May 2009 – A. Rheannon S.

FacingBlend.com in silverlight!

Posted on May 28, 2009 by ARSpaulding

FacingBlend’s Silverlight page is LIVE!

Since yesterday, I’ve had several emails asking questions regarding this release, so I thought I’d share a bit.

Most websites that I’ve seen around which had displays of Silverlight use weren’t as artistic as I thought a site could be. Expression Blend is a very powerful tool, and like most tools, if you really play with it, you can find that you can do almost anything if you just play with it long enough and tailor things to fit what you want, but… I’m not seeing that being done!

So I wanted to create a silverlight website that really pushed hard and heavy on the “pretty” side. I wanted it to use my favorite color, green ( no relation to the current popularity with “going green” ), but still have a little “windows vista /7” glassy watery look/ feel for the background. The centerfocus on the site isn’t really the content, its on the background which is done entirely in XAML.

That’s right – the pretty thing that appears to be raster based, is 100% xaml.

Now, I wasn’t really going for a “portfolio” either – this is my personal website. My play-thing over the web, so I stayed away from the typical “portfolio” feel. I’m having fun here. I feel like I’m playing when I’m working in Expression Blend, and I really wanted that to show in the design. I think my absolute favorite part is a little geeky. Even the icons are done in Xaml and I think there’s just something awesome about that.

The Toybox itself was what pulled back my timeline a bit. What to put in there? What to NOT put in there and how the heck do I want to organize it?

Well, I kept not having time to work on this and it sat on a back burner not being worked on for months. I seriously had this nearly done back in December of 08, but I got stuck working on a few other things and having a blast with my family and helping out with a logo for the company, Seovian (which you can find in my galleries here on my blog).

I then was pushed by 2 different projects that I’m working with to upgrade to Silverlight 3 and with that, I forced everything aside, brought Facing Blend in Silverlight back into the forefront and finished the entire Toybox in 3 days(in my spare time).

I still look at this stuff and have to remind myself that I actually did this, all on my own, that I’m not looking at someone else’s work. I still can’t believe how much I’ve learned in such a short amount of time. Maybe it’ll sink in a few years from now, but until then, I keep getting deeply involved in design work and when I come “out of it” and look at the whole picture, I am impressing even myself. 2 years ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed that I could do what I just released. It just blows my mind.

Deseloper Vs. Devigner

Posted on May 21, 2009 by ARSpaulding

Last night’s Seattle D2ig meetup was quite interesting with speaker Yoeun Pen explaining Flex and how this is bringing Flash development and design forward into well… today.

After the meeting, there was the amusing conversation regarding the “Integrator” role and the 2 names that have been mockingly thrown back and forth regarding “other ways” to name a person who is both what I call a hybrid – Designer and Developer.

But as I was drifting off to sleep on our way home from Bellevue (I promise, I wasn’t driving – I was sleeping! ha ha – and in the passanger seat), it dawned on me – Deseloper vs. Devigner. These COULD be more technically used terms, and here’s how:

Devigner

A lot of hybrids (as in people, not cars) come from a strong development background and are beginning to pick up on their naturally innate ability to see more than just the code – they have an eye on a window into design and understand design concepts which allows them to be quite the handyman as they’ll have one of the best relationships with the designers, instead of butting heads. Their strongest trait being in Development; while they get and have the ability to paint the picture they mostly are just making the code play nice and implement the artwork into that code.

Moto: Code – meet Art. Art – meet Code.

Deseloper

This person is a designer first and foremost, but like me, has found the desire to do more than just paint the picture – we want to make it move! There’s a little bit of practical logic tied into this creative mind, and this allows the Deseloper to shine in being able to take their creative artwork and understand how to wire it up so that it APPEARS to do something. The actual hard coding is still being done by someone much more talented in development skills, but this designer has a few tricks up his or her sleeve that gives them a kick while getting through their design projects.

Moto: Hey you! Pretty picture! Dance!

Disorientation between Blend & Photoshop

Posted on May 19, 2009 by ARSpaulding

I’ve come to the conclusion that this will likely never go away. The more I work in Expression Blend, the stronger the case of disorientation is when I come back to photoshop to do a quick mockup of something and I figured that there would likely be a time where I would go between the two and seeing as how I know what to do once the application is open based on its UI, that I’d recall the differences w/o issue as though it were all muscle memory.

