May 2008 - Posts
In case you haven't heard about Microsoft Surface, head over here for a quick look at what I think will be a huge influencer on personal computing in the future house hold as well as business in general.
Surface isn't just about a cool way of letting people use a computer, its much more than that. It's about collaboration amongst multiple users, digital tangibility and giving new and exciting takes on old ideas.
That's right... old ideas.
Despite what Microsoft may tell you in the marketing brochure, this type of computing has been around for a very long time and indeed there are several other companies that have been producing multi-touch (MT) systems for quite some time; but I must give Microsoft their credit, none of the other companies appear to have ever consulted a PR agency or really latched onto the potential of collaborative user experience and marketed it in quite the same way... Jeff Han is getting there though and the following demonstrates how his product is even more advanced than Surface:
You will hear me rattle on about user experience quite a bit, and what is great about the surface computing idea is that while you can get away with applications on the desktop and web that have rubbish user experience (well people have for years), I think it would be hard to try the same thing on a surface because people just wont be able to use your application.
From what I know of the Surface SDK, it aims to take away a lot of the "head tax" involved with getting elements to appear on the screen and allowing the user to twist and turn them in a standardised – gesticulated way. An extended WPF control set allows you to simply specify an items control panel which automatically gives the elements physics based movement on the surface.
This is all great and very exciting, but it would appear that Microsoft are travelling down a very specific and strategic path, pushing this technology out into the market place, meaning that big corporate retail and entertainment are the first clients and then big design agencies are next, while hanging the people that are very much into WPF and XNA, out to dry… well at least for a few years to come.
So I start doing some research in this past few weeks, about how I might go about building such a device and replicating some, if not all of the features of the surface, so as I might at the very least get a real head-start on the technology. You would be correct in thinking that I wouldn't have a Surface SDK, but the main point is that I would be thinking more and more about that collaborative scenario, understanding usability from the surface representation and gaining valuable insight into what the end users expectation is, as well as measuring their points of user experience tolerance.
After completing the research, I can tell you that it is very possible to build this machine and not only that but to also run WPF and XNA on it.
I am going to document my progress in here as much as possible and at the end of it all, if I am successful and people are interested, then I might just make a simple inexpensive kit (as much as possible) that will allow other to experiment with the same system and the same multi-touch technology.
Let me know if you are interested in that and I will make sure I compile a list for it.
I received an invitation last night from the guys at WPF Disciples asking me to join their merry bunch - I was quite surprised and immediately accepted before they had time to reconsider!
If you haven't had time or don't know who the WPF Disciples are, you should head on over and checkout the group as it's made up of a veritable who's who in the WPF world. A lot of the group discussion is free flowing banter but there is also a serious side to it all when it comes time to sharing and solving issues.
There is also some interesting ideas floating around in the background about certain aspects of WPF and some really cool project stuff which will eventually bubble to the surface.
If you only have room for one blog to watch, you should make room for two (cause I know you don't want to kill mine off J ), grab a hold of the group feed and listen in on some interesting conversations.
SVN (subversion) is the source control mechanism that I and many other people use for .NET solutions. I highly recommend it, and what is really great is that it is also open source:
http://subversion.tigris.org/
You can also use the Visual SVN plugin component to get access inside Visual Studio:
http://www.visualsvn.com/
The plugin is not free but does have a trial.
Something that had been bugging me for awhile was sometimes (rarely) when I added a solution to SVN, I could no longer open the solution in Expression Blend.
Finally I found the cause of this issue which lies in the Visual Studio .sln file.
If you open the .sln file in Notepad.exe, you should be able to scroll down and fine a few lines that look like the following:
GlobalSection(ExtensibilityGlobals) = postSolution
VisualSVNWorkingCopyRoot =
EndGlobalSection
You can see the line "VisualSVNWorkingCopyRoot = " has nothing assigned to it which is the cause. Remove the entire block and you should be fine to open the solution in Blend.
Well it has finally happened...
Expression Blend Unleashed is through final reviews and is now set to be printed this month with an expected shelf date (say my publisher) of June 2nd.
If only Microsoft would stop releasing preview versions of stuff it would have been last November, but better late then never I guess.
Some people won't like it, some people will. I have tried my best which is all I could do, but I have learnt a lot about the writing process during the time.
Now its time to concentrate on the video site... I might have a sleep first though.