Nigel Parker's Outside Line : UX

Silverlight 3 + Expression 3 Launch

nparker — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 08:49:00 GMT

I previously blogged about the release of Silverlight 3. Today I want to expand on this and talk about the Release To Manufacturing of Expression Studio 3 and DeepZoom Composer.

Having used these products and technologies for a little while now I racked my brain to figure out the best way to communicate the capabilities of each of these technologies to you.

All too often with the nature of blogging, tweeting and instant feedback the best projects/ ideas and implementations get referenced but lost as quickly as they are found. IMO it is important to step back, take a breath and look at what is still impressing you days or weeks later. By grouping these things together into a single cohesive piece of work you can then tell a story that marks a moment in time and is compelling to a broader group of people.

So that is what I did… I chose to use the latest version of the tools and platforms to showcase what I think is the most awesome work that is being done here in New Zealand and around the world. I apologise now if I missed your project out but feel free to drop a link in the comments so others can experience it.

The experience that I built leverages IIS Smooth Streaming and I have removed all the standard video player UI that I hope is not required to watch this showcase (buffer UI, scrub bar, timer, volume control etc). That said the video chunks are coming from a US media server (unfortunately) so I have found that they do tend to play out below their maximum quality to most people in New Zealand. For this reason I have added a download option for those wanting to download and experience the video in full HD.

If you like what you see remember to click the Twitter icon and feed the social media juggernaut!

Click Suite, Auckland Museum + the ‘Hybridiser’

nparker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 07:54:00 GMT

Click Suite has a long history of awesome interactive new media projects. Their front end weapon of choice has almost exclusively been Flash.

Zef Fugaz has always been one for pushing the user experience to the edge and delivered a great session at the Microsoft Expression for Art’s Sake event on User Centred Design with Microsoft Expression.

As it turns out this event was a bit of a turning point for Click Suite and their adoption of the Microsoft Expression Studio for front end design.

Since the workshop, Click Suite have built and installed at the Auckland Museum the ‘Hybridiser’. An interactive, multi-touch 3D application that allows visitors at the museum to create an orchid hybrid flower by selecting 2 parent orchids and tweaking its different parts in terms of pattern/texture, shape & colour.

The ‘Hybridiser’ is built using WPF (.NET 3.5), Visual Studio 2008 & Expression Blend 2. The application runs on the Windows 7 release candidate & takes advantage of the Windows 7 gesture APIs.

If you are in Auckland I recommend that you visit Wonderland: The Mystery of the Orchid and try it out for yourself. My creation is below.

Aren’t incrementing ID’s a beautiful thing!? I can browse through others peoples creations (currently at 565 at time of writing)… I was just thinking it would be cool to make a dynamic interactive deep zoom (possibly using eventr) of peoples creations on the Auckland Museum’s website but I digress.

For everyone else not able to make it to Auckland to check out the exhibition in person I have made a little video of my interactions with the ‘Hybridiser’ below.

Incidentally this is the first time I have used the new Encoder 3/ Silverlight 3 player. Tip try clicking the cog in the top right to check out the perspective 3D chapters.

Here are some of the technical details behind the build.

Pieter Bosteels from click suite wrote:

To achieve the hybridisation effect we are morphing 3D shapes, patterns & colours individually. Each flower part is covered by different layers of greyscale textures which are colourised individually by a custom made HLSL pixelshader to allow the user to adjust texture/pattern vs. colour. Shape morphing is achieved by interpolation between individual mesh points.

Multitouch manipulation is achieved by attaching a single-touch move to a camera rotation, a dual-touch panning gesture to a camera translation & a dual-touch zoom gesture to a scale translation.

We’ve built all the 3D models in Cinema4D & then ported them to XAML using ZAM3D.

Everything is build using WPF (.NET 3.5), Visual Studio 2008 & Blend 2. The application runs on Windows 7 RC & uses the Windows 7 gesture APIs. We hooked into the gesture events using the Multitouch Sample .NET Interop Library for .NET 3.5 & Windows 7.

We thought about using the WPF 4.0 beta to have multitouch support built-in into WPF, but in the end we didn’t want to risk using beta software on a live environment.

