ILM (Star Wars, Indian Jones, etc.) has created some of the best graphics in history of film. On the "Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest" ILM chose Vue (v5, I guess) for their natural terrain simulation needs. An amazing piece of software.

Susumo Yukuhiro, the matte artist on the project talks about their experince with Vue on e-on's website. (Vue's creators)

Art | e-on Vue | Star Wars

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If you've been one of the rare long followers of my blog you might occassionally ask yourself what happend to NukeBall, and all those other WPF apps and tools I've been talking about.

Well, we went over a lot of changes as Microsoft put WPF, Blend, and ORCAS into shape. Finally, we're ready to talk more about it.

We're bring all those things under one roof called REUXABLES (that's pronounced "reusables"). Click this link to find out more. We're going to reveal more over the next few weeks what other stuff we have in production under the reuxables line.

.NET | Blend | NukeBall | Windows Vista | WPF | reuxables

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I was recently ranting about WPF and Silverlight. Andy expanded and clarified his thoughts on his blog, where he also mentions:

| My fear, though, is that the industry will try to make XAML yet-another utility language

That brings up a point I will be raising with some people at Microsoft. I think XAML can be made more powerful in a few key aspects. I'm not talking about making Andy's fears real. Far from it. I want XAML to take over as much of visual side of things so that developers have to do even less for the UI and concentrate on their code.

One of these is the Triggers architecture. I think it should be expanded out of the Template zone. Right now only ControlTemplates and Styles use Triggers. If you introduce higher level property and event triggers in XAML objects, a lot of visual programming is possible.

Let's take an example of a simple textbox. Our goal is to make the textbox red when a negative value is entered. You can easily inherit the textbox, add two bits of code and voila. It's done. But that's with procedural code. If you have more powerful triggers, a designer can go in, select a control and add the trigger for this like you would a IsMouseOver = True trigger. It would make things easier. A lot.

This was just a simple and stupid example. But a lot of interactivity can be added with this. And lots of functionality can be added by the designer - mostly functionality relating to the UX that he or she would have to depend upon a developer for.

.NET 4.0 will be great. I can't wait.

WPF

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Okay, so we haven't been able to release a new revolUXions episode in a while (both Andy and I are up to our armpits in XAML, but we'll be back soon), but we haven't forgotten WPF. What's funny is that many people are. Now I'm the last person to criticize Microsoft - that's why if I am critisizing Microsoft you know it has be bad (at least in my eyes). I think Microsoft is playing up Silverlight a bit too much.

Now we can spend eternity sitting here and discussing the market impact of WPF vs Silverlight, or Flash vs. Silverlight, or whatever. But my point is that the marketing is maybe a bit confusing. In fact, I must've heard at least a dozen confused queries in the past two days. I've had clients coming to me for "WPF and .NET 3.0 websites". People are finding it hard to differentiate between WPF and Silverlight. Especially with 1.1 Alpha out now.

Look, I'm really happy with Silverlight. I'll be even more when I get to go deep inside Silverlight. But let's not forget WPF. That's the root technology. A whole lot more (profit and innovation) will come out of WPF than WPF/E (that's what Silverlight used to be called and what potentially confused people - and don't get me started about people confused with 3.0 and 3.5). There's a lot of time, money, knowledge, and infrastructure invested in the Windows platform (software, i.e.) and WPF is the successor to Windows Forms - the biggest UI change since DOS to Windows. You do the math.

Andy and I just had this discussion about Silverlight. His company is really deep into Silverlight and he's just worshipping it like a madman. I'm still iffy about Silverlight. But he and I both agreed on one thing: keep the web and desktop seperate to a point. Now, innovation is not bad - not at all. But it's kinda like those washing machines you can control from the office. Technologically that's awesome, but the actual usability requires a *bit* more thinking.

Nukeation will be doing some Silverlight stuff no doubt, but we're focusing almost 98% on WPF only. In fact, check out our new services at www.nukeation.com - and we'll be creating WPF support tools starting with NukeBall which is being ported to WPF (as well as being compatible with VS2005/WinForms) and Codename Helios.

But back to my original point: I think WPF is being forgotten over Silverlight which is just a fraction of the whole innovation. What do you think?

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I just heard through the grapevine (what can I do, limited connectivity right now) Carl Franklin just got RD of the Year, and Richard Campbell's company Strangeloop Networks got Best of the Show. Congrats, guys.

All the news I got so far. If someone has more info, please call me. I'm lonely without my net connection being all proper and fast... :(

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My new article is featured on front page of the newly relaunched angryCoder.com.

But like developers, designers also have healthy egos measured in tons. Stick a single developer in a team of designers and he or she will be chewed to death in a matter of minutes. Black shirts hide bloodstains easily - why do you think designers wear only black?

Read the entire article at angryCoder.com

Articles | Geek Stuff | Philosophy | WPF

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