Polish it til you can see yourself

I’ve been kind of unmotivated and grouchy this week, but I got some cool stuff done anyway. The Surface music app was pretty much done, til Darren asked me to fix a minor visual glitch with it. It was something small but a fix required reworking a lot of the layout code. In the end it was worth it, and that inspired me to redo some other things to make for smoother and better animations.

Then Nathan reminded me of TouchOSC which got me percolating on ways to make the app controllable via iPhone, so I hacked that together as well, which was surprisingly easy considering I hadn’t touched any of the .NET networking APIs before.

If it were up to me, I would have gotten the basic concept down, made it work in an ugly sort of way, and called it good once the major problems were solved. It’s great to be working with a team that pushes me to take it from “it works” to “it’s beautiful.”

I think the plan is to show all of this off next week with videos on both our blog and the Surface blog. I’m hoping we’ll be able to distribute it to other Surface users soon after, but we’ll see how that goes.

Aside from that, we’re ramping up on some other cool projects for both Surface and Silverlight. The Silverlight one has a really interesting UI component that’s probably going to kick my ass, but if it works it’s going to look awesome. Unfortunately it’s going to be a long time before that one launches.

Wow, that was all really vague. It’s unfortunate that I can’t share more details.

The weekend has been cool. Got together with some friends on Fri and wandered the hill a bit. Drank some expensive bourbon. Saw lots of police but didn’t know what happened til later. On Sat a bunch of people came to my place for some social madness including lots of Wii Fit skiing, then it was off to the Doc Martin show, then chatting at a friend’s place til much too late. Today, some hacking, catching up on Fringe, and reading about LINQ.