This is a great showcase for WPF, especially in terms of productivity. It’s a good demonstration of how advanced graphics that are typically not available in rapid application development frameworks can be achieved relatively easily using WPF.

It is also a good showcase for WPF performance overall, with 3D rendering especially.

Without WPF, we could have never dreamed of getting the advanced stuff to work like it does now in the time we did it!

Zef Fugaz followed this with a comment:

For me as an observer the design and development team had a working prototype up and running in around a week. Pieter was in his element working with the visuals/interaction through code in close collaboration with the designers.

The hardened Flash developers who hasn't worked with the Expression Suite and WPF before seemed impressed with the capabilities of WPF and by the end of the project I heard them saying - "We never could have done this so quickly/easily using Flash".

This could make a great case study on design-dev team-work, rapid prototyping and a stunning visual design (+ multitouch to boot!)

Great work team!

As a side note when I visited the exhibition I chose to make a photosynth of the event.

Representatives from the Auckland Museum were quick to find my comments on Twitter and responded directly. Furthermore I was presently surprised to see them pimp the synth.

Making a photosynth of something I want to showcase is starting to become second nature to me. With a portable camera in you pocket it can be done in minutes and IMO shares the experience deeply with others.

TBWA, adidas, the ALL BLACKS and Photosynth

nparker — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 03:01:00 GMT

TBWA have teamed up with adidas to launch the 2009 All Black jersey with a new campaign.

This is how it works:

1) Buy the 2009 All Black jersey to go into the draw to photograph the All Blacks during the national anthem at one of the home test matches.

2) The photos are then loaded into photosynth and embedded on the adidas website.

3) At the end of the home matches the photos are going to be used to build a stylised 10th Anniversary adidas ALL BLACKS poster.

As a side note I have been working with TBWA/Shift and David Gedye (Group Manager for Photosynth & best known as the original founder of the SETI@home project) on the scoping phase of this project. If you look at the second synth of the All Blacks vs Italy you’ll see improvements to the approach over what is currently published on the adidas website.

Just like in Christchurch at the sell out first Bledisloe Cup match in Auckland 500 disposable cameras were given out to the public when they entered the ground. More than 160 of the cameras were returned and form part of the resulting synth that you can check out at http://tr.im/RichieMcCaw (also embedded on the adidas.com site). You can see the difference in quality of the pro shots and the “low fi” film shots taken by fans.

Incidentally before the match the competition was explained and the campaign video was played out on the big screen.

TBWA worked with Jonah Lomu (rugby legend) to explain photosynth and the latest crowd sourced All Blacks poster. I noticed that Andy Blood chose to embed a quicktime video in the page so I thought I’d use one of the new Expression Encoder 3 templates to play that same MP4 video using Silverlight below.

All the tweeting during the match was enough to get the term “All Blacks” as the #2 trending topic on twitter around the world!

I’m excited to see photosynth being adopted by large companies, events, magazines (caution link contains bikinis) and innovative execution. Done right this technology forms the basis of a very solid campaign.

Add geo-location and Bing Maps 3D and we are starting to get something really quite special!

As an alternative experience the amazing team at Soul Solutions in Australia have created a prototype that enables photosynth to work natively on Bing Maps using Silverlight. You can try it out for yourself at http://photosynth.soulsolutions.com.au.

At a time when new media agencies are trying to differentiate themselves and fight shrinking budgets, innovative solutions like Silverlight & photosynth can really play their part. I don’t know the cost of this campaign but I can only guess that it is substantially less than the ambitious $1.3 million campaign that Sanitarium took on to leverage their sponsorship of the 2009 All Blacks.

NZsynth – How It Was Done

nparker — Fri, 15 May 2009 15:10:26 GMT

Previously I wrote and demoed the NZsynth application that was built for the WEB09 keynote. This post is detailing how it was made and introducing version two (Zoom all the way in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image).

WATCH THE VIDEO that goes end-to-end on the development of the application (mainly building the mosaic and the extension that Tim Tate created to make the tiles clickable).

The video is also downloadable from Channel9

The Code

It goes without saying that this code is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights it is demo ware and should be treated as such.

