My tree at Carbon Grove

Thanks to the folks on the Internet Explorer team I planted a Virtual tree. I’ve made some commitments to help improve the environment (for instance I don’t drive to work any more, I take the bus or ride my bike) and if I visit my tree over the next six weeks then the IE folks in conjunction with Carbon Grove will plant a real tree.

As well as supporting the environment the site takes advantages of not only some of the new IE8 features (though it will work just as well in older browsers) but the folks at Jackson Fish Market have done a really creative job in bringing the forests to life.

This is just one of many ways you can get involved in making the world a bit better – recycling, composting, reducing your power bill … it doesn’t have to be hard (just remembering to turn out your office light or shut off your PC when you’re not using it) and over a year it adds up.

At MIX08 one of the projects I helped along the way was the Hard Rock Memorabilia site developed by Vertigo to show off the Deep Zoom capabilities in Silverlight. These are the guys who also released the great Silverlight Codeplex Slide.Show project that I’ve used a couple of times.

What I discovered recently is that they’ve shared another project on Codeplex to help make your life easier. This one is called BigPicture^tm and it helps by providing a lot of the basic framework for building a Silverlight Deep Zoom app. Now you still need to get your hands dirty with the Deep Zoom Composer and Visual Studio… but this gives you a real headstart.

BTW while we’re on the subject Jon Galloway (also from Vertigo) has written a great breakdown on how Deep Zoom compares to some other solutions and fellow evangelists Laurence Moroney and Jaime Rodriguez (both far cleverer than I) have posted some great write-ups on how to develop Deep Zoom apps in Silverlight.

If you build (or know of) a cool Deep Zoom sample please share it in the comments here.

Not long ago I realized I was getting a little heavier and slower (and yes, older) so to help motivate myself (there’s nothing like walking past an expensive piece of equipment every day) I got an elliptical.

It was great. I started to lose weight (and thanks to the pushups and situps I felt able to do get into slightly better shape). Of course motivation remains an issue (it’s always easy to find excuses).

Pounding away for half hours at a time (especially just before Christmas when the girls were away) gave me some thinking time… how to combine the aspects of motivation with the social networking tools that we have today – Facebook and Twitter for instance.

Twitter seemed like an obvious choice. Nice short messages that force clarity, and a really approachable API so that even I – now coming up to 18 months since I actually wrote code for a living – could get to grips with.

You may have noticed the occasional Twitter message from me (and a few other folks now) that reads like “@gtFtr Elliptical Lvl 7.5 30 mins 2.2 miles cal 318 77 watts 4.4 mph HR 152” – well those are sharing the stats from my latest workout with my pet project.

The trackers (different exercises) are all outlined on the blog, and it’s fairly easy to add new ones if you don’t see something you need. It is very much a part time project and there’s quite a to do list… assuming I ever get the time to do any of it (open to suggestions from folks with more skill, more time, or a good plan).

Feel free to check it out, suggest some new trackers or just laugh at my progress…

A while ago I posted about BrowserHawk adding support for Silverlight detection and for a while, apart from writing your own code, that had been it.

The good news is that as Silverlight is getting more popular the options are improving… I got a comment on the post to let me know that BrowserObject now also supports Silverlight detection in the same way as other plug ins.

The free version doesn’t detect plugins, but does give you some basic information for very little effort. The upscale product works for both .Net and PHP infrastructure and comes with some easy getting started samples to make you productive.

Good to see the eco-system growing.

If you’ve had a look at the amazing Hard Rock Memorabilia site that Vertigo built for the MIX08 Keynote (and then put live for good measure) you’ve probably been impressed at how easy it is to zoom in and out of the dynamically re-arranging collection thanks to the Deep Zoom feature in Silverlight.

Although it’s pretty astounding to think that Deep Zoom facilitates the delivery of megapixel and even gigapixel images that can be panned and zoomed into with amazing speed (and low bandwidth consumption) the story doesn’t end there.

Thanks to a concept called sparse images it’s possible to embed images and collections within another image so you can continue zooming down past the point where pixels blur into entire new worlds or collections – it makes the imagery almost fractal in depth and navigation possibilities.

So where can you see it in action? Simple … go to the Hard Rock Memorabilia site and have a look around. To give you a clue I’ve included a picture of what you’re looking for with this post, but if that isn’t enough then have a look here (but don’t you want to try finding the Easter Egg first…).

