These are just two sessions I wanted to highlight from Mix10, they are not necessarily my favorites of the whole show; I’m still watching videos. Oh, and I’m a bit Segoe happy after seeing all the Windows Phone stuff, so please excuse the gratuitous formatting.

Developing Natural User Interfaces
with Microsoft Silverlight and WPF 4 Touch 
Joshua
Blake

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/EX18

It’s
worth noting that at this design focused
conference, it was rare to see evidence of much good design put into in the
sessions themselves. Many were strikingly ordinary and pretty slides do not a
compelling presentation make. However, Joshua Blake’s session on Natural User
Interface design and Windows Touch technology was an exception. He delivered
the most compelling breakout I saw, and it hinged on how his tightly packed
content was synced with its delivery mechanism; a purpose-built PowerPoint
alternative that works like an infinite vector-based deepzoom. Not only did
Joshua build this tool using the NUI philosophies and techniques that were the
session’s topic (very meta), but he masterfully laid out the content in ways
that would give any Hollywood opening credits editor a run for his money. Even
if you didn’t care about what he was saying, it was fun to watch him say it
with these visuals. It’s also interesting how much this visual style, with its
heavy emphasis on flat graphics, minimal color, and modern typography,
resembles the Metro UI that was the hit of the show.

Oh,
and that’s me asking the first question. Free book! Note to Joshua, if you want
to see sales of your book skyrocket, release NaturalShow (preferably
open-sourced) when it hits shelves. The publicity will pay dividends.

Prototyping Rich Microsoft
Silverlight Applications with Expression SketchFlow  Chris
Bernard

http://live.visitmix.com/MIX10/Sessions/CL03

I
think we all like us a good Sketchflow demo! But if you’re like me, you’re a
bit burned out on perfect-world scenarios that seem to strain the limits of
believability. Are people really importing Photoshop files with hundreds of
layers and creating working prototypes in a matter of minutes? The answer is,
not much, but they are using this tool and it is adding a lot of value for
those who use it right. This session took the refreshing approach of inviting
up several partners who have been using Sketchflow on real-world projects and
had them show some examples. Their purpose, fidelity, and depth varied greatly.
You are left with a better sense of the true practical value of the tool. Not
everything here is golden, and they ran into some technical glitches, but most
of it is very worthwhile.

BTW,
I had a chance to sit down with Bill
Buxton for a long chat Monday night. I asked him how he felt about
Sketchflow after its first year in the wild. He says he’s still excited about
it and that the Windows 8 team is using it extensively, with amazing results.
He also told me the first fax was sent in the 19th century; a history lesson
comes with the territory when talking to Bill.

Well, after being inspired by Josh Smith’s post about that very subject, I took my own crack at this. My primary motivation was finding something that would work for transitioning items in and out of itemscontrols as well as single child content controls. I also wanted to avoid adding code to the view. Josh was sticking with current "production-ready" code, but since my apps are often just demos anyway, I decided to go ahead and use the Blend3 Behavior goodness.

The idea is this: If you apply one of my Behaviors to a content control, and the content is of type ITranstionItem, then the behavior will apply a transition when the value changes. If you apply the behavior to a datatemplate to be used in an itemscontrol, those items will transition in and out when they are added/removed. The behaviors are meant to be stackable too. I built two behaviors (or actually I guess they’re actions), one just fades items in and out, the other applies storyboards defined in the view and assigned at design time.

So even though this is very rough, I decided to show some details here. I don’t really like what I named things, and for some reason I did everything with properties and monitoring for PropertyChanged events instead of custom events (I did a lot of iterating on the fly) but I decided to stop here and step back. There’s probably memory leaks and obvious improvement to be made.

Here’s the interface. The viewmodels I want to support transitioning will implement this (or extend the abstract class below).

public interface ITransitionItem : INotifyPropertyChanged

{

    bool TransitionEnabled { get; set; }

    bool IsNew { get; set; }

    bool IsOld { get; set; }

    bool IsReadyToRemove { get; set; }

}

I also created an abstract class implementation for the properties and one reusable method called DelaySet. This is where I should probably change things to use more custom events rather than properties.

protected bool DelaySet(object currentValue, Action applyValue)

{

    var tItem = currentValue as ITransitionItem;

    if (tItem != null &&

        !tItem.IsNew &&

        !tItem.IsReadyToRemove &&

        !tItem.IsOld)

    {

        tItem.IsOld = true;