Flickr Image Download Code

Mosaic WCF REST Service (Including Flickr Database File)

NZsynth

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/ Hot keys in previous post

Tim’s Silverlight 3 Code and Demo

There is no “go live” for Silverlight 3 yet so what I’m going to do next is for “informational/ testing purposes only”. If you are a developer and happen to have either the Silverlight 3 Beta - Windows Developer Runtime or the Silverlight 3 Beta - Mac Developer Runtime installed pop over to http://possi.bility.co.nz/timtate/ to look at a running version of Tim’s solution.

NZsynth V2 Source (excluding image tiles)

Demo at http://possi.bility.co.nz/nzsynth (Zoom right in using mouse wheel then double-click for popup image)

Key tools

WEBPI to install Visual Studio Silverlight Development Tools & SQL Server 2008 Express
AndreaMosaic
HD Make
Deep Zoom Composer
WCF REST Starter Kit
FlickrNet

Other Resources/ Examples

Jellyfish Deep Zoom
Deep Zoom Image Generation with DeepZoomTools.DLL
My post DeepZoom-Tastic
http://tr.im/photosEFAS (DeepZoom Pix Photos from Expression for Art’s Sake)
Miss March and Other Distractions (Parental Advisory)
Deep Zoom++ : Build Dynamic Deep Zoom Applications with Open Source

All this got me thinking how this idea could be extended further?

National Geographic have been doing some interesting work with photosynth recently. Check out the Sphinx below.

This is why I was intrigued to see they too have developed a mosaic experience called Infinite Photograph. It is not as smooth or free flowing as the nzsynth mosaic demo but it has a great touch that it repeats on itself after a few layers giving you a “feeling” that you can zoom forever. Also double-clicking images brings up more details like in Tim and my examples.

I guess beyond this we then need to think about video and using dynamic frames in a form of “massive” stop motion animation. If you haven’t seen it yet the YouTube Mosaic Music Video may give you some insight into where my mind is heading.

Artist in Residence Melbourne Dec 1-5

nparker — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:43:39 GMT

Michael Kordahi and Shane Morris are holding an Artist in Resident (AiR) in Melbourne from Dec 1-5.

Michael wrote:

For those unfamiliar: AiR is a program whereby a developer and designer pair get together and build something in Silverlight from scratch.

It goes for 5 days where you start with some training (day 1), conceive an idea (day 2) and build (days 3 - 5) under the guidance of a qualified trainer.

It is a great way to get going on that Silverlight project that you’ve always wanted to do.

If you work as part of a dev/designer pair, have a project that you’re commencing (or want to commence) then AiR might be for you.

If you meet the criteria and are interested in crossing the ditch contact Michael or Shane to request a spot!

For NZ based designers wanting to get started with Expression there is a growing pool of resources that you can tap.

Technical Briefing Wrap and HOLIDAY!

nparker — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 12:38:00 GMT

First of all what does it look like to talk to nearly 2000 people?

Well here is a picture I found on flickr of 900 people... yup I'm in there #9 top row.

Think double this and we will be just about there!

It was all of you that made this event so successfull, THANKS!

Darryl did a great job of MC'ing the keynote at the events and holding it all together! The mindscape guys have done a great job bringing my backgroundmotion idea to life!

Presentation: Web Standards Compliance

Presentation: Extending Application Reach

Presentation: Building Composite Applications

In fact all the pptx decks are now online.

My presentation Building applications users love is there but without the link to the video that I promised.

Click the picture below to watch the Video!

I leave tomorrow for a trip around Europe with my wife and daughter followed by Mix in Las Vagas. The best part is that I'm not taking my laptop! See you again on the 7th of May if not a little sooner!

TVNZ Ondemand Launches

nparker — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:58:00 GMT

During my presentation yesterday (watch it) I talked about the concept of media convergence...

"Media Convergence is not the reduction of devices but the expansion of channels to content combinations."

I used TVNZ as an example to demonstrate these changing times.

This morning I received an email from John Ferguson (Production Manager of Interactive) at TVNZ anouncing the launch of their ondemand service.

I worked with John and his team on the great Vista Sidebar gadget that they produced and I'm convinced that this team really gets it!

Now over to ondemand to try it out!

The Long Tail of TV in NZ is with us!

Great work!

