worker in Redmond has posted an awesome post on all the content that might be of interest to designers from MIX08. A better man than I, he has put together a really comprehensive list of links and summary of the news.

Thanks Arturo!

http://ux.artu.tv/?page_id=51

One of the coolest things shown at MIX08 was Deep Zoom. Deep Zoom is a technology that came from a technology originally called Seadragon. The demo that was shown at MIX08 was by Hard Rock Cafe. They have a huge collection of memorabilia so they built a Silverlight application made of a montage of 512 images (various pixel dimensions) and you can zoom in and out on them. Very neat.

Try it out at the HardRock Memorabilia site.

Another example built by one of our guys, Joe Stegman, is a version of the Silverlight v2 poster. Easy to move in and out and pan around the image.

To learn more about Deep Zoom I'd recommend a couple of blog posts. First I appreciated Scott Hanselman's post. The second, and where you can grab the tooling is the Expression Team Blog. User guide is there too.

It has been a busy week this week. I arrived in Las Vegas on Sunday and have been really enjoying meeting with colleagues from around the world and customers and partners who made the decision to join the event.

As a Microsoft employee, you sometimes think you know all that is going on, but I have to say that I was still very impressed by the sheer number of announcements that we tried to squeeze in to a single keynote this week. Wednesday's keynote was kicked off by Ray Ozzie, and, though not my high point of the kickoff, it is certainly interesting to hear what he is thinking as I find him somewhat of an enigma.

The keynote covered a number of pieces of the Silverlight story, as well as work with partners and updates to the Expression products.

Silverlight 2 beta 1: This update to the Silverlight runtime is fully compatible with all the v1 sites out there, but now includes the .NET support that was promised a year ago and a limited GoLive license. The reaction from people at the conference was genuinely positive with, as expected, Microsoft developers being the most happy. I did have a random chat with a designer from an agency in the U.S. and he expressed being interested in learning SL now that he'd seen the show cases. To build Silverlight 2 beta content you'll want to download the beta of Expression Blend 2.5 (yeah, the version numbers are out of sync, hard to solve that one).

Expression v2 betas: Expression v2 products are getting close and we released beta versions of the products. Blend v2 supports Silverlight v1, Expression Web v2 supports PHP and many other nice features. Check out Expression Encoder v2 which added simple editing, better encoding, new UI. All the features are listed on the Expression Encoder blog. I really like this product and find I use it quite a bit.

The partner products shown were really nice. IMHO the best was a fairly simple site for the NBC production of the Olympics. The challenge they took on was to make all the broadcasts and all content available both synchronously and asynchronously so the volume of video content they'll support is huge! They choose Silverlight for the player side since they felt the infrastructure for Windows Media was more suitable and scaled better than Flash video infrastructure and serving. Also discussed was Double Click allowing Silverlight content and their upcoming release of a SDK to support in-stream advertising on their networks. Move Networks also added Silverlight support, and partners such as AOL and Aston Martin showed off applications using Silverlight.

Silverlight for mobile was big too. Nokia's announcement of support for Silverlight mobile came out earlier in the week. Nice to see the support of a company of Nokia's stature as we bring this out as they wouldn't do this unless they thought it had some value to their users.

And, lastly, but first in the keynote, is IE8 beta. I wasn't too fond of the presentation itself, but the content was great. IE7 has been so bad with standards and so slow to update that this was a huge relief. CSS2.1 support, new features (with code released under and open source license), test suites, in browser debugging. Check out the IE Blog for details. One point noted by pundit Joe Wilcox was that there were over 500 comments on the initial announcement blog post that were positive. A good start.

Lots of other things I enjoyed during the week. I'll start updating my blog a bit more when I get back and have time to sort through my notes.

Fresh off the presses, the Expression Community Site has come on-line. A new place to go to post questions on the products.

http://expression.microsoft.com/

:)

MIX08 in Las Vegas is almost sold out. I am starting to look forward to seeing all the sessions and meeting everyone coming out to attend that I know. There are also some fun things going on at MIX this year. One that looks interesting is the following (clipped):

"The King of Kong's" Steve Wiebe attempts to reclaim his title at MIX08

Join middle-school science teacher, Steve Wiebe, on the evening of Tuesday, March 4th for a special MIX screening of New Line Cinema's "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.”   The movie, featuring Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell’s quest to see who is the true King of Kong, will be followed by a Q&A session with Steve, producer Ed Cunningham, and Twin Galaxies referee Walter Day. Then, on Wednesday, March 5th, watch Steve try to recapture his world record at the MIX attendee party at TAO!

I'll be honest, when I saw the trailers for the movie I wasn't totally captivated, but it should be fun to see it live. I mean, Donkey Kong? Galaxian was my speed.

Anyhow, if you are going to be there, and for some odd reason happen to be reading my blog, drop me a note and let's hook up. Cheers.

If you haven't had a chance to take a look at the upcoming MIX08 sessions in Las Vegas, now isn't too late. Aside from a number of great tracks, there are a couple of nice new announcements I noticed today.

First is a contest.

A contest to restyle the MIX home page. Prize includes ticket to MIX08, three nights at the Venetian Hotel and US$1000 towards your travel. So, why is this good? Well they have a blog post on the visitmix site saying that only one person has submitted anything so far (24 January). Percentages are high that you could be successful. Designs must be submitted by 7 February.

And, there is a dedicated User Experience track at MIX08.

From the VisitMIX site:

It is official: 10 sessions will be dedicated to user experience during MIX08.  It's so exciting to consider what Lou Carbone, Dave Armano, Dan Roam and the speakers from Adaptive Path are going to present.  Microsoft is also going to talk about the evolution of the ribbon in Office.