        PropertyChangedEventHandler handler = null;

        handler = new PropertyChangedEventHandler(delegate(object s, PropertyChangedEventArgs ev)

        {

            if (tItem != null && tItem.IsReadyToRemove)

            {

                tItem.PropertyChanged -= handler;

                applyValue.Invoke();

            }

        });

        tItem.PropertyChanged += handler;

        return true;

    }

    else

        return false;

}

Then here is a view and viewmodel using the fade action:
<ContentPresenter Content="{Binding Path=Content, NotifyOnTargetUpdated=true}"
    <i:Interaction.Triggers>
        <i:EventTrigger EventName="TargetUpdated" >
            <PersonalMVVMSampleApp_Behaviors:Fade_InAndOut_TransitionAction />
        </i:EventTrigger>
    </i:Interaction.Triggers>
</ContentPresenter>

public class ApplicationViewModel : TransitionItem

{...

  public ITransitionItem Content

  {

    get { return _content; }

    set 

    {

        if (!DelaySet(_content, () => Content = value))

        {

            _content = value;

            OnPropertyChanged("Content");

        }

    }

  }

The code for items controls is even simpler because no special code is needed in the viewmodel. It’s handled by a custom version of ObservableCollection:

public class TransitioningObservableCollection<T> : ObservableCollection<T> where T : ITransitionItem

{

    protected override void RemoveItem(int index)

    {

        var toRemove = this[index];

        if (toRemove.IsReadyToRemove)

            base.RemoveItem(index);

        else if (!toRemove.TransitionEnabled)

            base.RemoveItem(index);

        else

        {

            toRemove.IsOld = true;

            toRemove.PropertyChanged += new PropertyChangedEventHandler(delegate(object s, PropertyChangedEventArgs e)

            {

                if (toRemove.IsReadyToRemove) Remove(toRemove);

            });

        }

    }

}

I won’t post the details of the behaviors here, but basically they attach and look for a transiton item to listen to, then apply the transtions when appropriate. (i’ll make the source code available soon)

This is meant to get me on the road to something reusable, but I welcome suggestions for how to improve this, or you can just tell me that this is a crazy way to handle this issue and you’ll probably be right.

]]> https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/animated-transitions-in-mvvm-with-wpf-my-attempt/feed/ 1 3 BenReierson https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/microsofts-rec/ https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/microsofts-rec/#respond Mon, 12 Jan 2009 20:14:06 +0000 http://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/microsofts-rec I see Microsoft has announced their Retail Experience Center (REC). I’ve been there, and I can definitely say they’ve built something really cool. In fact, they’ve included so much detail it’s actually kind of surreal. You can easily forget you’re not in a real store. Right down to the giant mural of a parking lot that’s behind the sliding glass doors. Anyway, if you have the means, I recommend checking it out.

Also, Avanade’s retail demo is installed on their Microsoft Surface, and you can catch a glimpse of it in the video (it also appears in one of the gallery images). So that’s cool to see! ]]> https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/microsofts-rec/feed/ 0 5 BenReierson https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/financial-planning-on-microsoft-surface-from-avanade-and-accenture/ https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/financial-planning-on-microsoft-surface-from-avanade-and-accenture/#respond Mon, 05 Jan 2009 23:24:08 +0000 http://benreierson.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/financial-planning-on-microsoft-surface-from-avanade-and-accenture

I just finished a drive from St. Paul to Seattle. 2.5 days,
1800 miles, lots of fun, 1 perspective shift. I have a new position at the same
company, but now it makes more sense for me to work out of our headquarters in Seattle,
so here I am. Technically, I could have flown. It would have taken about 6-7
hours total, and would have put me here in time to enjoy a beautiful august
weekend. The company is paying for relocation, so whether I drove or had my car
shipped was totally up to me and made no financial difference. So why did I
drive?

It was a rather an easy decision to make, even though I put
on a show of going back and forth about it for a couple weeks. Really though, I knew I wanted to drive the
first time I thought of it, but it’s only in doing it, that I understood
why. The fact that I hadn’t ever been in Montana, Wyoming, or Idaho was
something I thought should change. I’m also planning to sell my car shortly,
now that I don’t need it to get to work or the gym, so I thought it would be
good to enjoy it while I have it. But the real
reason turned out to be perspective. I needed to MOVE, not just pop over to
Seattle like I’ve done at least a dozen times before. I wanted to feel the very
sobering reality that I was leaving my home state indefinitely for the first
time. I wanted to feel the weight of leaving behind friends and family. Not
that I’m a masochist, understand; it just seemed like flying here would be like
cheating somehow.