Emerging Web Technologies

nparker — Mon, 19 Mar 2007 07:56:00 GMT

I presented today alongside David Bolocker amongst others on Service Oriented Architecture, Web 2.0 and Mashups.

I even came up with my own quote...

"Software Convergence, is not the reduction of solutions but the expansion of presentation & information to user combinations."

Check out my presentation at http://gobeyond.net.nz/brightstar and tell me what you think.

Michael Sampson live blogged the event.

Solving the Ticketmaster UX Problem.

nparker — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 09:08:27 GMT

I'm on the train thinking about this ticket buying system.

I mentioned today that the experience of buying tickets was the "worst" user experience which I'm sure leads to excess traffic which in turn leads to the web site falling over and a bunch of people being extremely unhappy.

The Problem:

More demand than supply, no ability to queue for tickets in the traditional sense. No indication of ticket volume or availability.

A Solution:

"I call it the lolly scramble approach."

1. Get interested people to pre register at the ticket master website.

2. Work out the number of tickets & the number of registered users.

3. Put people in manageable groups. More people than tickets available.

4. Invite everyone into a "room" just before the tickets go on sale.

S. Drop the tickets in move them around the screen and have people "try" and click on a ticket. Hell even have more crowded rooms for people wanting to buy a bundle of multiple tickets.

6. Once the tickets have all been clicked game over and everyone would have had a shot of buying some.

This system would be easy to build in .Net with a WPF/E or flash UI.

Is no one thinking about this stuff?

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Visa Pre-Sale! Yeah Right!

nparker — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 23:44:00 GMT

I knew the visa pre-sale for Red Hot Chili Pepper tickets would be popular but this is ridiculous!

I started at http://www.visaentertainment.co.nz I got to the site http://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/promo/wbismv the site became unresponsive at 9am when tickets went on sale.

I got on at 9:01 am and got to the screen to choose my tickets... woot!

Problem #1

The form let you purchase upto 50 tickets in one go!

(I chose 2 tickets)

Problem #2

There was no indication of how many tickets were for sale and when they had sold out!

I select 2 general admission tickets seated anywhere...

After responding to the "cryptic code" to stop robots buying tickets I got this friendly message.

I proceeded to try every combination of tickets for every seating option to find the same result in all.

Good to see there were actually some tickets... they turned up on Trade Me at $600 each.

PATHETIC!

Update: A second show was announced... yup I missed this one to!

From the herald... "The Visa pre-sales are going exceptionally well. Demand was such we felt the time was right to announce the second show"

My take... I have experience one of the worst user experience of my life... there is still no way to tell if the tickets have actually sold out... going to http://www.ticketmaster.co.nz/promo/wbismv you are greeted with a nice message telling you "don't miss out"... although it appears that the boat has long since sailed.

The tickets are all over Trade Me selling from everything from $100 million to $5000... the comments of people seeling go from things like...

"a mate and I tried for ages to get through to no avail, then by chance we both snapped up 2 each, so have 2 surplus to our requirements. Our mistake is your opportunity to pick some up cheap (although I think there is alot of demand and they may sell for over our purchase price!)"

to...

"Cant get time off work :(

Txt offers to 027 388 xxxx"

Bring on a ballot system for selling tickets to events like this!

My Tech.Ready (Well at least the parts I can talk about)

nparker — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 07:52:00 GMT

I'm starting my long flight home from Seattle to Auckland. Please join me for another long convoluted post about this week abroad all written and linked while disconnected from the Internet ;)

Each year technical Microsoft staff that are based out in the field fly to Seattle to attend a week long technical breifing. The briefings takes place twice a year and unfortunately I have got myself into the winter cycle. That said the weather has been great! I'm sitting in Seattle airport watching the sun set over the snow capped mountains and there is hardly a cloud in the sky.

The purpose of the briefing is for us to network with others doing the same job in other countries, to learn from product teams and to feed back customer information that we have encountered in our geographies.

This event is the pre-cursor to public events like Mix and PDC where many of the technologies we are discussing are seen in public for the first time.

So what are some of the stats for this year's event?

There were 6000 people in the keynote on Monday morning, there were ~700 session with >35 sessions running concurrently in each timeslot.

Since every session was recorded and streamed around the company worldwide in real time. This conference became the largest live meeting site in the world.

