Author: Brad Becker

  • Microsoft Spark UX Summit

    Microsoft just put on an interesting summit bringing together some very different types of people into the same room for a discussion about user experience and software architecture. Jacob Nielson from the Nielson/Norman Group was there, as was Grant Skinner and thought leaders from Adaptive Path, Ovum, Gartner, Yahoo!, Oracle, Rosenfeld Media, Microsoft, Frog Design, and others. Some of…

  • Free Online Training for WPF and .NET 3.0

    So for a limited time (until Vista ships), Microsoft Learning is offering three free 2-hour “premium clinics”  for .NET 3.0 (including WPF). The course is called “Developing Rich Experiences with Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual Studio® 2005”. Note that these are targeted at developers and architects. I haven’t taken a look at these yet but…

  • work :: thirteen23

    The folks at thirteen23 have built some really cool little apps using the latest and greatest tech. You’ll need Vista RC1 or .NET 3.0 RC1 to run these. The two things I find most interesting about these: they are really well designed and they blend the power of the desktop and the connectivity of the web.…

  • Bruce Sterling’s Design Bibliography

    Bruce Sterling published this list of “Seriously With-It Design Books” on his wired.com blog. Unfortunately it would take me about twenty years to get around to reading all the ones in this list that I haven’t read yet…

  • Photosynth: next-gen image viewing

    Very cool software called Photosynth that let’s you view related pictures as a 3D model of what they’re representing. You have to see it for yourself to understand which is both good and bad. Check it out: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?na=46&p=2&SrcDisplayLang=en&SrcCategoryId=&SrcFamilyId=afe093ae-b780-4ee0-b0f1-897dfd42f0f9&u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f3%2f9%2f0%2f3902e391-734e-470f-806b-4d779f07749f%2fPS_DEMO_320x180_1MB.wmv

  • She said *what*?

    So today I was on two different email threads where the subject of the thread mysteriously changed mid-thread. The first one was innocuous enough–“forum” was misspelled as “foum” got changed to “foam”. Odd that it changed but nothing more than a raised eyebrow warranted there. The second one, however, went from talking about WPF UI’s…

  • Nothing risked, nothing gained

    Developer Overview of the User Interface for the 2007 Microsoft Office System MSDN has a new article regarding the new UI for Office 2007 chock full of screen shots and explanations of what they did and why. As I’ve mentioned before, the Office team took a real risk with this and I hope they succeed–and…

  • Fireworks XAML Exporter

    Infragistics has put together a Fireworks panel that allows exporting to XAML for those of us more used to Fireworks than Photoshop or Illustrator. (Hey, it’s called “PHOTOshop” for a reason and I rarely need to edit photos…) Now there are several choices for those looking to create XAML graphics for use in WPF or…

  • May CTP’s of All Expression Products

    The first CTP* of Expression Web Designer–released last week–has now been joined by brand-spankin’ new CTP’s* of Graphic Designer and Interactive Designer. Get ’em here: Microsoft Expression – Home * ‘CTP’ is Microsoft-speak for “public alpha”.

  • Mix06 session videos posted

    Mix06 session videos posted

    All of the Microsoft MIX06 sessions have been posted on the web for public consumption. There are powerpoints, videos, etc. A lot of good content for those interested in some of what Microsoft (and others including Amazon, MySpace, BBC online, etc) are doing in the web, devices, and desktop spaces in the near future. Also…