Next week on Wednesday is the 3rd group meeting of the newly formed organization, Seattle’s Developer / Designer Interaction Group.
If you’re a Designer or Developer and will be in the region, you should try to make room in your schedule and join us in Bellevue.
Topic:
Mobile Technologies
Date / Time:
Jan 21st, 2009 / 7:00pm – 8:30pm
Location:
Bellevue Lincoln Square
700 Bellevue Way, NE (map)
For more information, Visit: SeattleD2ig.org
My first thought when I read mention of this was *drool*. I find I am more and more able to comfortably do basic c# for functionality – partly because of intellisense. But most of XAML to me makes sense – it feels like HTML with a kick, but I wonder what I’m missing at times?
Well, that’s when I tend to hop into Visual Studio – but why when I could have Intellisense in blend?
I say – cool! But then I kept reading.
Recompiling DLLs?
Sounds like something that even the most adventurous designer might quail from, but just to see how far down the rabbit hole I’d have to go, I decided to read on.
Apparently this is actually a few months old – so old news. But its good to get the word out no matter how late to the catch, right?
So here’s the link to a blog with someone helping, and a direct link to MSDN’s page for the plugin.
But I have to ask myself – do I really use Intellisense for XAML?
The answer: Nope – not so much.
So why use Visual Studio for XAML?
The organization. I love the ability to “minimize” huge blocks of code. Wait – I didn’t make that emphatic enough. I LOVE the ability to minimize huge blocks of code.
So here are my thoughts: Blend is still a work in progress. Microsoft keeps adding more and more to the program, and there have been whispers about a Blend 3 being more public knowledge come Mix 09 (wish I could go…). I wonder if perhaps intellisense will be part of Blend 3 – with full compatibility?
I recently had a visitor to my blog who came here looking for the ability to translate an animated GIF to XAML.
My first thought without digging was, “Couldn’t one just pull the image in, create a shape, and fill the shape with an imagebrush with the animated gif?”
The thought was to try something like this:
<Rectangle Margin=”102,36,242,33″ >
<Rectangle.Fill>
<ImageBrush ImageSource=”animated.gif” />
</Rectangle.Fill>
</Rectangle>
The answer which I discovered pretty quickly when trying to accomplish just that was: Nope. No can do. It’ll load and it won’t even see that there is a problem, but the animated gif will not display.
An alternative to this wouldn’t be TOO terribly difficult though. Pull the GIF into illustrator and obtain all of the frames separately. Once you’ve accomplished that, exporting to XAML and bringing it all together is easily done.
Oh, quick note to mention – the Illustrator export tool has a hidden functionality mentioned in the video interview – that hidden functionality is while exporting to XAML, if you hold down the left shift key when you tell it to perform the export, the actual XAML will also hit your clipboard to be pasted directly in already existing XAML document.
Pretty spiffy!
Back to the topic on Animated GIFs to XAML:
Once you have each frame in XAML, you will need to add all of the elements into your xaml and I’d go with a step of collapsing all canvases until needed. Open the keyframe animator, and then depending on the timeline from the original GIF, you can plot each item to become visible or collapsed. Blend will automatically add a trigger for the application to run the animation on load, so if you want it to start by use with a button, you’ll need to modify that – also, most GIFs are set to repeat forever, so you’ll need to update the repeat behavior to loop infinitely.
Once someone has done it a time or two, I’d put a guess on the work taking between 20-30 min for the full translation. between GIF to XAML animation.
I’m having far too much fun converting things from Illustrator to XAML.
This opens up a whole new set of avenues for me to explore. As powerful as Blend and Design are, Illustrator has just plainly been around far longer and has more functionality at this point in time to do certain things.
The exporter exports to silverlight or wpf compatibility, btw.
For text, it “technically” isn’t supported, however, if you convert your text to points, you then can export the points with each character being its own individual path of nodes being as editable in Blend as XAML as they could be done in Illustrator.
The real power of this is when you have something realy crazy that you have done with various warp and masking tools – exporting to XAML = drools.
This is going to be fun.
I’ve mentioned a few times in the past that I’ve created a silverlight page for FacingBlend… actually almost a year ago. It needs to be upgraded as it was originally done when Silverlight was at 1.1, but that initial project is one of a few things that I have plans for.
Here’s a bit of a teaser in 2 words: Toy box
Just… incredible.
I decided that I was going to go back to working on something that I’d started before the book – while my other computer was waiting for its completed status to be… well – complete.
In the process, I found myself frustrated with trying to creatively recreate something that I’d originally created in Blend. (Perhaps I should have tried in Design?) On a whim, I decided that it might be interesting to see if someone had created a plugin which converted Photoshop files to XAML.
Well guess what? Someone has.
This makes me a very VERY happy lady.
Its not path by path like I would prefer it – instead what it does is turn the file into a PNG and from there create an imagebrush.
Alternatively, if you have a PSD you could just take the elements which you would like, seperate the layers, and then save each as a PNG. Add the new PNG to your project in the resources pane, and then draw out a shape and fill it with an imagebrush.
– – – Not exactly what I was looking for, but useful.
Further searching shows several Adobe Illustrator exports to XAML though which ARE path plotting.
Here are a few links:
http://www.mikeswanson.com/xamlexport/
http://www.codeplex.com/xamlxporter
A lot of the times, if you have your PSD prepared for it, you can easily open your items to illustrator. Technically you can do this on any occasion, however, depending on how you have your PSD, it may be quite difficult to tinker with once its opened into illustrator. The behavior of the different elements often don’t quite behave the way they would if they were built natively within Illustrator.
The installation of Vista at first appeared to be pretty smooth, but then I attempted to update the drivers on my video card so it would pick up the dual DVI on the single card and display across both monitors.
Unfortunately, I encountered the blue screen of death and the only way it was even possible to get the dang thing to load into vista was by going into safe mode and rolling back the drivers. Downloaded several different releases of the driver for the video card and unfortunately all of them resulted in the same issue.
Lets just say, I was fairly bummed when I wanted to get through the first few chapters of the Silverlight 1 animations book published by Friends of ED.
In any event, this resulted in finally purchasing the last pieces to a computer which has been slowly coming into conception, piece by piece over the past few weeks. It was a little costly and untimely, but we upgraded none-the-less. Vista’s installation was painless and the windows updates have been applied. I just wish it hadn’t eaten up my entire weekend.
Cross your fingers for me, if you could, and hope that things go smoothly from this point forward.