Louis P. Carbone is a great speaker, and the line up will be fun. Hope to see everyone there.

My co-worker Nigel Parker down in New Zealand has created a fantastic demo compilation as a video showing 31 demos in 39 minutes. Very very fun to watch. You can jump around and see the parts you like or just have time to watch. Click on the image below to get to his blog.

Here's the list of what he demos and the links to them:

1. Microsoft Research Group Shot
2. Sea Dragon (TED Video)
3. Photosynth
4. Microsoft Research HD View (Auckland, Wellington)
5. Virtual Earth (Live Labs on the Map)
6. Bill Buxton's Presentation from Expression around the Clock
7. Microsoft Surface
8. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Surface Demonstration (Video Support)
9. French Silverlight 1.0 Application (Script#)
10. Tablet Features in WPF - Inking Over Video Sample, Ink Support Silverlight 1.0, Silverlight Ink SDK Sample
11. Silverlight 1.0 Inking Search Sample
12. Live Image Search (filters)
13. Tafiti Search Visualization
14. GPS location based interactive community (Where is Frank?)
15. Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Invaders - Code
16. Contoso Bicycle Club - Windows Live Quick Applications
17. Live Messenger Integration Demo - Details
18. http://backgroundmotion.com - Code/ Source Code
19. Microsoft Popfly
20. Windows Live Photo Gallery
21. Windows Home Server
22. LCI Intégrale
23. Livestation
24. WebGuide
25. hsn.tv
26. thirteen23 :: denounce
27. How About It?
28. the-hub.tv
29. Glenn Conner Interview - Amazon Demo Silverlight 1.1 Alpha
30. Building a 3D WPF Gesture Application - Code
31. Building a Video Player in 8 mins with Silverlight 1.0

I've been working on a project to localize some of our video content for different countries. Most of what shows up on ms.com is in English and that sometimes is challenge for non-English speaking viewers.

The method I have been working on is to make available sub-titles or captions for the content. My ideal implementation will be a Silverlight player that can consume XML files and allow the users to flip to the language they'd like to view and have it sync with the time code of the video. From a project perspective my workflow involves transcribing the video content, translating, than syncing to video.

Making the player that can consume a SAMI file is the trick. Expression Encoder can consume and write the cc on top. One of our Developer Evangelists in the US, Marc Schweigert,  produced a video showing how to caption using EE. Check out his webcast by clicking on the screen shot below.

After the new year I've been a little slow blogging. Sigh. Not much happened at the end of December that I thought was interesting to share, but finally found one.

If you have not seen the NY Times Reader, you should. I got to use it during the beta period and really enjoyed it. You can check out a 30-day trial at the link above and purchase if you'd like. I used to download NY Times before I left to travel and read it while at airports or other offline moments.

Whenever I showed the demo, you'd always get numerous requests on how to make one. Today I found the link. There is a started kit, a SDK, and a link to our own reader for MSDN articles. Pretty good.

A very cool product. 3D authoring that outputs WPF/XAML so you can directly author Vista applications. From their homepage:

Zam 3D is a 3D XAML Tool for Microsoft Windows Vista Application Development.
Provides developers and designers with a quick and easy solution for creating 3D interface elements for Microsoft Windows Vista based applications. It also acts as a 3ds to XAML and dxf to XAML converter.

I've played with pre-release versions and it is a good tool. Take a look at the electricrain page directly for more information.

I recently visited Bangkok, Thailand on a vacation with family. Very nice, thank you for asking. Once we got back we were discussing how close the temperatures of the two cites were (Singapore vs. Bangkok) as Thailand feels hotter.

Here is the graph created by weather.com:

Note that in the graph above Bangkok is 2-3 degrees Celsius warmer than Singapore. If you have visited there before than you'll most likely be able to concur that often it feels much warmer than that!

But the funny part of this (well, to me at least) is that there is a textual description of the difference at the bottom. Not sure if this makes it much clearer. :)

I hope everyone has had a wonderful holiday season to date and enjoys the new year also.

There is a good eWeek article today that contains a number of very complimentary quotes about Silverlight. You can read the whole article at eWeek: Users Itching for Silverlight 2.0.

One strength I've always felt Silverlight had is the number of .NET developers out in the world. In general they have been working on Enterprise software and web applications, but it is nice to see the quote from Dave Wolf, VP @ Cynergy giving this some credence:

"...there is no question that the Microsoft developer community is huge, passionate and for the most part they 'get' enterprise software development. Really the limiting reagent in growth in the RIA space has been having enough of a pool of RIA developers."

Another point I've talked with people about is the competition now to create excellent tools for not only developers, but for designers too. Noah Gedrich, director of technology at Blitz is quoted as saying:

"By providing a real competitor to the Flash Player and the Adobe Web tools, Silverlight has the potential to force both Adobe and Microsoft to be more responsive to the needs of the end users and the designer and developer communities..."

It is certainly nice to see people creating projects based on Silverlight v1.0, and as noted in the article, looking forward to Silverlight v2.0. It is a great time to be working creating applications and experiences as the technology to allow for both designers and developers to create exceptional work is really coming together. Fun stuff.

A really excellent white paper as been published by some of my co-workers talking about how XAML can contribute to writing better applications using Windows Presentation Foundation. The paper, The New Iteration, walks through a brief discussion of XAML and markup, and then dives in to how designers and developers can collaborate though XAML and tools.

Quite a fine paper to read.