... or why Scott Guthrie was playing with his balls on stage!

Things have been rather quiet here the last few weeks as I've been very focused on some of the incredibly cool stuff we couldn't talk about until MIX08 so I had to contain my enthusiasm.

Much like last year at MIX07 I worked with some amazing partners to help provide some of the demos that Scott was able to showcase in his keynote. I still find it pretty amazing to be involved in such a great event and have a chance to work behind the scenes to make at least some of the magic come to life. You can see all of the action of the day1 keynote on the VisitMIX site but here's the back story for some of the demos...

So... enough of that. What was I involved in....

IE8 with Dean Hackamovitch

Although the rumor mill knew we would be showing IE8 at MIX I don't think anyone had guessed that we'd actually be making bits available, along with developer documentation on how to take advantage of some of the new features. I've been playing with IE8 through some of it's very early stages now and have to say I wish in my previous job I'd had the ability to use features like WebSlices. Luckily in my new job I was able to work with the team to help implement them on Facebook.com (yes, they're live. Install IE8 and go try it out) - for some more information check out the video on VisitMIX.

Hard Rock - Deep Zoom gets a work out.

I've worked with the fine folks from Vertigo before on the Slide.Show project (one of the top downloads on Codeplex if you want a great Slideshow app for your site - there's even a plugin for this blog engine, and others, available.) so it was great to get the gang together again to work on a project that would really demonstrate the capabilities of Deep Zoom - the Silverlight implementation of the Seadragon technology.

Working with the folks at Hard Rock to expose just the tip of their memorabilia collection was an awesome experience - check out the results of all the hard work at the live Memorabilia site. Having a chance to visit the World Headquarters of Hard Rock, have a look around their warehouse and check out their flagship restaurant in Orlando was icing on the cake (thanks guys - you rock!)

Sean Dee (Hard Rock CMO) and Scott Stanfield (Vertigo CEO) delivered a great presentation and the bonus at the end was that the site went live at the end of their demo.

Mix Keynote: Hard Rock Demo

VisitMIX hosted a great interview with the team to give you a clue how they put it all together and you can check it out here and for a much more in-depth dive into how the technology can be put to use the team even ran a session afterwards.

Aston Martin - design delivers

Nestled in the heart of the English countryside is one of the most revered names in the automotive world. Recently branching out after several years as part of Ford they are pushing innovation along with their existing design and engineering focus, and we were lucky enough to be able to give folks a sneak preview into their thinking this year at MIX.

Marek Reishman (Design Director from Aston Martin) and Paul Bishop (Managing Director of Splendid) treated us to a three part insight into a possible future - a new way of configuring your dream car on the web (using 3D models in Silverlight to navigate around a car and Deep Zoom to step inside it); a dealer experience using XNA and WPF (and an ultra portable PC) to work through the millions of possible combinations, and allow a customer to see their chosen vehicle in amazing detail before placing an order. The final part of the demo was a video clip showing the in-car systems managed by a central embedded Windows device - telemetry monitoring, phone and GPS navigation.

Aston Martin MIX08 Keynote

Nishant did a great interview with Marek and Paul (as well as reminding me in the run up to MIX that we do care about designers!)

Having a chance to go to Gaydon in the UK and see the home of Aston Martin was an amazing experience... now I just have to work out how to save the money to get one of my own ;)

Cirque du Soleil - HR is a real juggling act

One of the challenges of MIX has been the way the web hogs all the design glory. No-one talks about the same problems faced by designers and developers working within a corporate environment on Line of Business (LOB) apps because it lacks a certain.... sparkle.

Well, Cirque du Soleil understand sparkle, and they really understand the challenges of LOB applications - they maintain a huge catalogue of performers, and making sure there is quality data available is a real task.

Krista Monson (Head of Casting, Resident Shows America) came on stage (with a suitably theatrical flair!) and showed what can happen when a LOB app meets design head on and sits on top of the latest Microsoft technologies (WPF, TabletPC, SQL Server and Sync Framework, and of course Silverlight)

For me the highlight of MIX had to be Krista asking Scott some cheeky questions... and trying to juggle on stage (and yes, we do have the video recorded live from the stage!)

Cirque MIX08 Keynote

Check the weather on your phone

Silverlight is establishing itself as a player on the web - Windows and OSX are the start of a cross platform story that Moonlight is helping round out on Linux. At MIX08 it was great to be able to announce that not only was Silverlight coming to Windows Mobile it was also going to be supported on the Nokia S60 devices.

