January 21, 2010

Looky here – Seesmic Look

Looky here – Seesmic Look

Recently IdentityMine had the great opportunity to work on the new Seesmic Look application that debuted in New York earlier this morning.  Seesmic Look is a new lens on the tremendous flow of information that is the Twitter firehose.  At IdentityMine we specialize in UX and so when we were approached about a new way to look at and use the information locked up in the Twitter stream we jumped at the opportunity.

You can tell by some of the screenshots below that Seesmic Look is an extremely visual application.

Below you see the public timeline view which shows a users friends in a constantly flowing stream.

seesmic2

These are pretty typical views but where Seesmic Look really shines is in the new “interests” and “channels” areas.  IdentityMine’s efforts on the project were mainly focused in the channels area.  The new areas allow a user to have a look into what is going on in various interest categories or corporate backed channels.  Seesmic works with companies to define and brand those channels creating a great marketing medium to have their “official” athletes add to a brand stream.

It’s a great new take on the twitter ecosystem and we are excited to be part of delivering the new experience.

You can check out both a shot of Sports interests and the Red Bull channel below.

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seesmic4

seesmic5

Published on January 21, 2010 in Kurt Brockett, WPF and Windows 7. 0 Comments
January 19, 2010

Talking in Las Vegas: MIX2010 and MVVM

originally posted by Laurent Bugnion: (link) – please comment at original post

MIXSpeaker

This morning, very early (or very late depending how you see it), I learned that one of the sessions I submitted to the MIX 2010 open call for speakers had been picked by the public. Out of 169 sessions, only 12 were picked, so you imagine my feelings right now. Honestly, I am sure that this will be a good session, but it could have gone either way, and I had prepared myself mentally for the alternative possibility too.

Understanding the Model-View-ViewModel pattern

The Model-View-ViewModel pattern (also called MVVM) is a hot topic in today’s Silverlight and WPF world. This pattern facilitates modern development techniques such as separation of concerns (decoupling), unit testing and test driven development, work with modern tools such as Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend and more.

In this session, Laurent (a user and promoter of MVVM since 2006) will introduce this pattern to you with many demos. We will talk about the basic components of a modern Silverlight or WPF application, and of additional helpers that will make your life as a developer much easier.

MVVM at MIX

Interestingly, 3 of the 12 open call sessions picked by the audience have “MVVM” in the title. Rob Eisenberg’s “Build Your Own MVVM Framework” and Shawn Wildermuth’s “RIA Services and MVVM: It Can Happen!”, in addition to mine, should cover the topic in depth. After thinking about it, I decided I will contact Rob and Shawn to talk to them about their session, and try to avoid overlap.

On my end, I will probably shift the focus a little more on what MVM brings you from a designer (well, integrator)’s point of view, and how you can leverage this pattern to create beautiful applications. I will also, of course, talk about the MVVM Light Toolkit, the open source toolkit I have been developing since last year, and which encounters a great success.

Send me your suggestions

I would love to hear if you have topics you would like to hear about during the session. I have a pretty good idea of what I will talk about, but let me know what is really important for you. What aspects of MVVM do you want me to focus on? What components of MVVM Light? Let me know, and I will adapt the content to include these topics!

I am very much looking forward to this session, and will see you in March at MIX!

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Published on January 19, 2010 in Laurent Bugnion. 0 Comments
January 18, 2010

NRF Follow Up

Well it was definitely an exhausting week between CES and NRF.  My plan to sleep on the plane from Las Vegas to New York didn’t quite work out as planned.  Flying JetBlue with DirectTV during the Jets v. Bengals playoff game and a plane full of New Yorkers resulted in a pretty rambunctious flight.  NRF was an incredible show and a big win for IdentityMine.  The Microsoft Retail team brought a bunch of great customers by.  Checkout the video posted on the Surface blog below.   One correction is that the Microsoft Tag application is not yet available for Android.

Thanks everyone at IdentityMine who worked so hard on the application and to all those who stopped by the Microsoft Retail booth.

Published on January 18, 2010 in Kurt Brockett and Microsoft Surface. 0 Comments
January 16, 2010

IdentityMine, UX, NUI and 2010

originally posted by Chad Brown: (link) – please comment at original post

Last night I was reading a blog post about IdentityMine from a local UW director. Look at that… We share the same blogger template. I was confused for a second. Isn’t it sad I have a creative company and don’t have a custom one? (hint, hint if any of our creative folks are reading this) I’m sure they’ll just tell me to switch to WordPress.

Anyway, I appreciated Andrew’s comments and it inspired me to take a few minutes and post again. It’s been awhile.

Yes, we are busy and last year was our biggest year ever with 2010 looking better yet – despite the downturn. I thank all you out there who demand a better user experience for that. People have been given a taste of good UX and now they have an appetite for more. After all, what good is a feature rich application if the features remain buried in a help file somewhere begging to be used? What good is a collection of data that hasn’t been turned into information via a rich visualization?

The technology is no longer a limiting factor. With presentation technologies like WPF and Silverlight and NUI platforms like Surface, Windows 7 and the various multi-touch overlays, an applications UX is only limited to your creativity and willingness to invest in the engineering required to build the vision. Of course, the “appetite for innovation” and change is only so big depending on which ecosystem your “experience” is targeting. Therefore UX innovation must be managed with good user research and tested with proof of concepts and prototypes. I’m very proud of IdentityMine. One of the things I’m most proud of is the culture which allows all competencies required to deliver the perfect balance of UX innovation to live under one roof.

Collectively we all expect more from the interfaces we use day to day at work, home or during play. The UX is now a major component in our perception of “quality”. As a result, the next couple years will offer companies the opportunity to meet or exceed this new and constantly raising UX bar or disappear into yesterday. Exciting times indeed.

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Published on January 16, 2010 in Chad Brown. 0 Comments
January 14, 2010

Quick tip: Finding Silverlight 4 documentation fast

originally posted by Laurent Bugnion: (link) – please comment at original post

The Silverlight 4 documentation is available online from Microsoft. However, it is not the fastest way to find documentation. Instead, you should know that the Silverlight 4 documentation is available online, it is just a little bit hidden.

“Also available for…”

When you navigate to an MSDN page, you will find a box letting you know that the page you are looking for is also available for Silverlight 3, .NET 3.0, .NET 3.5 or .NET 4. For example, here is what the page for System.Windows.Controls.Border shows:

1

No sign of Silverlight 4 yet. However, it is easy to get to the same page: In the URL of this page, replace the version number (VS.95) with (VS.96).

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.windows.controls.border(VS.96).aspx

The version numbers are as follows:

  • (VS.85): .NET 3.0
  • (VS.90): .NET 3.5 SP1 (Note that you can also omit the version number altogether for this.
  • (VS.95): Silverlight 3
  • (VS.96): Silverlight 4
  • (VS.100): .NET 4

Of course some classes are not available for some versions, so you might get a Page Not Found.

Feeling lucky? Search from Bing or Google

In Google and in Bing, it is very fast to search for classes, methods or properties: Simply type the following query:

Border class

The first hit returned by the search engine is the MSDN Border class documentation. From there, you can use the navigation shown above. Another cool tip to go even faster: Type the same query followed by the version number. For example

Border class vs.96

Again, the first hit is what you are looking for.

Note: On Google, apparently you can even just type Border class 96 to get the result you want. On Bing, however, it returns other results first. Safer to type the vs. prefix first.

Since I set Bing to be my default search engine on Chrome and in IE8, I can type my queries directly in the browser’s location bar, and get the result page immediately.

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Published on January 14, 2010 in Laurent Bugnion and Silverlight. 0 Comments