Design, Arts, Life: The Blog of an Interactive Designer1-800-867-5309
You might have noticed the cool commenting system I’m using on this blog. At MIX Online, here at Microsoft, we’ve developed a new prototype called Incarnate. Incarnate is a system that allows readers of a blog to use their already-existing avatars from common social-networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and XBox Live.
Let the visitors [...]
Now in its second year, the MIX team and conference brings the MIX10K contest to the community. It’s a simple contest designed to maximize creativity within strictly confined boundaries. In this case, the boundaries are file-size: namely, 10K. As well, the application must be built using of Silverlight, Gestalt or HTML5.
For a full list of [...]
Today we released the latest version of Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit.
Microformats are about enhancing the web, representing data in HTML and moving that data around. Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit is for web developers, designers and users, making it easier to create, consume, and style Microformats. Oomph makes consuming and producing content for the web [...]
According to their website, the new application, Echo:
More than just a radio player
Leverages the best of the Internet to bring you the music you want to hear.
Just type in your favorite artist or musical genre and echo will do the rest. echo even suggests similar artists based on what you’re listening to, helping you [...]
Two new items came across the wire today, which I thought was pretty cool. First, "Sarah In Tampa" picked up on the new update to The Archivist, which Karsten implemented in the middle of one of our MIX Online meetings. I think it’s pretty cool. As Sarah states, this new update:
Fixes a couple of bugs [...]
As my boss, @TommyLee Tweeted, “Three 15-year-olds think Flotzam is cool.” They put it as number 10 in their “50+ Really Cool Twitter Mashups” list.
Recently we on the MIX Online team here at Microsoft released Glimmer, a tool for adding jQuery animations to your website. Fabian Anderwald, a web-designer, recently contacted us, letting us know about two sites he recently designed for customers. He used Glimmer to produce a simple image-sequence and dropdown on these two sites. Fabian [...]
There’s a great write up in Smashing Magazine featuring 50 of the top tools to help “improve your workflow.” Glimmer is included, I’m proud to say.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/06/21/50-fresh-javascript-tools-that-will-improve-your-workflow/
I just got pinged from a co-worker, giving me kudos for a WPF time-tracking application I had the opportunity to design last year. This was a “demo” application for use with one of the the CRM team here at Microsoft. All designed in Blend 2, the demo has been well-received and may even be used [...]
Karsten Januszewski recently sat down and wrote a WPF application that will search the Twitter archives and allow users to save the search results as an XML file or export to Excel.
One of the most interesting happenings this week was the release of Glimmer. Glimmer allows you to easily create interactive elements on your web pages by harnessing the power of the jQuery library. Without having to hand-craft your JavaScript code, you can use Glimmer’s wizards to generate jQuery scripts for common interactive scenarios. Glimmer also [...]
Betsy Weber just published a nice blog-post regarding Flotzam, the WPF application Karsten Januszewski and I (with some great help from Hans Hugli) developed and have been running at the MIX and PDC conferences for the last 3 years. Check it out!
I did an interview with Robert Hess for his webcast, “The Knowledge Chamber,” regarding the new software the MIX Online team has rolled out, Glimmer. Robert’s a great host and I fee fortunate that he was able to give me a little time to discuss this great new tool.
Be sure to check out Glimmer [...]
Glimmer: a jQuery Interactive Design Tool is a prototype from the Mix Online Labs which makes jQuery accessible through a visual tool. The objective for Glimmer is pretty simple: to enable the power of jQuery through an interactive design surface. If jQuery is the “write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool. Glimmer has three core audiences: power users, designers and developers.
A few months ago, I was approached by a group at Microsoft Labs to help with the user-experience and user-interface for Microsoft Songsmith. Songsmith is an application – written in WPF, and exclusively for Windows – that allows you to sing into your computer’s microphone, and it “magically” creates the backing musical track to your [...]
We released a new project today named Oxite:
Oxite is “an open source, standards compliant, and highly extensible content management platform that can run anything from blogs to big web sites.” Duncan Mackenzie’s team of web ninjas worked feverishly on taking the MIX Online code base and making it available to all of our users! We [...]
We’ve added the Oomph Microformats Toolkit to the MIX09 conference site, to help users and conference goers. With the addition of Oomph, users can now directly export conference and speaker information to Outlook, Yahoo!, and many other service providers.
Before triggering Oomph:
After triggering Oomph, you see the overlay displaying the event and speaker information:
We [...]
Belgian developer Pascal Van Hecke put together a great Greasemonkey implementation for the MIX Online prototype, “Oomph.”
Inserting lines of JavaScript automatically in any page? That sounds like a Greasemonkey job, doesn’t it? Strangely enough, a search for Oomph and Greasemonkey didn’t result in anything useful. So that’s why I put this simple Greasemonkey userscript online2 [...]
Delicate Genius interviews Karstenj and Tim Aidlin on Oomph and Microformats
This morning we made Oomph: A Microformats Toolkit available on the Internet Explorer Gallery (beta). We’re hoping this makes it even easier for users to enjoy the great functionality that Oomph provides. Cheers to Joshua Allen for all his hard work on Oomph and for getting it on the gallery.
I’ll make this post the official live test of the Oomph Microformats Windows Live Writer hCard generator plugin. Wow, that’s a lot of words. Here’s what it generates, using my contact information:
Tim Aidlin
Microsoft
taidlin@microsoft.com
1 Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 USA
425.706.7655
http://thunderkick.us
We soon will be releasing this plugin as well as some other great tools that will [...]
Download a WPF UI and get some tips on workflow and design.
In addition to taking on the Creative Director role for the MIX08 conference, I worked in a team of 6 to develop the WPF and Silverlight applications they demonstrate during the Cirque de Soleil part of the Day 1 Keynote address. Check it out.
I *wish* that dialogue box hadn’t been open at the very beginning, [...]
With the unbelievable development help of Karsten Januszewski, we released the first second version of our application, Flotzam.
DOWNLOAD NOW
System Requirements:
Windows Vista or Windows XP SP2 with .NET Framework 3.0
Internet connection
We released this application preceeding the MIX08 conference, and invited users to “restyle” the application and resubmit it as part of a contest. The winner won [...]