Nigel Parker's Outside Line : innovation

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.

Live Platform Jumpstart 2009 in Sydney 8th-9th of December 2008

nparker — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:58:11 GMT

At PDC 2008 this week, we announced a new way to program Live Services, the Live Framework (in CTP). Check out the overview of Microsoft’s Live Platform Services.

Today we are making available the first preview release of the Azure Services Training Kit. The Azure Services Training Kit will include hands-on labs, presentations, and samples to help you understand how to build applications that utilize the Azure Services Platform. This PDC preview release of the training kit includes 11 hands-on labs that cover the broad set of services including Windows Azure, .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services. These are the same hands-on labs that have already been used by hundreds of customers at the PDC.

You can download the Azure Services Training Kit from the Microsoft Download Center here.

Over the next few weeks we will also be releasing several samples and scenario-based demos that can be used to both demonstrate the value proposition of these services and understand how to use the SDKs, Tools, and Services themselves.

Please note: The Windows Azure hands-on labs can be used locally with the Windows Azure developer fabric that is included with the Windows Azure SDK. However, the .NET Services, SQL Services, and Live Services labs require a registered service account. You can apply for a services account here.

PDC sessions on this topic so far:

A Lap Around Windows Azure

Windows Azure: Essential Cloud Storage Services

Live Services: Making your Application More Social

Live Services: A Lap around the Live Framework and Mesh Services

A Lap Around the Azure Services Platform

On the 8th/9th Dec in Sydney we are holding a 2 day Live Services Jumpstart provides in-depth technical training sessions (level 300-400) on Microsoft’s cutting edge consumer web platform technologies that help developers / partner organizations build rich web applications, sync and share them across devices and more importantly, build audience for the web applications.

The Jumpstart event contains several in-depth sessions, hands-on code labs and informal Q&A.

You can learn more about the event at http://lpjumpstart.com

The 2 day agenda is at http://bit.ly/agenda

Capacity is limited to maintain a setting that fosters dialogue among all participants. However, we’re eager to accommodate you if we can, so please register at http://bit.ly/Register and we will contact you shortly to let you know if your registration has been accepted.

If you are accepted into the training there will be no cost associated but T&E will be your responsibility.

Next Thursday in Sydney is also Liberation Day in Australia.

SteveB will be talking about our developer vision (especially around S+S) – this is not to be missed. Following Steve, we’re going to be joined by Gianpaolo Carraro and Tim Sneath.

Gianpaolo will go into more depth around the services component. He is an expert on the topic and will be hot off PDC announcements.

Tim is the windows client (WPF, Vista, Silverlight etc) evangelism lead at Microsoft. He’ll be going into more depth around the software component.

The event will be streamed live on Thursday 6th Nov 5:30pm NZ Time over at http://www.microsoft.com/australia/powertodevelopers/

Day 3 PDC Microsoft Research Rules the Roost

nparker — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:05:00 GMT

Reading tweets and Scott’s WOW blog post this morning perked my interest in what was shown at PDC this morning.

I checked out the overview of what was presented and the Microsoft Research site to find out more about what was shown.

~~Unfortunately it looks like today's keynote wasn’t recorded~~

Update: This keynote is now online at http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/KYN04/

but I have found a few videos online of what some have called the “best bits”.

Check out the Boku website and the SecondLight white paper.

Countdown to PDC2008: Rick Rashid, a Researcher’s Researcher

Also many of the breakout sessions from PDC are making their way up to channel9.

Update: Mike Swanson has the complete list on his blog.

Enjoy!

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!

Guy Kawasaki

nparker — Sun, 18 Mar 2007 12:11:00 GMT

I was recently lucky enough to see Guy Kawasaki present to Microsoft on the Art of Evangelism... it was a very entertaining session.

While enough said Guy is a legand and you can see him virtually talking about why it’s essential to innovate—and how to do it.

Register Now (yeah too many steps I know) - session is March 19 11:00 AM Pacific Time or (6am Tuesday morning NZ time)... the web cast will be available on-demand 72 hours after the event so you don't have to be an early bird.

One comment Guy said during his presentation that resonated with me was that since he has left Apple Apple have never asked him back to speak... their loss I guess.

Vcal here to get into your calendar.

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 :)

Happy New Year!

nparker — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 07:29:00 GMT

Since I am going back to work tomorrow I thought I would lead with a holiday style post.