I made an effort to track down, see sessions and introduce myself to some of Microsofts new hires during the week.

I very much enjoyed Will Tschumy's (Ex Director User Experience for Flock) session on brokering the User Experience conversation with developers. Ethnography was mentioned more than once but the general principal here was that if you invest in UX upfront in a project it is much cheaper and easier than making changes later. The more time I spend with User Experience people the more I am convinced about this... if you are in Auckland on March 15 you might like to attend Intergen's twighlight event "Why User Experience and Usability are important to businesses online". Also I recommend reading Allan Cooper's "About Face 2.0" as a great introduction to the principals of User Experience.

I attended an architecture de-brief for the Otto project. This is a client based e-commerce store that extends Otto's web site to offer a premium service to their customers (similar to the New York Times reader). This was very insightful particular as we learnt how the project was designed by a German pioneer design company SinnerSchrader. Since showing this project at the Windows Vista consumer launch in Europe Otto has received many requests by other online and catalog retailers to license the engine they have built for their own WPF based client stores. If you have .Net 3.0 installed or are running Vista check out the Otto Store here (warning takes a long time for the inital catalog to be downloaded and cached locally and at the last stage they have there window on top of other windows which is annoying). I took a couple of screen shots of Otto in action below.

Watch Videos of models wearing the clothes... Add Clothes to your wardrobe and dress your model up with the clothes that you choose.

The store is harder to navigate if you don't understand German but a couple of things to note, all the images in the offline store are syncronised with images available on their website and are simply presented in a different way. The catalog is "updated" from the web each time you open it. The 'Mix n Match' (shown above) allows you to experiment and dress the model with different outfits as you browse the store. If you've read 'the long tail' you'll realise what Otto are doing here. They are using a smarter UI to make their catalog more accessible to their customers so that they can sell their products further down the tail thus creating a competitive advantage in a world where shelf space isn't limited and your preferences can be visually served up front and centre.

Bill Gates' presentation on Wednesday was very good. I have seen Bill speak at conferences a few times now and this was IMO indeed his best work. It was a very forward thinking presentation he talked about Microsoft Research and some of the projects that moved out of the research labs into commercial projects. It was interesting to hear about the tablet PC's begining in research and that there are more than two million tablet PC's sold world-wide. I've mentioned many times that I love my tablet. This morning I downloaded todays New York Times into the reader & used pen flicks to turn the pages reading in portrait mode in the tiny seats as I flew into San Fran. I couldn't help but smile when I saw others struggling with paper newspapers in the same seats! Incidentally I learnt this week that the Ny Times are now getting more page views in the reader than on their website!

Bill also talked about Moores Law and how the "free lunch" speed increases in our processors is coming to an end (possibly around 5GHZ) & how a much greater emphasis in the future will be put on writing parallel code for client machines running 8 or 16 core processors. Bill talked again about the concept of verifiable composability. In this brave new world we may need to go back to basics and re-invent the way we write software to take advantage of the multiple cores that are at our disposal. I couldn't help but be taken back to this post from a few weeks ago. It is no secret that Bill regards Ray Kurzweil as the greatest futurist of our time and he referenced his book 'The Singularity Is Near' during his presentation. Bill spoke with passion & genuine excitement of what is just around the corner in this fast moving technology age. Greater processing power on the client coupled with advanced virtualisation and the widespread adoption of services & backup in the cloud makes for a very interesting future indeed.

Kevin Schofield, head of Microsoft research followed Bill Gates. MS research is this year celebrating their 15th Anniversary. Kevin showed some mind blowing innovation! If only half the things that Kevin showed cross the chasm and make their way into commercial innovation in the next 3 to 5 years the world will be a better place.

I was very happy also to see the progress with WPF/E. Tooling is getting better for both the designer & the developer and there is a nice open jscript + XAML model available to try today in the browser & cross platform (yup search engines can index it!). Check out this site (click the left icon then use alt+v then c to view source if you are using IE7) that was built usign WPF/E as part of the Vista launch in Slovenia. There are some big new announcements coming up in this area at Mix so book your ticket to Vegas or check this site on April 30.

