A RIA’s background is vital to achieving that perfect UX

One of the hardest things to get right when building out a RIA is designing the background. You can make or break the users experience by designing a bad background.. In my opinion this is a beautiful example of a well executed background.

The future of Deepzoom – my take!

The “delicate genius” did a short video of my deepzoom samples, I created these samples with the view to push deepzoom into the mainstream. I wanted to show people that there was more to deepzoom then a zooming picture!

 

(ignore the fact that I need a haircut)..

 

 

Thanks “Michael Kordahi” for taking the time to do this video!!!

Rant – Mesh is going to be HUGE!

The last time I was excited about a new technology was about a year and a half ago with Silverlight, it was so new and fresh and offered such promise. I can now say, personally speaking, that the same things can be said about Mesh. It will ultimately redefine how we exchange, use and sync data online. It has the potential to be HUGE!

This post is nothing more than a personal rant about a technology that I believe will affect the world of RIA! To date we build alot of business RIA’s on top of the desktop, in the future that desktop will be intimately tied to the Mesh, in fact in some cases it may replace it! The rest of my rant can be found on my Cynergy blog, click the image below to get there!

My "Digg Mashup" that taught me so much about Silverlight 2.0 beta – part 1

The mashup began by me wanting to write a feed reader type of application end-to-end with Silverlight. Basically I wanted to really see if Silverlight could handle a real RIA scenario.

I wanted to utilize a lot of features in Silverlight that I knew would be required for any type of business RIA. I also wanted to go wild with the UI and test out just how flexible XAML was.

Here is a screen shot of my DIGG mashup! (The rest of this post is at my Cynergy blog)

 

 

Live Messenger – Login Screen UI

 

2 days ago I set myself 1 simple task, to build the UI for the Login screen of windows Live messenger!

1 day later I was done!

Equipped with the knowledge gained from my control skinning adventures I set out on creating the UI as best I could pixel for pixel. The result speaks for itself. 

I said it before and I’ll say it again, Silverlight is an amazing technology. It’s potential is limitless, and it really empowers the designer making their role in any software project critical to it’s success!

How to make a spiral xaml asset with Design

 

This is going to be a simple post BUT I thought I’d share it because I have been racking my brain for so long trying to work out how to do something like this in pure xAML. This shows why design is just as important to the UX toolset as blend is. There are just some things that can’t be done in blend!

[Thanks to Germain from over at the expression forums for showing me how to do this]

Showing off the power of Silverlight 2.0 – Windows Media Player redone

A couple of months ago I recreated the Windows Media Player interface using Blend and Silverlight 1.1 alpha refresh, I wired up the UI so that it behaved similar to the actual application. It had a lot of code in the code behind that managed the resizing, it also made extensive use of the canvas control for layout positioning,  it had a lot of absolute positioning and funky logic to make it work when the page resized.

Today it’s time to rewrite that project in Silverlight 2.0 beta. The main reason why I’m doing this is because I feel that there isn’t enough examples of real world skinning using the new Silverlight 2.0 bits. There needs to be more samples out there for people to learn from, I for one would of loved to have more demo’s to digest in the early days of the Silverlight 2.0 beta release.

Anyway hope you guys can learn from this real world sample, I know I learnt heaps making it…

[read the article at my new home at Cynergy]