Pete Brown's Blog (POKE 53280,0)
Pete Brown writes on a variety of topics from .NET programming using WPF, Silverlight, XNA, and Windows Phone, to raising two children in the suburbs of Maryland, to woodworking, CNC and generally "making real stuff". Oh, and Pete loves retro technology, especially Commodore (C64 and C128). If the content interests you, please subscribe using the subscription link to the right of every page.
Archive for tag:
User-Experience-(UX)
-
I've received some interesting commentary on Item 0 in my 10 Things for Silverlight and WPF Developers
post. That item says to know your limitations, including when to
call in a "designer". (I'm using designer loosely here, it's a
graphics designer or ux pro. Often, those are the same people, or
highly related people working for the same org)
I contend that 99% of developers make terrible gra...
-
This is Windows Client Developer roundup #23.
The Windows Client Developer Roundup aggregates information of
interest to Windows Client Developers, including WPF, Surface, Windows 7, XNA,
Windows Forms, Silverlight, Windows Phone and
Visual Studio. If you have something interesting you've done or
have run across, please send me the URL and brief description via
the
contact link on my blog.
...
Published
Monday, May 10, 2010 |
Tagged:
.NET, User-Experience-(UX), WPF, Silverlight, Patterns, XNA, Visual-Studio, win7, CPP, WindowsClient, WindowsClientRoundup, Windows-Phone |
-
I recently went to one of those Righttime
Medical Care clinics (used to be Nighttime Pediatrics) to get
checked out for a cold that had lingered for three weeks (turned
out to be a sinus infection). These are clinics, usually with a
long wait while in the office, but same-day appointments. They see
the usual things: colds, sniffles etc. as well as things that used
to mean a trip to the ...
-
Marc Schweigert in public sector just announced the availability of touch.codeplex.com, a set of multi-touch behaviors for WPF 3.5sp1, Silverlight 3 and Silverlight 4.Project OverviewThe APIs in WPF4 plus the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch make building common touch scenarios easy. However, implementing many of the same touch scenarios using WPF3.5SP1 or Silverlight 3/4 involves writing a fa...
-
Since deregulation increased my electric bill by more than 100%, I’ve hated paying it. What makes it worse, though, is the really annoying workflow for the BGE online payment site. I’ve been meaning to take screenshots of the process for some time now, and just finally got around to it. First, we start at the main page at www.bge.com . You might assume that you should click the “Pay Online” li...
-
I’m not sure why I concentrate on Pie Charts. Maybe circles are just more attractive to me than bars or points :) For the January 2009 Expression Newsletter (which will be out in a week or two), I put together a rather deep article on styling pie charts in the Silverlight Toolkit. At the end, I mentioned to check here for info on overlays. One effect you can achieve with an overlay, is a glas...
-
We’re coming up to the end of the year, and for the first time in a very long time, I decided to set some real personal goals for myself for 2009 (outside of the usual eat better, lose weight, spend less, save more type goals) I’ve always been pretty good about keeping up with technologies and products that interest me. I’ve been an early adopter of things like Silverlight, Expression Blend/De...
-
There’s a glaring issue with this dialog from the Amazon MP3 Downloader. What is it? For comparison, here’s another dialog in Windows And a third I won’t fault you if you don’t happen to see the problem. In fact, you really need to have the mouse in your hand before your muscle memory points out the issue.
-
I was snagging some icons to go into a comp of a Silverlight LOB application today when I realized that some of the metaphors used in the software we’re refacing (Silverlight front-end to an existing LOB application), just don’t hold anymore. While it is instantly recognized by folks who have been with computers for a while, I think the 3 1/2” floppy save icon needs to die. Back when we had 5...
-
What's up with the new spinning ASCII art in Microsoft installers? (from http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ all of Star Wars as animated ASCII art) Ok, well, not quite as bad as that <g>, but you've seen it: | / - \ | / - \ | When it cycles like that, it looks like a rotating line, straight out of DOS or our old VT100/220 terminal days. I think the problem they're trying to solve is...
-
I like Windows Vista. I’ve been running it since the beta period, and it has been my primary operating system since it was released. Despite some of the common hearsay, Vista is very stable. I typically leave my machine on for weeks on end, rebooting only if I have to install a service pack to a tool or something (like the .NET SP1 and VS2008 SP1 sp). I run all sorts of beta stuff, dev tools, g...
-
Fellow Silverlight enthusiast (and great author) Chad Campbell called me out on this, so now it's my turn :) How old were you when you first started programming? That was either 6th grade or 7th grade, so I was around 12. I often question the people who tell you they were hacking systems at the age of 6, but who knows? :) How did you get started in programming? The first time I ever wrote ...
-
During all my Silverlight and WPF talks, one point I try to make is that in those technologies, the important aspect of an out-of-the-box control is not its particular display properties, but its model and its ability to be customized. Back when we used to do Windows Forms work, you often picked third-party controls based on how many UI customization tweaks they offered (fonts, colors, one or ...
-
So I'm trying to complete registration at this site today, and I noticed that there is no textbox next to state. I figured maybe they pulled the state from the zip code. So, I fill everything else in and submit, and get this wonderful screen telling me State/Province is required - even though there's no field for me to input into. Refreshing the page didn't fix the problem. I had to close ...
-
WPF and Silverlight applications cover a whole spectrum of application types and richness from incredible full-screen applications incorporating 3d and video to games to good old standard (but highly usable and attractive) business applications. It's the last category that I find of particular interest as while those applications don't always get the attention that the others do, they will be,...
-
Early in my programming career, we had a choice to make at the beginning of each project: do we do this as a command-line/console app (prompt and response), use a DOS windowing library, or do a Windows 3 native app?Eventually, it became the norm to do a Windows app by default, and fall back to command-line only if you need to call it from batch files. The idea of creating prompt & response ...
