Entries from October 2008 ↓

The good folks at MIX Online have relaunched with a new beautifully designed site and mission. The new site is intended to be a community for web designers and developers. Behind the scenes they’re using a custom blogging engine built by the people behind Channel9 using ASP.NET MVC.

This site was painfully designed using a combination of Photoshop, Illustrator and Expression Web. It was brought to life using a custom blogging engine built by the code monkeys behind Channel9 on the recently released ASP.NET MVC. Imagery and icons, unless mentioned otherwise, were, and continue to be created by our team of versatile ninja designers. A shout out to You The Designer, and IconArchive for giving away some cool images that we repurposed for our needs.

Thanks to Long Zheng over at ISatrtedSomething for the tip.

Michael Cohen, Principal Researcher at the Interactive Visual Media Group for Microsoft Research, has posted some examples of annotated gigapixel images.

These examples are large Quicktime videos, and the site is thin on detail, but they’re worth a look. I checked out A “tour” of Boston (62Mb), it was really interesting stuff.

U Rank is a social search engine prototype developed by Microsoft Research.

U Rank is a research project to help us learn more about how people organize search results as they go about larger information tasks, how people collaboratively search, and generally, how people edit and share searches

According to the U Rank project page you can organize, edit and annotate search results, as well as share information with others.

• Collaboration: Share URLs with friends (”related projects”, “our reading list”)
• Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like (”best books,” “favorite restaurants”)
• Multimedia results: Mix video and images with web results for added context
• Ego-boosting: Make sure your home page is #1 (at least for you and your friends)
• Easy to explore what your friends are sharing
• Short-cuts: Move your favorite sites up; then put an ! in front of the query and go straight to the top result

Check out the latest release of Silverlight Contrib (Alpha 2 - Silverlight 2 Compatible).

Silverlight Contrib is a collection of open source Silverlight Controls and API enhancements built for and by the Silverlight developer community. The goal of this project is to complement Silverlight and make the lives of Silverlight developers easier.

The set features 5 Controls;

• Color Picker
• Gauge Control
• Star Selector
• Enhanced Metafile (EMF)
• OSX Dock like Menu

And 8 Library items;

• Zip Compression
• Byte Utilities
• String Utilities
• Simple Text Parser
• Animation Tweening
• Wheel Mouse Listener
• Clipboard Helper - (IE Only)
• Data Context Extension Method Wrapper

The coolest features, for me at least, is the Tweening framework and Zip compression which is a port of the ShareZip library. Check out the full functioning demos here.

Kirupa Chinnathambi had put together a nice concise tutorial on Preloading and Displaying an Image in Silverlight. It’s very well written and a great primer for novice Silverlight designers or developers.

Colorful Expression is an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design inspired by the Adobe Kuler community. It brings the Kruler functionality right into Expression. This is an awesome add-in for designers, but more importantly it may give you ‘color balance challenged’ developers some much needed help.

Source: Jonas Follesø

Need to make a Silverlight app portable?

Sure, you could just create an exe from studio. But what if you don’t have Studio available and want to quickly package up an xap file? Blendables Labs Desklighter allows you to package Silverlight xap files in an executable for distribution.

Desklighter is a windows utility that can convert Silverlight applications into standalone desktop applications. The output from Desklighter is a single executable file that can display the Silverlight content on windows desktops without requiring a hosting server or a browser. Desklighter enables users to carry a Silverlight application off the web to wherever they need it.

Celso Gomes has relaunched the Nibbles Tutorials website using Silverlight 2. It features a new navigation structure and updated design.

Celso runs a great site with well thought out WPF and Silverlight tutorials. If you like it let him know on his Blog.

The Microsoft Expression team have released an updated version of Deep Zoom Composer (v0.9.000.5) to coincide with the release of Silverlight 2. There are a few minor reliability updates in this release but most notably are the updated project templates that are made to be 100% compatible with Silverlight 2.

According to Long Zheng @ IStartedSomething, Microsoft recently hinted at a consumer version of Surface in a recent survey. As if we didn’t have reason enough to be excited about the forthcoming Surface SDK