On Wednesday night I went out with Tony Chor (Principal Group Program Manager Internet Explorer or 2IC for short). I must admit that I have been quite suprised by all the press (1, 2, 3) surrounding Robert's presentation at foo regarding Mozilla's proposed offline support for web applications. Juha wrote in his Friday fryup "I asked Nigel from Microsoft if Redmond had anything similar to this coming up, but it doesn’t look like it"... how can you take two unrelated comments like that & put them together? We are not talking about features/timelines/dates or codenames for the next version of IE just yet.

What I can tell you... The IE team has more than 200 team members (sorry Asa I low balled that number when I talked to you at foo) they are absolutely taking the standards route welcome Molly and as I said in my previous post as the standards bodies are looking at offline caching the IE team is looking at it too. That said will any web developers actually write their applications to support the new offline capabilities if they are made available by the browsers? IE has had support for some of this for a long time in the form of the userData behavior which is used by Google but very few others. It isn’t quite as powerful as what the WhatWG has proposed here but it is pretty close. In addition to WhatWG Robert wrote... "The only really new API is an API for storing application pages in the "offline cache", and that's just a new "rel" keyword for the element. So it should be pretty easy to add this to any browser."

I caution you all not to blow this up at such an early stage as this feature may not make it into the final build of FF (or IE)... does anyone remember places or winfs?

If you are running on windows and want an offline version of your gmail today why not use Windows Live Mail Desktop, I love it and I use it to work with my hotmail account while offline.

While we are back on the Windows client side at the launch of Vista Mary Jo Foley asked where are all the 3rd party Vista applications? In response Tim Sneath did a great job summarising a bunch of these (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8). Although this is a good selection it is by no means conclusive. One of the ones that I saw for the first time during this week was a "showcase " piece of art created by the leading design firm in Japan. they were experimenting with using 2D raster images in a 3D plane. This is what they came up with... .Net 3.0 runtime required... this is not a video click the camera icon then try interacting with the 3D environment by using the zoom controls while the animation is playing. Also I see Warner Brothers Japan has a Vista ap as well.

Another thing I did this week was spend quite a bit of time listening and talking to John Lam about dynamic languages and the web. John was the only presenter I saw running a Mac this week, I guess it's the best way to test cross platform. Again if you want to hear more go to Mix or check if out virtually late April. If you want to see what Microsoft is doing with dynamic languages today travel to http://asp.net/ironpython. It was great seeing Polita of "Blinq" fame involved in these presentations. What do you guys think about getting this team down to NZ and Australia for Tech.Ed?

Thursday night was the party, it is a challenging task to feed and entertain 6000 people but the organisers did a great job of doing just that. Each different part of the warehouse on the pier was set up with food, music & dance from a different part of the world. I very much enjoyed the Jam session where anyone could pick up an instrument & get involved... some MS employees had some real talent here.

For the keynote on Friday we were spoilt with a presentation by Chris Bangle (Director of Design at BMW). IMO Chris was brilliant & very inspiring (yes I know he has his critics). He started... I'd like to thank Microsoft for teaching me the secret of dreams. I now know that they are simply your brain defragging over night!

Chris took us all In a very insightful journey of car design... he explained the visual language of the surface itself he explained how his designers learnt the skills of "industrial origami" and showed us new techniques st shaping steel in a way that it is asymmetric and creates an emotional connection. He took us through the 3 step design process that they employ at BMW (Understanding, Believing, Seeing). He talked about the importance of computer modelling in car design but he stressed that their modellers are clay sculptures first so that they don't forget that the computer is simply a tool. Virtual design is important but you must take your creation out into the wild at some stage to ensure that it speaks to your target audience. Also Chris is a strong believer in putting the best tools into the hands of the Consumer. Everyone can read & write but there are plenty of great authors still earning a crust. Chris believes in having a 'Consumer Dialog' joining humanism with industry and seeking consumer contribution in the process of design.

I think Chris' presentation resonated with many in the room there is a real synergy with the design process at BMW and the sea change of user experience that is taking place at Microsoft. You just need to spend some time with products like Windows Vista, Blend and the 2007 Office System to experience the feeling that the software just fits and works with you.

