Category: News

  • 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.…

  • 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

  • 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…

  • 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”.

  • It’s Alive!

    Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer – Free Trial So Expression Interactive Designer (AKA “Sparkle”) is finally publicly available in a CTP (pre-beta) download. Check it out and let us know what you think. The product is definitely not finished yet and your feedback counts. We also now have a new version of Expression Graphic Designer available.…

  • Changes

    So…few will care but I’ve had a fair number of changes recently including moving to Seattle, going to work as a Sr. Product Manager for Microsoft, selling a house, buying a house, buying a car, organizing my trading card collection…ok, not the last one but I think the rest are plenty. So…wait for it…here’s where…

  • A Good Day To Be A Designer

    So we had the new Macromedia Studio 8 ship yesterday and then today at PDC the Expression family of tools was released. Now I may be biased (I work at Microsoft now and I worked at Macromedia for several years) but I’d say Designers are getting a lot of love this week. Because as fun…

  • Old Dogs Learn New Tricks

    I’m at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference today and watched Bill Gates unveil various products including recent builds of Windows Vista. But the big surprise (other than the great video featuring Bill Gates and Napolean Dynamite as roommates) was the new UI in Office 12.