About a year ago I sat down in the offices of the Surface team to talk about the design and development processes that went into building the Social Stream application. It took about that long to edit out all of the silly things I said down to 23 minutes of discussion of what it takes to build a quality app for Surface. The chat is presented in three parts over on the Surface YouTube channel.
Endquote is Josh Santangelo, an interface developer and former man-about-town in Seattle. Lately, he talks a lot about Silverlight, Surface, and Stimulant.
email: josh[a]endquote[.]com
work: stimulant.io
Recently, Stimulant was the first company to produce an application for the Sifteo platform outside of Sifteo themselves. We decided to create a simple music sequencing application which can be enjoyed by children and adults alike. The video above will give you the general idea. More over on the Stimulant blog.
It was really fun to work on an app for a platform that’s limited to 128x128 displays, 256 colors, but offers a bunch of new and novel interaction possibilities. The SDK is based on Mono, so I was able to use Visual Studio and C# to work very efficiently with familiar tools, even though it was a new environment.
Microsoft Local Impact Map v3
Recently at Stimulant we launched a third version of the Local Impact Map for Microsoft (previously, previously). The map is a tool to “Explore the positive impact of local programs promoted and supported by Microsoft around the world.” This was a full rewrite of the front-end which introduced new ways to navigate through the collection of 1500+ stories. We also replaced our custom Deep Zoom map with an extended version of the Bing Maps Silverlight control.
Typically the labels for countries and regions on the map are not interactive, but we extended the map control with custom labels that are interactive and can display dynamic data. We also added a data visualization layer which illustrates various statistics for each region, and designed an algorithm for smoothly clustering dense collections of story icons.
Each state of the application is serialized as a unique URL, which allows the back and forward buttons in the browser to work naturally and makes it easy to share a link with a friend or social network. This was achieved through some creative hacking of the Silverlight navigation framework.
The relaunch has been received positively within Microsoft so far, with features on the Unlimited Potential blog and the Bing Maps blog. And we’re not done yet, there are big plans to bring the map to new places over the coming months.
Goings On
There’s enough happening over the next little while that it seems to warrant an update.
Lately my time has been focused on wrapping up the Bing application for Surface v2. What was shown at CES was just a portion of the final functionality so there’s been a lot of work to do, but we’re planning on shipping a “final” (nothing ever is) version over to MS soon.
In a couple of weeks I’ll be attending my first MVP summit. I’m looking forward to hanging out with most of the other Surface MVPs, dining with the WPF disciples, learning some inside info, and attending some kind of giant party in a stadium. Should be a good time.
After that I’m headed directly to Roatàn for ten days with a group of friends to get into who knows what kind of trouble.
Then it’s back to work for about a month to start a couple of new projects before I’m off to Vegas to attend MIX11. This time I’ll actually be on stage as part of a panel with the other Surface MVPs. We’ll be talking and demoing about Surface but also the future of NUI in general. If you’re attending I hope you’ll come check us out.
On the first of the year, I attained the ultimate nerd status and was granted an “MVP award” from Microsoft under the Surface discipline. What’s that mean?
“The Microsoft MVP Award recognizes exceptional technical community leaders from around the world who voluntarily share their high quality, real world expertise with others. Microsoft MVPs are a highly select group of experts representing technology’s best and brightest who share a deep commitment to community and a willingness to help others. Worldwide, there are over 100 million participants in technical communities; of these participants, there are fewer than 4,000 active Microsoft MVPs.”
I’ll be joining the six other Surface MVPs at the summit in February. It should get pretty crazy… those guys know how to party.
Bing and Social Stream for Microsoft Surface v2
At CES, Microsoft announced the second version of the Microsoft Surface product. Part of their demos included two apps that I’ve been working on.
The first is Social Stream (née Live Stream), which has been reworked for the HD display of the v2 hardware.
The second is a Bing application. Currently you’re able to use their image search API to bring up images of pretty much anything. By the time it launches you’ll be able to do… other cool things. This is mostly what I’m working on lately.
Surface v2 and these applications will launch this summer. Learn more at surface.com.
KEXP Archive
My last project went by so fast (three weeks) that I forgot to post about it. It’s a rework of the WebVizBench project, which ads a new mode that shows each KEXP DJ’s favorite albums in a JavaScript-powered particle system. It’s live at KEXParchive.org and works best in the IE9 beta.
The app was featured in the PDC10 keynote (scrub to 44 minutes) and on the IE blog. I also did a video interview for the IE blog which is embedded below.
A short video and longer writeup of the Surface Live Stream application is up on the Stimulant site.
I did an interview with Channel 9 about WebVizBench. More on that here.
