Category Archives: Technology

Technology platforms used for product development.

News, Silverlight

And the Winner is…

Two award winners from our stables today. one is Silverlight which landed as one of C|Net’s best 100 Web apps, according to user voting. That’s pretty good for a product that hasn’t actually been released yet! The interest around Silverlight has really surpassed our expectations. The page mentions that Silverlight is young technology and is just getting started but could be the next big thing. We agree. 🙂

pcw160x28.gifSecond up is PopFly, which was named today at the top of the list of PCWorld’s 25 Web Sites to Watch.

Congrats to all the teams involved in these products.

News, Tools, WPF

Free WPF Tools

I’m glad to say that for the first time, we have some free developer tools for XAML and WPF. John Montgomery has blogged about it here and includes some links. Although this is still a CTP, it’s a CTP of some tools that are always free as in beer. The C# patch is up and the VB will be soon. Enjoy!

News, Silverlight

Microsoft Redefines RIA!

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Some people were fussing last week about the latest evil scheme by Micro$oft to take over the world via the insidious renaming of the term Rich Internet Application to Rich Interactive Application. Curses! Foiled again! You got us on that one. After running all the simulations on Hal XP, we calculated that changing that one word would net us nearly eleventy kajillion dollars thereby ensuring total world domination. And if it wasn’t for you meddling teenagers and Scooby-Doo(tm), we would’ve gotten away with it. So…

…conspiracy theories are fun and all but the truth is that we first had this discussion with Ovum, an analyst group in the UK. Here’s an excerpt from one of their papers, RIA: putting the user first :

As surely as winter follows autumn, the software industry continually presents us with new programming models. The latest is rich Internet applications (RIA), which have been around for quite a few years waiting for an architecture on which it can be deployed. One of the problems with this name is that whenever the words ‘rich’ and ‘Internet’ appear next to each other, it is commonly taken to assume that they mean multimedia, music and video, not data and business applications. A better description for these classes of applications is ‘rich interactive client applications. ‘Rich’ suggests that they offer more than a simple browser-based application and ‘interactive’ indicates that these are more than simply presentation layers. Rich interactive applications (RIA) are at the centre of the drive to make the experience of a user’s interaction with software applications matter more…

Ryan Stewart’s entire blog is about RIA’s and he was recently using both phrases interchangeably: “pull together the benefits of the web and the benefits of the desktop and blend them into rich, interactive applications.”

Now do a web search for the term “rich interactive” and see what pulls up. The term is used by IBM: “rich interactive applications that bind together disparate services“, by Microsoft (seven years ago!) for IE 5.5: “New Internet Explorer 5.5 Technologies Designed to Support Rich, Interactive Web Applications“

The last point I want to bring up is, perhaps, the most interesting. In speaking with a major analyst firm recently, they spoke about RIA’s and mentioned that for all of the companies they talk to, “RIA” meant AJAX and nothing else. It’s very interesting that the RIA term has seen a major uptake without the original implication of the flash plugin.

All of that said, I don’t personally think it matters that much. There’s really no advantage to Microsoft to twiddle with a single word in a name for competitive reasons–it’s just an attempt to make the definition of this murky area a little clearer. Is AJAX RIA technology? What about Apollo? WPF?

Maybe we need RIIA? Rich Interactive Internet Applications. 🙂

News, Silverlight

Silverlight!

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Hello to a clean, well-lit name and good riddance to the worst code name ever, “WPF/E”. Well, IceWeasel and Brady Bunch weren’t stellar either but at least they were easier to type. Try typing “WPF/E” five times quickly and you’ll see what I mean. Yes, the quotes have to be around it as well.

In case you’ve not heard, Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plugin for delivering next generation media experiences and rich interactive applications for the web. It takes some of the powerful markup goodness of XAML and marries it to the most popular file types in the world right now: html and javascript.

There is a lot of information regarding Silverlight that all went live today.

The official Silverlight website

Silverlight Press room

Tim Sneath’s list of 10 best things about Silverlight

Sean Alexander’s list of rich media features

News, WPF

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 MicrosoftÂŽ .NET Framework 3.0 and Visual StudioÂŽ 2005”. Note that these are targeted at developers and architects. I haven’t taken a look at these yet but the price is certainly right…

Link to Offer Detail

Downloads, Flex

Wireframing with Flex pt.2

What:

I updated the stylesheet that turns any mxml app into a wireframe. V2.0 catches a lot of styling exceptions that snuck by with the first version of this wireframing stylesheet. It also adds wirebox and wire header styles you can add to make sure all the necessary wireframes show up.

Why:

This stylesheet allows you to create wireframes that take advantage of the built in components, layout, and CSS styling of Flex. For more information on the benefits of wireframing in Flex, read the previous post. I’ll be posting some of the problems with this approach in the near future.

How:

If you’re using FlexBuilder for wireframing, just use the Design panel > CSS tab > Attach StyleSheet button to add the wireframe.css to your app. Or under the application tag just add the style tag:

< mx:Style source="../Wireframes/wireframe2.css" />

(where ../Wireframes/ is the path to this css file) and the entire app will inherit these styles. Note that if you are overriding this elsewhere, the more localized styles will override the wireframe styles—wireframing is usually happening long before styling so this shouldn’t be a problem.

You can download it here.

If you use this at all, let me know if it works for you and if there are any improvements needed.

Flex, Presentations

MAX 2004 Presentation

November 8th, 2004I spoke at MAX 2004 with John Bennett of Macromedia Consulting. The presentation is entitled “Creating Rich User Experiences with the Flex Experience Model” (say that five times fast).

The presentation went fairly well–no one threw rotten fruit or pointy objects so we can consider that a success. We also ended up with a fair number of people showing up, considering that the session wasn’t listed in the registration app.

I’ve recorded a breeze presentation to be posted on the macromedia MAX web site. I’ve also posted the presentation in uglified web format here.
Downloads, Flex, Tools

Wireframing with Flex

What:

I created a stylesheet that turns any mxml app into a wireframe. This allows you to wireframe using real components.

Why:

  1. To keep prototypes looking like prototypes, avoiding premature discussion about Halo look and feel.
  2. Using flex for the wireframes help insure that they are technically feasible. Designers build familiarity with Flex.
  3. Save time wireframing by using the automatic layout features of flex.
  4. Reuse the UI layout effort in wireframing to save time at implementation—just remove the stylesheet or replace with a production one and you have a styled flex UI.
  5. Allows for wireframes that actually *work*–can be interacted with. You can now “wireframe” the interaction design work without needing to create a Flash animation mockup.

How:

If you’re using FlexBuilder for wireframing, just use the Design panel > CSS tab > Attach StyleSheet button to add the wireframe.css to your app. Or under the application tag just add the style tag:

< mx:Style source="../Wireframes/wireframe.css" />

(where ../Wireframes/ is the path to this css file) and the entire app will inherit these styles. Note that if you are overriding this elsewhere, the more localized styles will override the wireframe styles—wireframing is usually happening long before styling so this shouldn’t be a problem.

You can download it here.

This is just a first rough draft that I’ve been using. If you use this at all, let me know if it works for you and if there are any improvements needed.


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