However, the similarities of controls and manipulation are just so similar that every time I switch between the two, it takes a moment for the change to click.

For instance – shapes – aka vector objects. Photoshop has vector objects – they’re not as easy to manipulate after they’ve been placed in a layer as they would be if I were in illustrator or blend, but they do have them in photoshop and I use them more than I think any other tool in photoshop. It helps that I’ve lately been using photoshop to do mockups of things that will translate to Expression Blend… but there-in lies the problem.

So an example: In photoshop, I have a circle, I need place it and its not quite right. So I scale it… but oh yeah, I need to approve the append in photoshop. In blend, I make the change and its much more like illustrator. It just is – its done. Changed.

Gradients – I’ve come to very VERY much enjoy the flexibility of hand manipulating direction and well.. every characteristic of a gradient. I’d like to toot my own horn and say that I’ve actually gotten pretty damn good at it. In photoshop, its all raster based. So its… seriously different. Sure – a whole lot more can be done, but I also find limitations to the power of the rastering in photoshop.

So yeah – anyway. I think I’ve officially determined that I will likely never get over that first 5 minutes of “oh yeah, that’s right, I’m not working in ___”

Oh – and just for the heck of it because I’ve gone a different direction, below is a screenshot of a flower recreated using gradients in blend – next to the example flower which is a photograph of a real flower.

Visual State Manager =/= Storyboard?

Posted on May 15, 2009 by ARSpaulding

Working on a few visual states on a Silverlight 2 page and I want my mouse to hover over an object, have it go through a visual state, then when removing the mouse, have it reverse the animation.

Well, if I’d done these as normal animated storyboards, I’d be able to easily go to my little plus-sign button and create a new one that goes in reverse. Problem is – I’m working in silverlight and when I created this, I did it through the visual state manager.

What I can’t understand is this: Why would I be given essentially the exact same functionality which is nicely tied into a VSM but not be able to use the same features that make keyframe animating simple and easy?

When I look at my XAML, I see that its starting a storyboard. So why not give the reverse and duplicate functionality?

Now, I get to create a new visual state, hand copy-paste the previous one in, and then tear it apart so I can reverse each state. Visually, it looks similar, but there are a lot of different not-connected parts that are moving to make the whole that I have in the initial storyboard.

grr.

I guess what I could do is create a storyboard, copy all the xaml from my visual state into the storyboard, then tell the storyboard to reverse, and then copy that back to the new visual state manager bit where I need the reverse to happen…

*sigh*

Unwritten "Job" of a Designer

Posted on May 14, 2009 by ARSpaulding

I’ve heard comments to this effect, but I’ve not seen it written anywhere, but I think there must be a rule somewhere – the unwritten job of a designer is to ask of the developer something that would seem theoretically possible to the designer – easily, right?

Apparently not. Its our job to find ways to desire something “simple” to do something “more” that might appear to the user as a simple difference, but apparently, not so simple to do.

I kind of enjoy it when I find something that I think should/could be “easily possible” and am told that its not as simple as it might seem. Just a teeny change graphically. Programatically – not so teeny or simple. Its like going on a hunt for the little hidden buttons to press and set off the developer.

Gleee!!

Side Topic: Twitter hears us!

Posted on May 13, 2009 by ARSpaulding

Twitter brought their service down for maintanence yesterday and at noon today. As of this morning, if someone was to reply to someone that wasn’t part of my crowd, I’d not actualy see the message.

Well you know what? I use that! Quite a few people that I didn’t realize were on Twitter that I actually talk with regularly were found because they were talking with someone else that I already had on my following list. I’m not alone in this – many people, and I mean many – are upset about the update. But twitter has some news. The original functionality as it was – was a bit broken and would have melted down into a lovely ooz of horridness had they not taken it down.

Well they definitely hear us and really support how we’ve been using the @___ reply system.

Posted on their Twitter Blog – Twitter gives us feedback as to why the feature had to be removed as well as the steps that they’re taking to bring most of it back, but in a way that will allow us to manage based on our preferences rather than by default. I kind of like that. I could see how some people wouldn’t like to have the information if there were several people who were reply-happy and OVERLY posting.

So in the coming future, we’ll be able to update the settings to our preference. Now they didn’t specify exactly how much power we’ll have – will it be an all on, all off, specific contact selections or… ?

I guess we’ll have to wait for more information.

Now – back to my normal design/blend type posts.