Sean Gerety

This blog is moving

I'm moving this blog over to a personally managed site so I can do more with it. I'll add podcasts and samples and some projects. Here's the new links. Home page - http://ideakitchn.com My new blog - http://ideakitchn.com/blogs/sean/default.aspx

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

Visual DNA

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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

The fourth acronym in the .NET 3.0 framework

The .NET framework 3.0 has been released! We’ve got three acronyms (WPF, WCF and WF) and one new term (CardSpace) that are ready for “release to market “. However, there’s one more acronym in the list that is part of the framework. The acronym is UX. UX stands for “User Experience” and it’s a big part of the 3.0 framework and Vista. UX isn’t just adding a reflection to all your images on your application, its goes well beyond that. UX is designing your application to handle low bandwidth networks, UX is designing your site to run in more than one browser, UX is using DirectX to render your application (hint: WPF), UX is getting the right people talking at the beginning so that there is common language and understanding about what you are building. As you can see UX is actually quite a broad. It’s not just about your UI design.

As we see more and more of the 3.0 framework start to show up in our everyday lives, don’t forget about that fourth acronym of the framework, UX.

Tags: WPF | UX | net3

Expression Add-in

I know that there is an Add-in contest going on for visual studio, however where I would really like to see one is in the Expression Suite. I’d like to see a storyboard add-in for both Expression Graphic designer and Expression Interactive Designer. The storyboard feature could be used to storyboard out the interaction of your applications. Mock-ups could be created in EGD and then sent to EID for further work. You would need a view that would show interaction paths (in both products) and allow you to also show an atomic state view (think button behavior onmouseover, etc). To further the value of this feature you could integrate with Cider and VSTS (what I like to call Visual Studio Team Slayer). Just think, adding UX into the Software design process. Huh? I’m talking about slide 155 from Simon Guest’s TechEd 2006 presentation. And these storyboard layouts could later be used for documentation, training and requirements (and goals).

Think of this as a way to paper prototype. I know that people use everything from Photoshop to PowerPoint to Visio, why not use the Expression tools and create artifacts that you can keep and use?

Until then you could do this now (somewhat) by creating a new XAML window for each state (or page) and paste them up on a whiteboard. Have fun.

Tags: WPF | XAML | net3

New CTP for June

Looks like it's time for a fresh batch of WPF (.Net 3.0) goodness. Tim Sneath points us to the .NET Framework 3.0 - June 2006 CTP. Check out Soma's blog for details about the name change and of course, be sure to read about compatibility with Vista Beta 2. I'm not going to install this weekend due to some cool WPF stuff that coming up in the Atlanta area.

On a side note: I have a suggestion for Microsoft, which could actually be used by other folks, provide a tag or tags for your technology or product, especially when you have names like "Microsoft Expression Interactive Designer".

Tags:WPF | .Net3

Beautiful Evidence

Tonight I got home and after what seemed like years of waiting, "it" was here. Edward Tufte's new book "Beautiful Evidence" has arrived on my doorstep.

Tags: tufte | Design | sparklines

360 - updated!

Thank you dashboard developers for background downloads. I just downloaded the update, which didn't take long and am currently downloading a couple of items in the background. Sweet.

Tag: Xbox 360

WPF and Command Centers

WPF and Command Centers? Yes, WPF and Command Centers. What a great match. I got this idea when recently touring CheckFree and seeing their command center. (They had this really cool glass that you could change from opaque to clear with a remote. I don't know if that's the product that they used, but it's the same concept.) I've seen a couple of command centers and they all look like really big versions of what we see on small monitors. So you can image the text and image quality is pretty rough. With zooming and the new text technology you could create some really killer apps out there for these big screens. Plus, there is always a ton of data visualizations could take advantage of the power of data templates in WPF. And you can use the Nick Thuesen's RangeConverters post to learn how to hide bits when you're looking at your command center app's on a smaller screen.

Tags: WPF | XAML

UX at Piggly Wiggly

I had always remembered the Piggly Wiggly's out in my Mom's home state of Arkansas as being these relic's from the fifty's. Well it look's like that's not the case any more, at least in Litchfield Beach, South Carolina. Where I happen to be vacationing at the moment.

Yesterday, my daughter and I were walking around at a local Piggly Wiggly picking up a few things for dinner and once we got to the check out line I was asked for my "member card". I don't care for "member cards". I find them annoying and the only benefit is for data mining on the companies part.

When I gave the cashier my answer of "no, I'm vacationing", she politely asked how long we would be staying and I informed her of how long. Then she whipped out a temporary member card for me to use during my visit. No questionnaire to fill out, no data mining, no coupons in the mail based off my shopping habits.

I said thank you, and saved three bucks. I thought about how easy she made the process and the experience. Make the "member card" easy for people to get and easy for people to use. They'll come back and to the store and use it while they're on vacation.

Now how does all this apply to the world of software?

First, be friendly and polite. Is your app rude? Does it ask to close everything you're working on when installing? Does it hog resources when running?

Second, make it easy. Easy and be done in a couple of different ways. Do you controls on you app have a flow that's appropriate for the culture that's going to be using it? Is it easy on the eyes? (empty space, font's, color, etc.) Does it do what it's supposed to do?

Third, bring them back. If your app is friendly, polite and easy to use this should happen.

Well, I'm back to the vacation. I'm making some fish taco's with avocado mango salsa, lime slaw and pineapple mojito's. See you later.

Tag: UX

Expression May CTP notes

I've got the May CTP installed with no problem. I fired up VS.NET 2005 and all of the WinFX projects were gone. Bummer. Luckily I'm having fun in EID. Expression Graphic Designer and Interactive Designer both seem to be fine, except for my PSP background samples gradients have lost their mind and added a grey color in the mid-point of the gradient for the stroke. It should just go from white to transparent. And the opacity mask has the same issue, except this one looks magenta! What's up with that?

I'll keep my eyes open for more strange happenings. And I'm running this on Windows server 2003 SP1 with all the updates if anyone from the Expression team is reading this.

Sean

Tags: XAML | WPF | Expression Interactive Designer | Expression Graphic Designer