Sean Gerety

Meet me at MIX 07

I'm going to MIX 07. This year should be even better than last year. So far the sessions look like there is more meat to them. My only problem will be to choose which sessions to see and which to catch later on the TIVO. If you're going contact me and let me know.

Tag: MIX07

My new box full of Vista with multi-touch gesture support

So I've been quiet for a while, here's a couple of reasons. One is I've got a new box to run Vista. Here's some of the components that I've got in it.
motherboard - http://evga.com/products/moreinfo.asp?pn=122-CK-NF68-AR
chip - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115002
video card - http://www.bfgtech.com/8800GTS_640_PCIe.html
case - http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=81800
http://www.antec.com/productImageInside.php?ProdID=81800
memory (2 gigs) - http://www.patriotmem.com/products/detailp.jsp?prodline=5&catid=2&prodgroupid=38&id=581&type=1
power supply - http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=getarticle&articID=511
DVD burner - http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4367295
Hard Drive - http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/Internal_SATA/ (320 gig )

I was going to look at possibly buying a high end box like the Dell XPS, however I could get the above box for about $1000 less than the Dell. Putting the box together only took a day with the hardest part being shoehorning the power supply in the bottom. Plus, I had to pull the 120 mm fan out of the bottom, however it did go to the middle section and will keep everything nice and cool. The box is pretty quiet, which is nice.

I've installed Vista Ultimate on it and it runs like a champ. The only pain that I encountered was from my GeForce 8800 GTS not having any drivers for Vista. That was definitely a WTF moment. How could a cutting edge card not even have any beta drivers? So that put my Vista Experience Meter at 1.0. No Aero for me.

So I called the support line over at BFG tech (lifetime 24/7 support, which rocks) and talked with the rep who informed me that there are no drivers for Vista. WTFO? However! He did recommend that I check out www.guru3d.com . Kudos to the forum at guru3d.com. They had a driver on the forum for my 8800, which took my Vista Experience level to 5.0. See below.

Another thing is that I've had a Fingerworks keyboard for about 5 years. It's been great and I get all that gesture support that Apple fanboy's are swooning over with the iPhone. I hooked it up to my new Vista box and it worked great right from the start.
So now that I've been playing with it for a week, here's some impressions.
1. Driver support needs to be stronger. (Especially from high end product producers. (cough - Nvidia))
2. Where's my DirectX 10 games? (I love my 360, but this system rocks).
3. I love the look and feel of Vista.
4. The sidebar is nice, but I'm not sure about what happens when people load it up with widgets beyond maybe ten?
5. I love WPF apps on Vista, I pulled down a bunch from www.thirteen23.com and they look great.
6. I've also found out that I'm getting tried of app's that have to run all the time (Quicktime and iTunes?) and lodge themselves in the taskbar. If you have that hard of a time starting up, look at how your app runs. (Sorry that was a UX rant)

Once I get everything setup on my new Vista box, I'll see how Vista runs on my old box. (I'll probably need to throw more RAM at it. We'll see).

The shiny red candy like button

See if you click it! dontclick.it
Tags: UX

The sum of all experiences

From Futurama: “Insane in the Mainframe”
Roberto: "I'm not crazy. Don't call me crazy! I'm just not user-friendly!"
Your application / software is just like a person. If there is a part that you don't like about it, it can ruin the whole experience. So when you're looking at your application and you think it's fantastic, be careful you may have "over looked" something about it. Shall we say, for example, an over zealous use of animation or gratuitous usage of design patterns? Remember that your overall application user experience (UX) can be poisoned by that one bad feature.
For example, take the Apple iPod, the hardware device is elegant. The wheel is the perfect way to navigate around the device (left or right handed), and the size and heft feels solid and the overall design, clean . But, iTunes spoils the experience. It's a CPU hog, it's hard to transfer videos to the device, and you have to use many third party tools to get it to behave correctly. iTunes does get some things right. Podcasting, buying items is dead easy, the amount of content on the iTunes store and the UI layout.
But remember the next time you’re waiting for those files to encode and you lose a file because something didn’t transfer correctly and you cuss the application that it's UX. Make sure that the sum of your application experiences are not overwhelmed by one or a couple bad ones. And also remember that by focusing on UX, your applications, even if you just fix one part, can start to shine beneath that tarnish of bad UX.

Wiki Mind Map

I've got a lot of project ideas for WPF and WPF/E and one that I thought of the other day would be a Wiki Mind Map. What is Wiki Mind Map? It's a mashup of two different ideas, a wiki and a mind map. From Wikipedia: A wiki is a type of Web site that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for collaborative authoring. The term wiki also can refer to the collaborative software itself (wiki engine) that facilitates the operation of such a Web site, or to certain specific wiki sites, including the computer science site (an original wiki), WikiWikiWeb, and on-line encyclopedias such as Wikipedia. From Wikipedia: A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, and decision making. Are you interested in working on this and using WPF/E? Please contact me. Sean Tags: WPF | UX | net3 | Wiki | Mindmap