Entries Tagged 'portfolio' ↓

Kapow! Shazam! Zing! Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet drove in hard with a right hook last week, referencing my recently-returned-from-hiatus series of great WPF applications and asking why Windows Vista didn't have more killer applications. As one of her correspondents notes, and even Wikipedia highlights, the notion of a killer application is both rare and perhaps something that is better observed in hindsight than at the time. Windows XP and Windows 2000 were both great successes, but I can't name any one application that was the tipping point for industry adoption of either.

From a development standpoint, the killer application is less relevant than the killer platform. This needs to strike the right balance between feature richness and ease of use, between power and flexibility, between ease of deployment and performance. Can you build an application that takes full advantage of your machine's hardware? Can you build an application that your customers love to use? Can you create faster, more feature-rich, less buggy software with fewer resources? My intention in writing this series is to try and highlight great applications that take advantage of WPF - the killer platform in Windows Vista!

Which brings us nicely on to one of the more amazing WPF applications that I've seen recently. This application came up in our team meeting today, and we were all noting that it's not had nearly the exposure it deserves. The application is the HP Interactive Canvas, built by Obscura Digital and Look or Feel for the Wall Street Journal D | All Things Digital conference held in May of this year. Created in just four weeks, this application takes full advantage of WPF to deliver a massive multi-touch interactive video experience. It's hard to do it justice with a couple of lines of text, so I'm going to break my usual moratorium on all things Google (!) and post this YouTube video that gives you a quick sense of the experience:

In the video above, you can see that multiple users are able to use their fingers to manipulate different objects on the screen: musical instruments, a photo and archive video collection, real-time stock symbols and charts. Obscura claim it is the world's largest multi-touch interactive video display. The application blends a high-resolution display with prototype hardware to bring the alleged Holy Grail of user experience to reality: the Minority Report interface.

Much of the work for this application was done by Darren David, a self-proclaimed "GUI geek" who was also responsible in large part for The North Face's in-store explorer application. He's got further videos and photos of the Interactive Canvas on his blog, which is also a great read on advanced WPF development. Keep an eye out for another similar application that he's going to be posting about in the next 24 hours too - another good reason to be subscribed to his blog.

It's time for me to reboot this series that showcases great applications built on WPF. I left it on hiatus for some months because I felt that the point had been well made, but it's probably time to pick it up again, not least because there's a swathe of cool WPF applications out there that a lot of people probably aren't aware of. WPF is picking up steam and gaining growing respect from those who recognize the benefits of a modern UI framework built on top of a powerful runtime and operating system platform, as some of the future examples will demonstrate.

There could be no better way to restart the series than to highlight the WPF-based, Windows Vista-exploitative version of Yahoo! Messenger that was finally released into the wild today in the form of a preview release. It's been nearly a year since it was first announced, and Ryan Stewart wasn't the only one to wonder where it had got to.

The high-quality application experience starts from the moment you begin the download. The bootstrapper is only 200kb in size, so you're quickly into the setup routine. Something that really makes this stand out: Yahoo! Messenger is installed on a per-user basis, which means it does not require administrative privileges to install: instead, it places the application binaries into the correct area of the user's profile by default. This alone will get it installed in environments where no other IM client can reach.

Once you get it installed, the messaging client itself shows what a WPF application can do - from its subtle use of Aero Glass and custom control styling to the browser-style tab metaphor that allow you to have multiple conversations going simultaneously within a single window, it immediately dates every other IM client out there. You won't want to go back.

 
Perhaps the highlight, however, is the emoticons window (shown above). For most teenagers, this will be the killer feature. Although they are unlikely to care that they are animated, vector-based assets created as XAML, they'll love the way they pop out of the screen before shrinking back to normal size. Given that there's a thriving industry selling winks, avatars, custom emoticons and the like, this is guaranteed to be a hit with the younger generation.

For more information on the development story behind Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista, you're going to want to check out Eric Burke's blog. As one of the key guys behind this application, he's got some pretty good warts-and-all war stories to tell, and I'm looking forward to hearing the good and the bad over the coming weeks. Congratulations to Eric, Josh and the team, as well as to Karsten, who has been working behind the scenes to help them with answers to a bunch of tough questions.