I am now inflight halfway home... I'm still handwriting in portrait mode. I have all my notes to reference. My email (hotmail included) is available cached offline (along with all the Rss feeds from the blogsphere from the last week or so). My complementary upgrade came through on Air NZ and I am for the first time stretched out in a sleeper seat. I ate a great meal, watched Babel and drank some fantastic wine. Whats more I have power! very important as I had to run from my Seattle flight to make this connection. All we need now is WiFi on air NZ and I could actually post this... goodnight :)

Expand Your Portfolio... it's a wrap!

nparker — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 15:09:00 GMT

Hey there,

Two weeks ago we met and presented to over 200 people from more than 85 companies across New Zealand!

We got some great feedback and had heaps of fun doing it!

I have got great feedback via email and I have had truck loads of people wanting to show their friends... learn more and try things out themselves!

What sites did we update/release?

http://www.microsoft.com/expression

http://www.microsoft.com/design

http://www.microsoft.com/wpfe

What did I showcase last week...

WPF

firstlook.nytimes.com

Blend (Beta 1)

thirteen23.com, harmony (itunes/Amazon desktop mashup), denounce (next gen rss/podcast reader)

Tools

SWF2XAML (v1), demo, video

AItoXAML

Expression Web (Available Now)

personifydesign.com

ASP.NET AJAX (Release Candidate)

sample sites, from NZ - http://ecobob.com

Vista Media Center

mobilewares, Media Center Extender Video

Sidebar

Building a WPF Vista Sidebar Gadget, Gadgets

WPF/E (Community Preview)

Playground, Flash/ WPF/E coexist

Windows Live

Fresh Logic Studio GPS Mashup

Queenstown 3D video, Virtual Earth 3D

Photosynth

Where are my custom demos?

Demonstrating Designer & Developer Workflow using a 3D Kiwi, code

NZ Vector Animation in XAML (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

"experience is the product" video presentation (rough cut, includes preview of Right Hemispheres upcoming version of Deep Publish)

Rapid prototyping using XAML and Blend (requires .NET 3.0 Runtime Installed)

Where can you go to learn?

Back in June I blogged about learning WPF, after Tech.Ed I also posted a bunch of my videos (including the Tablet Montage) showcasing WPF.

The community site for Windows Presentation Foundation - http://wpf.netfx3.com

Videos for the release candidate of ASP.NET AJAX

Training for the Expresion tools

What has been released since?

Microsoft Robotics Studio Version 1

XNA Game Studio Express Version 1, Sharky (local XNA game developer)

3D Tools for the Windows Presentation Foundation - Example

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1

Show me the video of what people are using WPF for.

5 minute overview video

Where is this conversation going next?

To Vegas Baby... April 30th - May 2nd.

Who do you recognise from "Mix and Mash"?

The person next to BillG looks like someone that I met at WebStock in March... what do you think?

Take some time over Christmas to pass that Suck Threshold.

Merry Christmas

December UX Events

nparker — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 02:48:00 GMT

Do you build Flash/ AJAX/ CSS/ user centred UI’s for the web?
Are you the one person in the business that fights to get more of the project budget spent on user centric design and intuitive UIs?
Are you the “creative one” that is forced to work with developers that never listen to your ideas?
Or are you the developer with the creative streak that needs nurturing?
Are you one of the reasons that the UX industry in NZ has gone loco?

User interfaces are a fundamentally important part of most applications. Making those interfaces as effective as possible can have measurable benefits to the people and organisations that rely on them. By providing a unified platform for modern user interfaces, by making designers active participants in creating those interfaces, and by allowing a common programming model for standalone and browser applications we are poised to supplant some technologies that have been in place for twenty years and in doing so lay the foundation for the next twenty years.

I have organised some UX focused events in December (with international speakers) http://www.microsoft.co.nz/uxnz that you must attend... we are tying these presentations to some upcoming announcements and I guarantee even if you’ve been following what Microsoft is up to in this area there will be good new stuff there that you haven’t seen anywhere before.

To avoid disappointment secure your seat today!

Tue 5th Dec - Auckland - Microsoft - 1-4pm - register now
Wed 6th Dec - Wellington - Creative HQ - 11am-1pm (Summer of Code) - register now
Thrs 7th Dec - Wellington - Microsoft - 9am-12pm - register now
Fri 8th Dec - Christchurch - University of Canterbury - 1-4pm - register now