Month: July 2009

Facing Blend – Blog update

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’ve heard often enough that some much prefer to at least be given the option on whether or not to have to view the Silverlight version site when going to my .com – so in lue of that, I’m updating my blog to be a more fully functional site rather than 90% blog. Tomorrow, I’ll have a landing page which gives visitors the choice to visit either the Silverlight 3 or non-Silverlight 3 version of my site.

Now there is a slight bit of an unfortunate circumstance with this new look to my site. I have this incredible plugin, but in the process of configuring it, I thought it might be beneficial to upgrade my wordpress to the latest version. Unfortunately, that broke the little font-page content scroller. I’ll either poke around into the files and see what I can do about fixing it or I’ll just wait until the original author upgrades their plugin to support the latest version of wordpress.

thumbs-upAs to the recent upgrades, I’d have to say that I was very close to moving entirely away from wordpress – until the last week or two. I upgraded to the latest version. Not only is the administration far cleaner, but the plugins that 3rd-party authors are creating seems to be of higher quality as well. Sounds like the same story that many other software groups are going – better/ more usable design, cleaner coding, hightened standards.

So I give a huge shoutout to all who are developing and designing for WordPress. You guys are rockin’ at all that you’re doing!

Sorry about the incoming oddball posts – updating Blog UI

Posted on by ARSpaulding

So sorry for the oddball repostings of a few items to the blog, Twitter, and Facebook. These will discontinue shortly.

This is a test of the content population after a post has been made. I wonder if the actual content level is determinate of the string error that I’m seeing on the front page or not. We shall see as I’m typing quite a lot. I have to say that Pandora is great, though sometimes it seems that they are rating based on the thumb-ups matrix and not off of the thumb-down, so I’ll end up getting a series of horrid music and after a while, will just go to a different station that I’ve created. It would be nice to have it weigh my music listening off of the data of the down thumb as well as the thumb up.

Ah well.

Ok, was that enough content?

Creating a Simple Twitter Bird in Expression Blend

Posted on by ARSpaulding

twitterbirdLately, I’ve been somewhat caught by the fun of creating a unique twitter bird for every project that I do which has twitter feeds.  Twitter birds, can anyone think of anything more fun?

Ok, I’m sure you can, but I decided to kick off my tutorial section of FacingBlend with a fun and easy to create twitter bird done within Expression Blend 3.

Please click on the “More” below to view the entire tutorial

A great example of the discovery process to design

Posted on by ARSpaulding

When talking with someone who is interested in having me as their designer, some of the first things that I do is ask a million questions about the intent and the business that the design is to be representing.  Quite often, the person (or people) that I’m talking with don’t quite have a vision of everything that they need and/or want and that’s when the questions become fairly deeply digging to determine not only the “what” but everything that has to do with the design.

About 2 years ago, I went through this with the company that I am still working for when they decided to switch the software that their IT Servicedesk reps used on a daily basis to log their service requests.  Though the company had a fairly good handle on what the business needed, they didn’t quite have everything nailed down and that was where I was brought in to assist with the layout of the screens.  They’re not really “pretty” as the software that they chose isn’t really capable of anything remotely close to pretty, but the entire workflow  prioritization was discovered as were many other elements that were previously not possible with the old software that now, 2 years later, are still in place and used hundreds of time on a daily basis for the location of quick information while also providing the functionality for call logging and tracking.

This same process is discussed  in the link below – its a pretty well written article on the process that they went through with their client.  If you’re interested in reading just what goes into the discovery process of design, this would be a great article to read.

Blend 3's conversions from Photoshop

Posted on by ARSpaulding

I’ve been so caught up in what I’ve been working on that I’ve not really stopped to post much about my experiences with this newly released preview of the Expression Blend series.

Blend 3 has a whole lot of new shiny features.  From the ability to see where the gradient stops are right ON the object itself as well as the ability to move them actively on that object, to the 3-axis 2.5D manipulation of objects for Silveright 3 – this new release to Blend is definitely one that’ll set someone off balance for a while to get used to the newer product.

There are 2 new features that I’d like to dedicate this post to.  The ability to have blend directly consume Photoshop and Illustrator files.

I’ll start with photoshop and its importability.  In some cases, I’ll pop into Photoshop for its flexibility and quickly design an interface or graphic.  Blend still has a quirk where paths are being manipulated that drives me to having a litter of kittens, so I’ll sometimes do my pathing in photoshop or illustrator, depending on what else I’ll be doing with the comp.

Well I recently had a project where I did just that – for Something Spacial.  I created the comp in photoshop and decided to use the blend Import tool for Photoshop Documents (PSD) and though it was nice to get a head-start in laying everything out in blend – it still didn’t give enough of one.  I ended up needing to create many of my pathed elements new because they didn’t quite import retaining the integrety of the object into blend.  My gradients were missing, the paths were disjointed, and did I mention my gradients?

There was a lot of work put in and I think I would have spent less time had I just created it all from scratch.  I do like that they’ve added the feature, but I think that the story of most software releases with new features applies – the first release isn’t always the best release.  I’ll be optimistic and say that they’ve gotten quite a great feature started, and I can’t wait for the next itteration or two where the full features are realized and implemented as well as honed to near perfection.

The illustrator file import tool I haven’t had as much real-time experience with and part of it is that I’ve been reluctant.  I already have a really nice plugin created that can export my illustrator files, maintaining full integrety of the object, and directly porting it into xaml.  It works well, a little messy on the XAML side, so I’ve had to clean that up a bit, but otherwise, everything maintained full design integrity.  So why risk it by using the import tool?

Once I get the latest SDK pack for Silverlight 3 installed, I’ll blog about the illustrator import.