The fact is that Seattle IS 1600 miles from St Paul (the
extra 200 miles I drove was for a very worthwhile detour to Yellowstone
national park), and one tends to underestimate the enormity of that distance
when they routinely cover the round trip twice a week and sometimes 10 times in
a single month. The incredible speed at which you travel while 30k feet above
the earth should evoke its own kind of awe, but for someone who didn’t grow up
taking road trips, I suspected these distances were somewhat lost on me. I was
right.

For example, yesterday I spent over 11 hours driving; saw
the sunrise and the sunset from the car, and stopped only occasionally to
stretch my legs and remind my senses that the world isn’t perpetually speeding
by at 80 mph. When I started the day I was in Montana and I ended it in….wait
for it….Montana! And still a good 150 miles from the western border! Granted, I
spent some of the day taking a detour a bit south which took me through a
corner of Wyoming, but generally I was heading west the whole day. I averaged
60 miles an hour according to my car’s computer, and filled my tank a couple
times. That’s distance!

And here’s the most important thing about it: every mile
along the way, every mountain pass or 10 mile straight-away that begs you to
see if you can get your car past 130mph, I was aware (at least subconsciously)
that it brought me further away from my old home and closer to my new one. That
limbo time, during which I thought of myself as a homeless wanderer (I should
have learned kung-fu first) was therapy for the mind. Or at least I hope it
was, because it didn’t do much for my back.

I will take possession of my new apartment tomorrow, and in
so doing, complete a journey. Moving to a new city is not a breakthrough for
mankind, I realize, but this is a journey that has been a long time coming for
me, and I feel it is (if you’ll permit the cliché) a beginning as much as an
end. Only one reader of this will remember directly, but I once stood on a dock
in Greece telling someone, who was at the time a relative stranger, about how I
wanted my life to be bigger. It was something I hadn’t thought of in those
terms before that moment, but it was very true. So what better path to a bigger
life than a big city, some big sky, and a big drive?

The Drive’s Flickr Set

I decided that the only way I can express my decision making process, which has led me to NOT buy a new iPhone tomorrow, is to externalize the conversation taking place in my head. So here ya go:

WM Owner

Ok, I’ve decided to stick with my HTC Touch Cruise (substitute any of the latest wm phones with 3G and GPS).

iPhone 3G Owner

But how can you think WM is still a better choice when the new iPhone is so great?

WM
I know, I have to keep reminding myself of the reasons. Let’s do this though. You start telling me the things you love about the iPhone that you think are either unique to it, or better than WM. And I will respond with something that is unique or better on WM; OR demonstrate equivalent functionality on WM, and see how far we get. And I’m not just going to list features for features sake; these are things that really matter to me

iPhone
Alright. Let’s start with mobile web browsing. Web pages are displayed like they are on a desktop.

WM
Yeah but opera 9.5 on wm does the same thing as safari now. It has all the same benefits. The only thing it can’t do is the multi-touch pinch, so just to even us up, I’ll throw in the obvious wm advantage that it can be used with any carrier world-wide and supports more radio bands.

iPhone
Fair enough. So how about the great multi-media ipod functionality? It plays videos beautifully.

WM
I’ll give you that it’s better overall at multi-media, although I can play xvid torrents natively on mine with minimal slowdown, while those have to be converted for the iPhone. Also I can play audio over bluetooth and expand my storage with the SDHC card reader.

iPhone
The iPhone is great for texting with its threaded display and smart keyboard.

WM
Actually I have threaded txting now too, and I can copy/paste things into my txts/emails from any other program on the phone. I also have a 3^rd party keyboard that incorporates all of the smarts of the iPhone keyboard, plus the ability to choose your layout and customize other useful options.

iPhone
I love google maps on the iPhone. And now I have gps.

WM
Yeah I have the same google maps program with gps, and I also have MS live search which includes turn-by-turn gps support via the internet. It even does rerouting when you deviate from course. And it supports voice commands.

iPhone
The gesture-based UI is great.

WM
I’ll give you that it’s nice, although multi-touch is probably underutilized. HTC phones do gestures now though too. All lists are flick-able. I can flip through pictures and emails. There is a program launcher that is all gesture based. And I can even zoom in on areas of pictures by drawing little circles instead of doing the pinch.

iPhone
Email support is great, and now supports exchange push.

