Multi-Touch Gesture Engine

One of the cool things about Silverlight 3 is the new multi-touch support. From a UX stand point this is just awesome to provide this kind of functionality. I know this guy Andrew that works at Identitymine that wrote a gesture engine for Surface that is just awesome. He was showing me this on his tablet at MIX at one of the many dinners. Its just amazing in part as he is just a supper genious :) really but also the kind of UX this provides for Windows 7 apps and more is just amazing. anyway check out the press release :

http://cs.identitymine.com/blogs/im_news/archive/2009/03/19/identitymine-introduces-the-identitymine-gesture-engine-to-support-advanced-multi-touch-development.aspx

its pretty slick and hoping he will port this to Silverlight 3 :)

Silverlight Presentation Design Rules...

Anyone that knows me well knows I'm in to rules. I have lots of them and even a little black rule book I like to use for fun (ie, Rule number 4 is Mexican food is good so long as it is not authenticate, this way I have an excuse to not eat food that is the least bit spicey.) . I realize this is a bit OCD and all but I like things that are OCD...

anyway over mix I wrote down a few short rules of thumbs for doing Silverlight Presentations (or any other kind) and much of this comes out of the theme at MIX that it is about the design, on top of the fact I have been reading alot of trending related books pointing to an increase in the need to be about design.

For me that is a hard thing. I have always been good at art, namely drawing and sculpting and much of the work I do in support of my 'hobbies' end of being works of Art. and if truth be told I'm probably better suited to be an artist then a programmer, however I just love the logic of coding. That all being the case I'm trying to send me self down the road of being a UX designer archtect sort of role and it starts with some rules I put to gether to statisfy my OCD.

So here they are:


1. Power point is evil.
2. Designs, UX, Images or even power point slides are never about a message or getting information accross but about emotion.
3. A 'Deck' should never be able to stand along and make since.
4. A Visual 'AID' is not an outline.
5. When a picture is worth a thousand words... is when you use a picture.

Along those lines we will see how far I get down that 'UX' Designer Architect... path.

Quantum Computers...and more

so strickly speacking not silverlight related however both very cool and computer/UX related

this one on quantum computers pushing us one step closer
http://www.physorg.com/news156710301.html

and this one on Next Gen UX
http://singularityhub.com/2009/03/04/the-next-generation-in-human-computer-interfaces-awesome-videos/

Twitter and Social Networking

I went to this exclusive dinner party at MIX tuesday night. at the table was a number of luminaries from Mark Brown (CEO IdentityMine) to John Stockton (Author, Acentium, SD2IG). The conversation evolved around UX and eventually into Twitter... I have stayed away from that digital crack but after falling on the side of the converstation for twitter I have decided that if I believe what I was saying I needed to use twitter...

http://twitter.com/DavidJKelley

So that being said Twitter allows a user to kind of plug into the community. It can be a collaboriation tool and almost a collective intelligence sort of tool, so that when I have a question I can post it and it gets answered quickly. Its like a big instance chat room that is open all the time. The power of the group mind to solve problems is clearly where I want to go and this tool among others allows us to get closer to this nervana of one ness.

Silverlight 3 Bits

http://silverlight.net/getstarted/silverlight3/default.aspx

MIX 09 - the coolest place on earth

its about design stupid. developers that can't get on board right brain thinking will be outsourced.



this I think is a critical trend that we in the tec field need to get that in the modern world it will be about design. I read a book 'A Whole New Mind' and if you take that with the book 'Age of Spiritual Machines' I think you can get a clear picture of what is coming and for us in the tec field it is about the design (just like Bill say's on stage just now at MIX) 'its a good time for design'



So instead of code its about the design or the user experience (UX)



Getting back to MIX and the keynote and any annoucements...

Expression Web (really I have a hard time not having Front Page flash backs) but the super preview is really cool... kind of like an uber frontpage...

There is the new version of ASP.NET, VS 2010, Windows Webapp Gallery, and Bizspark...

Expression Blend 3 is really got some cool new features, including:

* my favororiate is Sketchflow and the sketch flow player... very very cool.
* photoshop and illustrator imports
* behavior stuff is cool and designing with data is much better
* Source Control integration
* XMAL, C# and VB intellisense in blend...

As to Silverlight 3...

* 3d
* better data binding
* running on the desktop support even on the mac...
* GPU Hardware level support
* bitmap and pixel API's Pixel Shader effexcts
* new deepzoom stuff
* deeplinking navigation
* multi-touch support
* New Codecx built in (H.264, AAC, MPEG-4
* Raw Bitstream Audio/Video API for doing things like custom codex support
* and my personal favorate this second is the we have more features now in SL3 and the download is 40k smaller including all the SL2 features for the plug in.

Next Generation UX

Normally I'm not a big fan of alot of the koolaid you might see coming form big corporations including ms. But I am about cool UX even if I'm just a dev and not even that great of one to begin with but I got this link from Jobi about cool UX applications coming out of MS labs that is a must see for next gen user experiences which I hope to be a smaller part of creating using Silverlight. Check it out:

http://www.officelabs.com/projects/futurevisionmontage/Pages/default.aspx

MIX 2009

MIX is coming up. If Microsoft does the normal thing I'm sure we will get a good look at what is next for Silverlight. Hope to see you all there?

http://2009.visitmix.com/