Pssst.
<whisper>I’ll let you you in on a little secret. There are people out there who know how to create a beautiful UI. They’re called designers. I’d just as soon call them artists.</whisper>
Ask a gathering of programmers about creative UI and most will tell you that their design skills are still back at the 3rd grade level. Good thing Microsoft is letting the developer and designer work together in WPF, don’t you think? That way we get the best of both worlds.
Now that .NET 3.0 has been out for a couple months we’re starting to see some working examples of applications.
Flickr
There are a bazillion Flickr applications floating around the net. Since Flickr published their API it’s simple to build an app to call their site and get photos.
My new favorite is Nostalgia by Thirteen23. Nostalgia is a beautiful example of what can be created in .NET when your team has an artistic eye and a programmers soul.
Videocast
I’m starting my videocasts today. I’m still working out the details but I think I’m going to use Vimeo for the hosting site. On of the benefits of Vimeo is they you can download the original video in addition to the watching the Flash player.
Please let me know how the service works for you.
I’m not happy with the production on the video in a few places. But it’s my first one, so cut me some slack :>
Nostalgia Videocast
This Videocast show how the Nostalgia application works. I plan on doing a few of these kinds of videocasts for those of you who don’t have the .NET 3.0 framework installed and want to see what WPF can do.
Also I’m looking at the apps, not from the consumer standpoint only, but as at developer. How did they write this app? What WPF tools did they use.
Enjoy!
Direct Link
http://www.vimeo.com/clip:128715
-Walt
Cool dude,
I’m liking your blog a lot as an intro to WPF. It would be cool to see more video casts. Two things I’d like to see in them: Higher res and a more ‘codey’ approach to the apps.
keep up the good work,
M
Marshall
Yeah, the resolution will be higher. I had some trouble with my screen capture and I didn’t want to re-record the video. Vimeo should have links to the original file. This time, the res was a bit lower than I wanted. Even the uploaded version has artifacts.
Don’t worry. I will have more code to show. This example I didn’t have the source code from thirteen23 so all I could look at is the UI. You can still glean a lot of information from looking at a good UI though.
The Flickr photo manager UI: overall disappointment.
Some of the scaling effects and animation effects are nice, but the lack of thought put into the interaction design sours the whole experience.
Having a purple animated flyout is cute, but pointless when all you really want is to rotate a picture. To top it off the actual picture rotation isn’t animated. Go look at Picasa – they have a pretty nice photo management UI.
I fear this is what the future holds for us: pretty but difficult-to-use user interfaces filled with pointless animations and distractions.
Awesome considering it’s a demo just to showcase the technology.
I agree. It’s a UI prototype, better than most of the Microsoft sponsored fanboy fodder out there. Cine.view and de.collage are also nice.
Wow. One word, killer.