Join myself and many others at a meeting this evening dedicated to bridging the gap between Designers and Developers. SeattleD2ig meets this evening from 7pm – 8:30pm, and then for those who are interested, we’ll choose somewhere within walking distance and head out for a bite to eat, something to sip upon.
Where?
Not really in Seattle, its actually in Bellevue.
Details on the location for this meeting (-meeting location changed for this month’s meetup-) can be found at: SeattleD2ig.org
I’ve finally had some time to sit down at my new computer and get the final things installed on it so I can move forward with this new book that I have on Silverlight Animations, by Jeff Paries but I’d somehow managed to forget exactly how long it took to get everything set up the first time through.
So I’m sitting here, flipping between watching the installation bar, looking at statistics for various sites that I own or manage, and reading through emails. Rinse and repeat.
The installs themselves aren’t that much of an issue – actually the updates are what kill the coo-coo clock. Currently, I’m upgrading my visual studio to SP1 and then I’ll need to upgrade .net 3.5 to the most current service pack.
I dread 1 thing – what if I need to do them in a different order? I feel a potential murphy’s law moment coming my way in the near future.
Ugh – its happening again.
Every time I’m on a project which has me working on certain specific things or types of things over and over again, day after day, my brain shifts in such a way where everything around me starts to take on elements which remind me of or make my mind pick things apart in a similar way.
Well I’m doing it again. Buttons and icons are beginning to be nothing more than their separate parts rather than a whole. For play buttons, I’m not seeing the button as a single entity, instead, I’m seeing the gradients, gradient transition points, the shine element, etc. I’m driving down the road and seeing how I could recreate the tail end of the car in front of me in gradients and semi-transparencies. Thanks brain! Thank you very much!
I have a beef to express.
One of the most common things that I find myself doing is taking objects, encapsulizing them into a canvas, and then turning them into a button.
“Make Button…” is an option under “Tools” but that’s it – I don’t find it in the right-click under the interaction panel, and according to Blend, there aren’t any hotkeys assigned.
Why not?! With the ability to turn any object within blend INTO a button, why is it not more easily accessible?!
Not that its difficult or anything, but it would be convenient to have multiple options for preference.
I was searching for something else entirely and saw one of the listings in google report something like, “Faking a shadow with Blend to work in Silverlight”. There are several ways to do this, but I can’t have thought of them all, so I decided to take a peak.
Definitely am going to have to add this site to my Blogroll.
Check it out: Silverlight for Dummies
Here is a quick tip.
There is a feature which in some occasions is very very useful. Say for instance, every item needs to be exactly spaced apart by an exact measurement no matter what? Good for consistency.
But sometimes you need to work with things in a manner which feels like photoshop’s layers where you have multiple layers – sometimes in the double or tripple digits, which make up a single “entity” (ever created an icon for a pencil?)
Well the snap to snaplines can make someone like me want to throw something at my screen, hoping that it’ll get to the program!
The solution? Turn off snap to snaplines – or set its snaplines meter down.
You can find this under Tools –> Options. Going to the options brings up the options window. Locate on the left the submenu Artboard.
Modify to suite your needs.
