HTML on coffee, monster energy drink, with lots of vegetables

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What is the title talking about?

XAML

There are many impressions of the experience from being a XHTML CSS Raster-based web designer to moving onward and upward to more User Experience technologies that I’ve skipped along the way.  Now that I have a blogging system in place that allows for more easy publication, I’m going to try to fill in the blanks.

So my first impression of XAML once I really got my feet wet was a strong familiarity.  XAML is like someone took HTML and fed it lots and lots of vegetables, gave it training on the track, music lessons, and then packed it full of coffee and monster energy drinks.  By the end of the day, you have the result of something more akin to Hal Milton, the hyperactive thoroughly intense, highly sarcastic and witty guy who works at the Sony Online Entertainment office leading the team creating the new PS3/PC game, The Agency.

Yes, I’m comparing XAML to Hal.

For those who have no clue what I’m talking about, but do know coding and markup enough to be reading this blog – I want you to take HTML, couple the base of HTML with some AJAX and wrap in lovely lovely CSS, and move back to the world of pretty formating, and you have XAML – sort of.  You could also say that its like flash only way slicker and easier.

For the HTML CSS markup designer, your wrist was slapped for using capitol letters.  Your elbow was flicked REALLY hard for using the enter key too often for spacing, and the back of your head popped for tabbing each child element out to make it easier to see… all in the name of quicker load times and most likely a UNIX based server.

XAML is going to – at first – appear to be fingernails on a chalkboard after these web standards have been beaten into you.

CamelCase naming (capitolizations, no spaces, no underscores unless creating an alt command, no numbers… what?!) schemes, tabbing to indicate parent and children (if you don’t, it won’t even run – and I mean run as in the application form of “run”) – aka ORGANIZATION and the app.xaml being your friend for those who are comfortable with CSS.

Moving backwards so we can move forward – you start out with Page.xaml as your root and App.xaml for sharable elements.  They may not be shared w/ anything else, but for organizational purposes, the same way that you would have your html set up as “index.html” and “style.css” – XAML brings you “Page.xaml” and “App.xaml”.  So you put your structures in place within your Page.xaml and tell the structure to look at some name which has the visual atributes defined within App.xaml.

The awesome part about xaml is that you are able to do a whole heck of a lot more.  We’re not working with raster-based (bitmap/pixel based) images (unless you want to).  We’re working with vector based shapes.  This gives a whole lot more flexibility in the visual attributes, what they do, how opaque they are, gradient scales, their x-y coordinate placing, and also allows one to do key frame animations.

Much like Flash, the versatility of silverlight utilizing XAML is only hindered by your abilities to be creative.

Puts me in a warm happy place.

Facingblend.com – splash screen

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The other day, I was going here to the site to post another blog article, but was completely derailed from my entire train of thought when I accidentally mistyped the URL to my blog and instead went to www.facingblend.com

The surprise that I saw there was… *cough* surprising.

A few months ago, there was someone, a local glass blower/artist, who was interested in having a revamp done for his website.

He’d previously been working with someone who appeared to have not decided whether he or she wanted to be an asp.net developer or an integrator… the guy/gal definitely was not anywhere close to a designer and towards the end of the project flaked out without finishing and things were broken as well. It was very very broken and very… 90s. It appeared to be like something that I had done back in 1998 when I was just learning HTML and using the online generated button makers…

But it was apparent that the site was built using a lot of raster-based images done as sort of highlights of the glass artist’s work.

In any event, he’d posted on Craigslist as a trade – he’d create a few glass pieces, and the person who he worked with would design and publish his site. Sounded like a pretty good setup to me, and I really love the colors and things that can be done with glass – it looks incredible whether its a photograph or graphically done.

So I created a few mockups and sent him the links. He didn’t respond, so I’m guessing he went with someone else – however what I didn’t realize was that godaddy decided that it was going to use the image and quick code index.html to use that image as the background.

I wonder how long THAT’S been there.

So instead of posting a blog about faking shadows (will come later) – I ended up working on a quick splash screen for people to view if they ever were interested in viewing facingblend.com.

Took about an hour to do and 35 min to code the html/css. So check it out if you’re curious. I like it – came out pretty nice and overall, its a whole lot better than the random rough mockup that I’d designed a few months ago.

and for the record – I am well aware of how tacky “under construction” or “coming soon” pages happen to be, but weighing in the pros and cons, I think having a splash screen is far better than having some potential customer’s mockup used to represent my .com

OMG gimme more screen!

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Just a short mention of 1 thing that drives me absolutely nuts.

Yes – vector based UI is pretty cool, but dangit!  I want the dang thing to get smaller when I change my resolution so I can have more screen space!

Solution?  Dual monitors.  Menus on the right, screen on the left. 

Problem?  Why the heck must there be an absolute paramount NEED for dual monitors just to have some dang space.  I want all of my menus for quick use AND enough space to work with.

Summary: I want to have my pie and eat it too.

*Click* Rant off.