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: surface

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Jan 14, 2011
@ 7:56 pm
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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.

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.

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Jan 14, 2011
@ 7:50 pm
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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.

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Sep 23, 2010
@ 6:45 pm
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A short video and longer writeup of the Surface Live Stream application is up on the Stimulant site.

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Sep 9, 2010
@ 7:39 pm
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The last project I worked on at Stimulant for the Surface team at Microsoft was Live Stream, a multi-user social media reader. An administrator can configure it to pull specific feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and RSS services, which are then displayed in a never-ending, scrollable stream across the display. Multiple users can pull interesting content toward them, where it will scale and orient to them for easy reading. They can take the content with them by flipping the items over and taking a photo of the Microsoft Tag on the back with their mobile phone, which resolves to the URL of that item. This project was the inspiration for the SurfaceScrollViewer behaviors, ManipulationViewport, flipping ScatterViewItems, and Plane. Each of these components are free for download from the preceding links, and the entire project’s source code is available on the MSDN code gallery.

The last project I worked on at Stimulant for the Surface team at Microsoft was Live Stream, a multi-user social media reader. An administrator can configure it to pull specific feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and RSS services, which are then displayed in a never-ending, scrollable stream across the display.

Multiple users can pull interesting content toward them, where it will scale and orient to them for easy reading. They can take the content with them by flipping the items over and taking a photo of the Microsoft Tag on the back with their mobile phone, which resolves to the URL of that item.

This project was the inspiration for the SurfaceScrollViewer behaviors, ManipulationViewport, flipping ScatterViewItems, and Plane. Each of these components are free for download from the preceding links, and the entire project’s source code is available on the MSDN code gallery.

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Jul 12, 2010
@ 10:48 am
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SurfaceScrollViewer Behaviors

In my last Surface project, I developed a couple of behaviors which tweak how SurfaceScrollViewer works. You can see them in the video below.

Here is a VS 2010 project which includes the demo application shown in the video. Let’s discuss them over on the Surface forum.

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Jul 6, 2010
@ 3:49 pm
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ManipulationViewport

By default, a ScatterViewItem can be scaled as large as the display. If the content is an image, the image will scale up with it. This works well, but if the application has multiple users at the same time, one person could scale an image up and occlude everything the other user was working with.

A solution to that would be to limit the size of the ScatterViewItem, but allow the content within it to be manipulated separately from the container. Something like the video below.

Here is a Visual Studio 2010 project which includes the source for the application shown above. Let’s discuss it over on the Surface forum.

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Jun 19, 2010
@ 12:13 pm
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Flipping ScatterViewItems

If you’re building a Surface or Surface Toolkit application, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re using ScatterView. ScatterView is an ItemsControl, so it’s a great way to show information about a list of objects and allow multiple users to manipulate the objects independently. However you’re usually only showing a small amount of information about the object within a ScatterViewItem — an image thumbnail, or a song title, for example. What would be nice is if you could flip the item over to show more detail.

I’ve needed to do this more than once, and I’m not the only one. The first time was in our Kodak Surface application, and I achieved the affect with some horribly hacky and fake animations. The project I’m currently working on also has a requirement to flip items over, so I decided I’d do it right this time. That’s the real reason I put Plane together. Check it out.

Here is a Visual Studio 2010 project which includes the Plane source as well as examples of flipping ScatterViewItems in Surface and Surface Toolkit projects. You will need the Surface SDK and/or the Surface Toolkit installed to run these samples.

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Mar 1, 2010
@ 10:45 am
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Our official video and post for the Wind Mobile app is up. We’ve been so busy with project work that we’ve fallen behind with keeping our own site up to date, but we’ll make up for it soon with a whole new site launching shortly.

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Jan 21, 2010
@ 10:50 pm
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Another video of the Wind Mobile app, which really shows all of the features. At the front-end is the game-like attract mode, at the end is the super-secret admin console. Well, not so secret anymore. Wind’s press release on the topic is also up. Stimulant’s will come soon…

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Dec 31, 2009
@ 2:34 pm
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A short video of our Wind Mobile app. It still doesn’t quite show all the awesome, but we’ll have an official video up probably in the latter half of January.