A friend just sent me a link to this site and I’m having to wonder what closet I’ve been living in for not having seen nor heard about this site at all.
The tagline says it all, “SilverZine – Silverlight resources for Designers”
You should check it out – http://www.silverzine.com
If you’re so inclined, you should join me in doing a happy dance!
Its finally ready!
I’ve had this sitting on the front and back burners for the last… few months (has it really been that long?). Got the design to my buddy David at HackingSilverlight.net about 3 or 4 weeks ago, he gave it brains and sent it back to me a week later… but in silverlight 3. What the heck?!
I want the world to actually get to PLAY WITH THIS!! So I rolled it back to silverlight 2… but there was a problem or 2. The sounds wouldn’t play, we didn’t have all of the sounds anyway, and the font wasn’t playing nice!
Ugh – and then work. Why the heck does that thing which makes my life actually operate smoothly have to come into the foreground just when I need some time to do my little projects?! Geez. What are these people thinking – do they think they pay me or something to do their stuff? Oh yeah, right. They do.
Long story short, its DONE!
Go! Click on the picture – it’ll take you there. Have fun!
…
Oh, and tell me what you think in a happy comment, if you please 😀
There’s this little piece of FacingBlend that I originally designed just as an icon and my buddy David said, “Hey! You should make that into the REAL THING!”
So I did – I made it larger. There were a few things… ok, a LOT of things… that needed to be modified when it was in its larger form, further details and the like, but the base model itself was still near to exactly the same – but then it required more fun stuff, like some level of interactivity, nice animations so that when YOU do something IT does something.
Ok, I’m being vague, and somewhat on purpose because I’m in the middle of “rolling it back” because the crazy guy did it in Silverlight 3 – but oh wait. Nothing’s supposed to “Go live” in Silverlight 3 according to the SL3 Development site.
So I’m going through some of the C# when I find a comment.
// blow up...
I can’t help it but laugh. I think that would be one of my absolute favorite things when going through someone else’s work and modifying things. The little comments that only someone who knows how to go through the stuff will find.
On one hand, a friend of mine tells me, “Man, don’t even worry about the XAML – just design, use Blend, go crazy. Be artistic.” and on the other hand, I have a different friend who groans at the messy XAML which Blend puts out when using transition Visual state manager Double Spline Animations – he says it reminds him of the splatter which the archaic “MS Front Page” would spew out in HTML format, that there are cleaner ways of doing the same things with far fewer lines of XAML.
I’m SO there with the 2nd guy in relation to MS FrontPage and html. Me being the gal who would create something in photoshop, chop it up, and piece it back together – most of the time without looking up from the HTML, CSS – and all the Divs in between until most of everything was put together to verify that everything was behaving the way that I thought it should with my markup.
That being said – I kind of like the idea of, “Just be creative…” Man… I’d love that. To just… make it happen, and move on. I could get SO many other creations done – OR – spend so much more time on the details of the art! That’s not to say that I don’t already, but what if I had even more time? What greater level of polish could be gained with that additional time?
For all who visit who are in either/or/both worlds – do you have any opinion on this matter? What’s better? Cleaner XAML/Learning the alternative markup which blend 2 doesn’t have in its interface – or – using the VSM and the keyframe animation tools?
Is there a better side?
Anyone have an opinion? Should there be / is there a middle-ground?
You’d think that the creation of a project in either Blend or Visual Studio, that they would start the entire solution with the same files.
Unfortunately that is not the case, and this is bad, not good.
So I’m working on a project, it has a pretty reflection on it and a main background that doesn’t take away from the elements and the bad part is I started it in Blend. So what happens when I run the silverlight application?
My SL Is in the contained box and the rest of my browser is WHITE. I can modify this by going to the debug folder, but then I can only open build from visual studio, because blend wants to rewrite the debug html file every time it loads.
This means that when I want to center the object and make the rest of the background more cohesive… ugh!
————–
When creating a Silverlight project in Visual Studio, it not only creates the items a bit cleaner, it also creates a seperate set of folders – inside one of these folders is a beautiful basic HTML page (and an aspx page, to use HTML, you have to right-click and tell it to be the starter page) which houses the information and is editable… and the modifications stay regardless of the application that I’m using to test!
Eeeee!
I need a “tsk tsk” bird to come out of somewhere every time I forget to start a project in Visual Studio.
Its been about 2 weeks since I completed Victor Gaudioso’s book on Blend 2 and just after I wrote the review on his book, I blogged that next on the order of business was to start going through the newly released book by Jeff Paries, Silverlight 2 Animation – and then I ran into computer troubles.
If you’re actually interested in reading me blogging while pulling my hair out, by all means, look through the archives. I think I blogged about it enough.
This blog posting is to say that finally, I’m able to begin going through this book by Jeff Paries (YAY!).
Before even getting to numbered pages, I’m reading the “Who this book is for” and am wondering. He mentions that this book is intended for web developers – developers being the key word here. As much as I enjoy getting my hands dirty in code, I wouldn’t really consider myself to be a developer. I can comprehend code, I can tinker around with things or make things work, but to me, a developer is a whole lot… I don’t know. I just don’t consider myself to be a developer. I’m the half-and-half. I do some cool, clean and shiny looking design work and tie it together with things that have already been created, and tinker until it works the way I want it to. So where there are 3 parts, the pretty picture, the engine behind it, and the pieces that make the pretty picture interact with the engine … I am the one that usually is creating the pretty picture and putting in place the stuff that makes that pretty picture talk w/ the engine. I’m not the engineer.
So hopefuly, I won’t get completely lost while going through this book.
We shall see.