Category: Facing Blend

Make Button hotkey?

Posted on by ARSpaulding

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.

Quick tip – snap to snaplines

Posted on by ARSpaulding

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.

Meetup with Western Washington Developers & Designers

Posted on by ARSpaulding

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

Intellisense in Blend?

Posted on by ARSpaulding

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?

Animated Gif to XAML

Posted on by ARSpaulding

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.