WM
That’s great, but obviously WM has that too. Also, it implements ALL exchange features. The iPhone is missing tasks and flagged emails, which are extremely useful to me.

iPhone
How about how you can browse itunes and buy/download music directly over wifi?

WM
Good one. Although I have an app that will auto-download podcasts over the 3g network, which I find more useful than buying songs. I also have apps for twitter and flickr uploading, all running in the background, which I understand you can’t do with 3rd party apps on the iPhone as they can’t stay resident.

iPhone
Honestly, when it comes down to it, the iPhone is all about the overall amazingly fast and beautiful user experience.

WM
You win on ux and speed, I can’t deny that. It takes a lot to overcome this one for me. Here’s a few things I haven’t mentioned yet: OfficeCommunicatorMobile for corporate IM and true freedom from the office; decent 3mp camera with auto-geotagging; windows remote desktop, for tweaking my home server from the road; laptop tethering to the internet via Bluetooth; spare batteries; Skype.

technorati tags:surface, microsoft, microsoftsurface, avanade ]]> https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/07/01/surface-video-available/feed/ 2 9 BenReierson https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/avanade-and-accentures-surface-demo/ https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/avanade-and-accentures-surface-demo/#respond Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:05:20 +0000 http://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/avanade-and-accentures-surface-demo Avanade put out a press release today announcing a Microsoft Surface demo that aims to "enhance the retail experience". This happens to be the application I’ve been working on for the past few months at Avanade headquarters in Seattle and I’m really excited to see it hit the light of day.

There should be a video available soon, but basically this application helps you shop for products by making it easy to compare them to each other, and see how they will work in your home. For instance, you can draw your living room blueprint-style, placing all your existing furniture and equipment, and then try out a new TV to see how well it will fit. Then you can resize the TV on the fly to pick the best one for your room. It’s a bit hard to explain how well that works, but when the video is available you’ll see it’s pretty cool. There are also additional aspects to the application involving making product suggestions and helping with connecting up your equipment. It’s all really good stuff that I would personally love to see adopted by retailers in the near future.

From a development perspective, this was a really fun app to work on. This is essentially a big WPF app that is touch-enabled using the Surface SDK. Our team didn’t start with much WPF experience, so we had that learning curve to deal with on top of learning the nuances of the Surface device itself. To Microsoft’s credit, it really wasn’t too tough. Even in this early stage the devices are stable and easy to work with, and the SDK is well designed. The whole approach to designing applications for Surface is still evolving inside Microsoft, and probably our biggest challenge was trying to figure out which design principles we could work into this application and to what extent we could define our own. There were quite a few iterations of the design, and I must say I’m pretty impressed with what we were able to produce in just a couple months (we started in December).

So take a look at the pics (that’s me in the first one on the left!), and be on the lookout for a video. I know this isn’t exactly a blog people are reading for development posts (or reading at all actually) but feel free to ask questions in the comments or send me email to seraph.ben+surface@gmail.com. I still have a ton to learn about WPF and Surface, but I’m happy to share the knowledge I’ve gained so far!

Update: The video is now available.

technorati tags:surface, microsoft, microsoftsurface, avanade

]]> https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/03/11/avanade-and-accentures-surface-demo/feed/ 0 10 BenReierson https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seattle-and-skiing/ https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seattle-and-skiing/#respond Sun, 24 Feb 2008 02:48:32 +0000 http://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seattle-and-skiing

I’ve been working in Seattle for the past few months, basically since I got back from New Zealand actually. It’s been great to work out of the company headquarters for a while, and I’m getting a chance to work on some really cool tech (although I’m not actually allowed to say what yet). I grabbed a corporate apartment here and have spent only two weekends at home in 2008 so far, so I’ve definitely had a chance to get to know the city. Let’s just say it’s an unquestionable upgrade weatherwise from MN winters.

The last two weekends have been the most dramatic examples of this. Not only do I get to enjoy 50’s and sun in February, but if you drive for two hours there are two totally decent mountains waiting for you. Last weekend I hit Steven’s pass, and I just got back from Crystal Mountain a few hours ago. These aren’t quite Colorado or Utah quality, but they get the job done admirably, and the views certainly don’t disappoint. There’s nothing like skiing to the edge and seeing the glory of something as huge as Mt Rainier spread out before you.

 

]]> https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2008/02/23/seattle-and-skiing/feed/ 0 11 BenReierson https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/travel-update/ https://benreierson.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/travel-update/#respond Tue, 09 Oct 2007 03:58:03 +0000 http://benreierson.wordpress.com/2007/10/08/travel-update