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 [...]
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.
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.
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’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.
With the recent re-boot of MIX Online, one of the new features was the publishing of comprehensive articles centered around a particular subject. For launch, the first subject we tackled was the technology of microformats. We were fortunate to get John Allsopp to write the first article, basically introducing the concept of Microformats. John Allsopp [...]
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 [...]
Here’s a little video that features me and my team working with a customer to redesign their mobile application. It was a fun project. This is a great example of what I do here at Microsoft.
Readwriteweb.com chose the application that I created with Karsten Januszewski, Flotzam, as number 10 in the Top Ten Twitter Applications.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_twitter_apps.php
With the unbelieveable development help of Karsten Januszewski, we released the first Alpha version of our application, Flotzam.
Watch the flotsam and jetsam of data that you care about in this mash-up of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and blogs. Using this simple application, you can configure what you want to watch and the speed in which [...]
I was fortunate to pursue a project that my friend Karsten Januszewski proposed a few weeks ago for the MIX07 conference. The initial idea was to create an interesting user-interface (UI) that would display a few different things:
1) Twitter: "Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows [...]