I like both the "blue monster campaign" and SIlverlight and given I'm dabbling around in 3D at the moment, I decided to play around with the idea of combining the two.

Here's "Dax" as I'd like to call him (why? dunno but Dax just stuck out as a cute name for the little guy). He's currently sitting in a surgical chair because he made fun of Flashbots new upgrades. He said they were rushed a bit to and looked like he just raided a dead storm trooper for them.

Flashbot obviously disagrees.

I'm so i love with these two cool characters, that I'm using them in my PowerPoint decks next week (TechReady 6 - Internal Microsoft conference in Seattle next week).

Here are some other picks

(Fig 1 - Since I'm an aussie, don't be alarmed at my accent fellow international audience members)

(Fig 2 - Here are your "Go Do's")

(Fig 3 - Putting Flashbot under the ...drill?)

(Fig 4 - Title Screen.. FLashbot's so proud of his new helmet)

(Fig 5 - Old title screen, Dax and Flashbot having a fall out over it)

(Fig 6 - Flashbot pinned to the wall heh.)

I read an interesting post this morning on how the author wanted folks to consider the 800px resolution for their designs. He cites that although he has a large resolution, it doesn't mean that he's not also using other applications at the same time.

...But with 1900+ pixels, I keep half for the browser and half for other stuff. If you go with 1000+ pixels, it doesn't leave me with enough room for my other apps, and I've got to (ack!) scroll sideways. It's not as bad with the ball on the Mighty Mouse, but most people don't have one and it's not exactly effortless even with one... -  Sammy Larbi

It's an interesting point to debate, as whilst on one hand I do agree with him that the potential for your audience to overlay multiple smaller applications is there, yet at the same time the benefits of expanding your resolution to accommodate more on screen can also be in an asset.

Screen real estate is a hard subject to nail as even if you're the best information architect in the world, you will still annoy someone with your chosen path. The trick is to figure out you collateral damage, in that what percentage of your user base is going to disagree with your design.

The easiest way to work that out is to do some basic research, check the statistics of your existing site (assuming you had one already) then ask them but do so in a way that doesn't draw attention to your intent - as humans are funny at times, they do one thing but say another.

eg:

Q. Do you think Coke is good for your diet...
A. Yes, it's terrible...

The intent was it's terrible, bad, negative, stop!. Yet they will drink coke.

Here is a tip, we are habitual creatures and if you can compliment our patterns of habit, you're likely to become less annoying.

Take this blog for example. Below is a graph indicating my resolution stats for this blog.

Would it be a good idea for me to go back to 800x600 resolution? If not what would you consider my ideal resolution.

Know your audiences technology limitations, know your customers habits and above all plot your approaches into a Risk Matrix.

Why did the media feel Macworld was flat this year? Why does Steve Jobs present so well, Why do people want Silverlight to succeed over Flash, why do people believe OSX is better than Windows Vista, why does Windows Vista sell so well? Why does...

The answers to all of the above are simple. We are chasing perfection, we are demanding that something succeed and we are highly emotional at times about it. Perfection once achieved is no longer perfect as it should be a ongoing quest with no end.

I am the worst perfectionist going, I see some interesting technology in this role and I find myself praising it on one hand and then brushing it aside, demanding it be improved. I do this also with my own artwork, I seek to ensure I put the most amount of energy, creativity and adhere's to a specific focused theme - failure... recycle bin..

I have just realised I have 4gb of artwork over 10 years that I've kept but doesn't meet my "perfection grade" (thus never really show people). That being said I have approx 1gb of artwork that I have kept that does -  but needs improvement.

I've never settled on one I'd call perfect.

It doesn't stop with my art work but also with regards to interactive programming. The interfaces I'd design for RIA solutions would be great to look at but I'd find the transition sequences the most frustrating as I wanted to achieve a certain outcome and would not accept "it will do".

Perfection is both a curse and gift in one, thus why critics exist and will continue to exist. A critic in my mind is someone or something that has already decided in their minds what perfection is and pity those whom are about to go before them - as they have lost before they began.

Accept the notion we need to reach perfection, but never punish the journey to perfection and results  produced along the way.

This post was inspired by Ratatouille a movie my son and I enjoy watching over and over.

12:33 AM and I'm currently putting together my power point deck for an upcoming internal conference (Seattle - February 4th - 15th). I typically like to use as many visuals as possible, as I've sort of decided that I'd prefer all my presentations going forward have a bit more "bang" associated to it.

The 3rd deck in is where I introduce myself and my title. I typically had a boring slide with basic text but I thought about it a bit more and decided to open up Adobe Photoshop CS3 and go to town on producing a better intro slide.

