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

Posts on: portfolio

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Jul 12, 2009
@ 7:00 pm
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Silverlight, Deep Zoom, and ScatterView

I worked on an image viewer for MSN that displays an arbitrary set of photos and lets you filter them based on attributes of each. LINQ is used heavily for the filtering logic. You can also drag, flip, and throw images with an experience that borrows heavily from Surface’s ScatterView component. When you select an image, Deep Zoom lets you get up close to the details. The first app to use it displays a set of celebrity tattoo photos.

The viewer has been reskinned six times with six different sets of photos:

We were asked to make an cool image viewer for a bunch of celebrity photos, and it sounded really uninteresting at first, but we went pretty next-level on it and made it fun. That’s Stimulant’s style.

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Apr 22, 2009
@ 11:40 pm
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Microsoft Local Impact Map »

A project that’s been in the works since late last year at Stimulant has just launched on Microsoft.com. The Local Impact Map presents over 500 stories about the positive impact of local programs supported by Microsoft around the world.

Some marketing will be following the launch soon, but I’m more interested in the technical side. Some cool features:

  • The map in the background is a Deep Zoom image, with a XAML version of the map overlayed on top for rollovers and data visualization.
  • Intense support for bookmarking and the browser back button. Pretty much any state of the app is bookmarkable and shareable.
  • The bookmarking support is extended by the “snapshots” feature, which lets you save a series of app states and recall them later, for a sort of presentation.
  • Live as-you-type search throughout all the data in the app, thanks to LINQ.
  • Lots of great stories, images, and even video.

This has definitely been the most complex Silverlight project I’ve done to date, maybe even the most complex RIA so far. That is if you don’t count the one I’m working on now for MSR, of course.

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Mar 27, 2009
@ 8:34 am
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This is the Stimulant Surface demo reel that Nathan put together for MIX09 (and was a third-place winner in the show-off contest). It covers all of our Surface projects to date. I’m actually working on a new Surface project right now, which is a reimagining of a Silverlight app that we’re just finishing up. No rest for the wicked.

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Mar 8, 2009
@ 10:55 pm
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Silverlight Around the World / Showcase

This is about a year old, but I’ve been referring to it recently, as the current Silverlight project is also a big world map. The Silverlight Around the World app is used to visualize data from the Silverlight Showcase (which I also built). I can’t prove it, but I think these are some of the most complex apps that were made in the Silverlight 1.0 timeframe. Keep in mind that this is JavaScript, not C#, and Canvas, no Grids. Both use the ASP.NET AJAX component model, and a Cairngorm-style architecture to bring a little sanity and reusability to the code.

The next map/datavis project is all SL 2, Deep Zoom, and other madness, and will launch on microsoft.com… when it’s ready.

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Feb 2, 2009
@ 10:32 pm
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The “XRay” project I’ve been working on has been posted to the Stimulant site, and talked about here, here, and here. The implementation is pretty simple — two data-bound ScatterView instances, some funky bitmap manipulation, and a WCF service to send the images to the device over HTTP. This approach means that not only did I not have to figure out how to write iPhone apps (yet), but that it also works on Android (really well) and on Windows Mobile (sort of).

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Dec 23, 2008
@ 10:49 pm
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International Quilt Study Center projects

A couple of freelance projects I worked on a while ago have gone live. Actually they’ve probably been up a while but I’ve just now noticed. Both are for the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Nebraska.

The first is the quilt collection, which presents 600 quilts in a pan-and-zoom grid, along with details about each and UI for searching the various collections.

The other half is the quilt maker, which lets you make and save your own quilt.

I believe these are also hosted as kiosk apps in the museum itself.

The project was designed and managed by the geniuses at Second Story in Portland. In both cases, I took the apps to a late beta stage, and final production and delivery was handled by Second Story. Both apps were implemented in Flex 3.

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Dec 9, 2008
@ 10:42 pm
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ToneGrid, Stimulant’s collaborative music app, has been announced. You should come to our office(s) and check it out some time.

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Nov 25, 2008
@ 11:05 pm
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The Reebok Custom home page project that we did with Fluid went live the other day. It was hopefully my last ActionScript 2 project, but hopefully not my last 3D project.

The Reebok Custom home page project that we did with Fluid went live the other day. It was hopefully my last ActionScript 2 project, but hopefully not my last 3D project.

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Oct 2, 2008
@ 10:57 am
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I made a fun thing. More here. As you can see, the physics library is coming along nicely.