Wow, i can’t believe it has been over a month since I chimed in to this blog. I had imagined the post vegas/Mix07 timeframe to be a really prolific one in terms of blogging, as there is so much joy/information to share given our announcements re: Silverlight, Expression, etc. et. all. My excuses for my silence include, let’s see, (a) being completely wiped out emotionally and physically from the strain of the launch activities, (b) being completely wiped out emotionally and physically from the strain of the launch activities, and (c) oh yeah, as if that wasn’t enough, my whole family and I got chicken pox–guess when my mother said “i don’t remember” when I asked her if i had had it as a kid…
Alas, now feeling recovered physically and emotionally, high time to share some of the good vibes on Silverlight and Expression. Anecdotes from the pac-nor-west (pacific northwest, as we Seattle residents refer to the general area of the USA where we live) are well past due… Silverlight 1.0 beta and 1.1 alpha downloads and community feedback have been incredible. The Silverlight community site and the Mix site have the current demo/sample repository, which we’ll be expanding dramatically in volume over the coming months… Expression shipping… after 3 years of installing weekly builds of these products (during the development of tools like these, there’s usually a new build every day, but the install/uninstall process is lengthy so on average I would upgrade to a newer version once a week)–it’s almost surreal to just be able to Start – Expression – and pick from Design/Blend/Web/Media.
But the thing that ironically i’m most excited to be able to talk about now is actually the recently announced Microsoft Surface! Surface has been my secret inspiration for the past 2 years, ever since I first saw and played with the demo, i’ve been telling friends and colleagues in the UX space that “we are working on some really incredible/sci-fi like stuff” and it has been frustrating to not be able to show/talk about it. You see, my stump-speech pitch about “the business opportunity of user experience” is predicated on the “transformational” possibilities that come into play when designers and developers can work together to build rich, compelling, highly usable, habit transforming applications that change the way we approach computing/tasks. To illustrate just how far UX might go, i always allude to the “Minority Report” concepts that were seen in the Steven Spielberg film… super rich visualizations, very gesture based/tactile interfaces, highly integrated environments that appear logically on walls/tables/cereal-boxes/etc–in effect “surfaces” become the user interface to all kinds of experiences, from highly targeted ads, to media consumption, and all manner of work related apps.
Well, Microsoft Surface is built using the platform and tools that I market, namely, the Windows Presentation Foundation is the underpinnings of the entire UI–providing rich media, 3d, animation, and hardware based rendering for highly interactive/immersive experiences. In this regard, the Surface is the best example of what is possible from a “future UX” conceptual perspective… and now that the project is public we’ll be able to use/demo the Surface and some of its applications as “reach” inspiration for what Designers and Developers can strive for with Expression/Visual Studio and the .NET Framework.
I’ll get some photos/video together to show what I mean… check out the videos on the Surface website as a starting point…
Forest Key's Blog 