We've already done some work with Weatherbug using Silverlight 1.0 so it was great to work with them on the next generation and the next platform for Silverlight. Using the same tools and techniques as for the desktop browser they were able to develop a really cool mobile app in just a few weeks.

WeatherBug MIX08 Keynote

Check out the interview with Tamir on VisitMIX to find out about their experiences and make sure you're ready when the bits become available.

Looking forward to MIX09

I had a great run up to MIX08 but we're not done yet. We've set the bar high for MIX09 back at the Venetian March 19th to 20th! Hope to see you there... keep an eye on VisitMIX for updates.

It's always great when you come across a really cool example of someone else's hard work. It's even better when you can take advantage of their cleverness really easily!

The folks at Vertigo have just released a new CodePlex (Shared Source, apparently it's different to Open Source) project that implements a very neat slideshow package in Silverlight.

It goes by the name of Slide.Show to link it with their other showcase uses of technology - Video.Show and Family.Show.

The architecture is really extensible - you can add your own transitions and functionality, even new data sources (it comes with a "local" source and a Flickr provider so you don't even have to host your own images) and of course the look and feel of the thing.

I, of course, wanted none of that complication. I just wanted to put a slideshow with some pictures of my dog and my house in the snow on the interweb.... the hardest thing was selecting the pictures, putting some cool captions in the data file and ... waiting while they uploaded...

 
The images are a bit big because I've not edited them in Paint.Net yet to make them a better size and also I wanted you to be able to see them in full screen. If you hover your mouse near the bottom of the slide show the arrow pointing up and right gives you full screen. The grid lets you choose a different album (the first is my dog, the second my house. I'm so domestic!)

Top marks to Vertigo for producing this, I'm looking forward to seeing what folks contribute to the project itself to extend it in cool new ways...

As a gentile I hope no-one gets offended if I wish everyone a very Happy Hanukkah (חנוכה‎).

Thanks to Michael for a great little Silverlight sample.

(The candles should light one at a time at 6pm starting December 4th)

In the last few days I seem to have visited an inordinate number of sites that instead of engaging with me in the 2 seconds they have to get my attention they've shown me a Flash plug in that sits there going "Loading" and has a percentage bar crawling across the screen.

These sites had all sent me email inviting me to come and learn about a wonderful seasonal opportunity or great offer. They'd managed to engage me enough to click the link in the email (note - this isn't an invite for Spam. Even if you get through Spamcop and the other blocks I've got in the way I'm not likely to click unless you've managed to target me accurately with something I actually care about).

Then they blow it by assuming I want to watch a progress bar for 2 minutes simply to watch an ad.

Now, the smart ones feature a prominent "skip intro" button I can click and get to the main course. Others actually optimize their Flash experience so that they do display something useful within a couple of seconds that I can interact with and continue my journey (while they finish loading stuff in the background).

The dumb ones (and sadly they seem to be in the majority) suffer the unintended consequence of totally disengaging me (and put me off returning because I assume I'll get the same gatekeeper).

Oh, and I'll add news sites that show me an interstitial advert before I can even get engaged with their homepage. It's just my daily reading workload down!

Now Microsoft have unleashed Silverlight on the web and so we can expect to see a new wave of creative, imaginative splash pages. Even if the creators of those don't do anything totally earth shattering they will make the web a better place if they think about the first 2-5 seconds of engagement.

And maybe just use Silverlight to spice up a page rather than force me to do everything in a RIA where I can't deep-link to content or navigate with the keyboard.

In the meantime... I'll keep clicking [close] - I wonder how many analytics packages report that sort of behavior and flag it as something site owners need to correct....

So, you're got a Flash project that you want to convert to Silverlight because you've seen through the marketing hype and realize that a nice human readable source like XAML is the way of the future, or you just want to play and see how the performance or feature-set compares.

Now you know that the Expression Suite is a really good design environment to start from scratch in, and Visual Studio is, of course, the ideal coding IDE for Silverlight but ... you don't want to start from scratch. You just want to have a look and see if Silverlight can render your magnum opus with some degree of fidelity before you talk a client into using it.

Well.... thanks to TheConverted there's a solution that, if you can drag'n'drop a file in Explorer, gets you started in a couple of clicks of the mouse (and even though it's really cheap, there's a 30 day trial you can use to check it out)