I have listened to a couple of books over the break... yup listened (not read), with a young baby I find it much easier to check audio books out of the Microsoft library and listen to them on my phone while walking the baby along the beach or around the park rather than lie in the sun and read. Anyone will know that #1 babies leave you with little time to yourself to read and #2 this summer in NZ there is little sun to be had anywhere!

What were the books? #1 The Long Tail and #2 The Art of Innovation.

There were lots of great take-aways from both of these books and I was especially happy to see shoutweb.com mentioned in relation to the early days of My Chemical Romance in "The Long Tail".

One of things I became present to is that I am (due to the nature of my job and my interests) probably living today like most mainstream consumers will be in the short to medium term.

I have wireless Internet at home... Via WiFi I have high speed (esentially free) broadband on my phone when I am at home, around the house or in range of an open wifi connection. Yes this is particularly useful for things such as voip phone services but I am finding more and more uses for this technology since I have it available.

I normally listen to Internet Radio on my phone while mowing the lawns. I don't normally listen to broadcast radio as it is irrelevant to me I like few hits and I like to discover my own music (before the web I used to do this via word of mouth and friends that I trusted the opinions of... I remember bus rides to school with my walkman and listening to tapes from my friends older brother that worked in a record store), some of my favourite bands Modest Mouse, The Shins, Mercury Rev, Barrington Levy, Flaming Lips, Cat Power spend little time on radio hitlists. It was for this reason that I was particluarly happy to be put onto pandora and even happier to see msn radio has licensed this technology. But I digress... Last week I saw TVNZ advertising free streaming of the ASB classic tennis through the web... this is of little use to me at home as I have a PVR (Windows Vista) connected to my TV and can time-shift broadcast TV (something that I have been using excessively with the cricket of late). I thought the TVNZ streaming would be useful for people living outside of NZ, or following the tennis at work but of little use elsewhere... then i remembered the fact that the 3 cellular network in Australia broadcasts the cricket live to it's mobile customers on a subscription model. Also Vodafone has a deal with prime to stream prime news at 5:30pm live to vodafone live mobile devices. I thought I would experiment watching the tennis on my phone outside at home at 128kpbs, through WiFi the result a "GREAT" experience! I used to have a small battery powered TV that I took to cricket matches, the beach and out boating when I was a teenager and this certainly brought back memories of that. I might be wrong but I'm not aware of any phones that have a TV Tuner card built in ( I wonder why not?). Can TV follow radio and make its place on the Internet with broadcast technology for any device any place any time or do they also need to open up their back catelogue and make it available to you via recommendation on subscription and on demand?

With "free" broadband, an ok quality camera/ camcorder, an mp3 player, web browsing, voice recognition, IM, push email and a 2GB mini SD card in a late model phone the convergance of devices promised in the late 90's is alive and real... I can that this is going to get better and better in the next few years until it reaches a point where you may ask yourself why you would carry anything else! Check out this video/ photos I shot from my phone while snowboarding with my sister last year... I even saw a cell phone video of the Sadam Hussain execution on TV1 news last night!

All of this said the current devices do still have their limitations. My phone for example has quite a low maximum volume when listening with standard headphones (or unamplified speakers) this may be by design to protect your hearing or as a limitation of the built in amplifier related to battery power I'm not sure. I had a problem today when I was trying to listen to an audio book while mowing the lawn, for some reason these books seem to come at a lower normalised volume than music.

I've been prototyping a bit recently and i finally made the connection between this and old skool childhood discovery. As a kid I spent weekends building tree houses, making home movies that stared my soft toys and pets and turning rubbish bin lids and monkey apples in shields and missiles.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I have found recently that by building mock-ups of Windows Sidebar Gadgets, Crazy pointless WPF applications (to learn) and MacGyver style mashups that a prototype is worth a thousand pictures!

So how did I solve my problem today with a prototype? Well I have talked to many people that rave about their "noise cancelling" head phones these things sell for a fortune and many executive travellers can be spotted wearing them in first class on airaplanes. Me I have a pair of basic Sony neck headphones with no amplifier and no noise cancelling. Today I took a drive to the hardware store and brought an 8$ pair of earmuffs. I found that by wearing these over my headphones I can hear my audio books while mowing the lawn remove external noise and protect my hearing by not needing to increase the volume on my phone. One of the strengths of NZers is that on mass we apply this #8 wire behaviour to everything we do including business, and I can't help but think that taking yourself out of your familiar surroundings you can identify opportunities and improve business process and products when you come back to face a fresh new year, relaxed and buzzing from your recently completed holiday.

Enjoy the new year at work, Nigel.