These are the results so far and putting them on a blog is not nearly as good as seeing them on a 24" iMAC at night.

Intro 01 - White..

I left some room to the left so I can put my details (name, email). I'm also thinking of designing a "digital passport" as being a RIA Evangelist I get to see cool UX day in day out.. so I think it's important that should I use a medium like PowerPoint that it represents this at the very least - in static form.

Intro 02 - Black (Favourite)

This is my favourite so far, as in a dark room it really comes up nice. The vision or story behind is that the words RIA are in the middle, which appear to be "popping" out of a monitor to indicate well, rich user experience. I've also tagged it with "Lighting up the web" which is a play on Silverlight's tag line "Light up the web"

I'm Proud

I'm proud to wear the title "RIA Evangelist" here at Microsoft as I think it's in many ways a first of many more titles to come that focus on our UX Platform. We are building a UX Platform made up of many pieces of connecting software along with looking to deploy such software on many devices going forward. I think we also have a really strong pedigree of designers on our payroll and the more I uncover them the more I am blown away by some of the upcoming idea's, solutions or products being produced.

Inspired by this, I thought it was time I also jumped in and added my own composition of art.

Now gimme a hug.... as have you hugged a designer today?

Have you seen Flotzam? It's a fun mash-up that Karsten and Tim put together that aggregates a bunch of different data sources: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, YouTube and indeed any general RSS feed. You can install it either as an application or a screen saver, and it's a nice way to see what's going on out there on the "tubes". Karsten has coined the term panopticon to describe it (from the Greek, meaning all seeing); to me, this feels like it has the potential to form the first step of a project to build the ultimate, pluggable, modular social networking client.

Being a WPF application, Flotzam can be easily restyled. From the enter/exit transitions for new items to the overall visual look and feel of the Flotzam interface, you can do almost anything you want just by tweaking the XAML mark-up. And with MIX08 selling out quickly (hope you've registered), the team thought it would be fun to put together a little contest that gives you the chance to experiment with WPF by creating your own custom themes. We'll use the best entries at MIX, both on the keynote screens and on all the PCs around the show; Karsten hopes that walking around the show will be like visiting some kind of art installation with all these different skins appearing.

Entering the contest is easy: everything you need to know can be found on the visitmix site. We've even got screencasts available to show you exactly how to use Blend to do the customization. Let your inner artist out - show us what you're capable of!

Whenever we run a WPF or Silverlight training event or lab, the one question that is guaranteed to come up relates to the designer / developer workflow on a project team.

In the old days of Win32 or Windows Forms, the workflow was straightforward (albeit extremely limiting). A lot of desktop application development teams I've seen, particularly in the enterprise, don't even include a formal role for a user interface designer. Although the development team might include a business analyst or someone in a interface development role who would be doing some basic interaction design and application flow work, the actual interface would be mostly designed and implemented by the same programmer who was writing the underlying logic. On the other hand, for the projects where design was taken more seriously as a core element to the success of the application, the design and development teams were separated into different silos. The design team would often present their output in the form of a color printout of a screen designed with Photoshop in complete isolation from the actual tools or platform available, and the developer would then have to jump through hoops to painstakingly reproduce the design with tools that were never built for that purpose. The end-result was typically a disappointing compromise between the ideal that the designer had envisioned and what was practical with limited and stretched development resources.

WPF and Silverlight revolutionize that process by bringing the designer into the heart of the process. XAML becomes the shared substrate that can be used by both designers and developers to communicate their intent. Finally, the designer is not divorced from the development process: using a tool like Expression Blend to produce XAML, their artistry is no longer the inspiration for the final interface design, it is the final design. For the developer, they no longer have to waste time recreating controls that already exist in the toolbox simply because the designer has implemented a different visual representation; they can concentrate on the engineering challenges that will create the rich engine that powers the interface.

Such a transformation isn't without challenges, however: it requires new forms of collaboration, different project team structures, and an updated cookbook of best practices. We're keen to help you retool your workforce to take advantage of WPF and Silverlight, of course, and so Jaime Rodriguez and Karsten Januszewski have spent the last couple of months distilling their own experiences and interviewing early adopters into a new whitepaper that addresses many of these issues and opportunities in great depth. This is the first of a series of content on this and related topics; we hope to produce several more in the run-up to MIX08.

Read the whitepaper online or download a copy for offline reading or printing. What best practices would you suggest to a software house or enterprise embarking on a new WPF project? What else should we be covering with this series of whitepapers? Let us know what you think.