So much for the latest attempt at keeping a regularly-updated blog. I’ll try to get back on the wagon.

Things have been busy at work and extremely dull otherwise. Since my last real post, we’ve started and finished a little Silverlight thing for MSN. We got some very silly content, very little direction, and very little time, and made something pretty cool out of it. It’s a pretty good example of how the team comes together. Should launch before Christmas.

Now I’m ramping up on a much larger and less silly Silverlight thing, as well as some other Surface experiments.

Last week I attended the “Silverlight Partner Summit” in Redmond, which was fun because I ran into some friends and colleagues, and also because we got a bunch of details on Silverlight 3, which is looking to be pretty exciting. I started using Silverlight because I was being paid to, and that’s changed some with v2, but I think v3 will be the one that really gets me to prefer it over Flash for most projects. I think I won’t be the only one.

After that I went straight to the airport to head to the SF office for the Stimulant holiday party. Nathan took some pictures, but I kept my camera in my pocket as usual. My job was to set up Surface to be party friendly — removing most of the SDK apps and adding our stuff to the launcher, including ToneGrid, Xray (demo video to come, someday), and the photo booth app that Darren made just for the party. Surface was a big hit, as were the Stimulant-green cocktails served throughout the night.

Now I’m back in Seattle, where everyone’s panicking about cold weather and snow, and I’m trying to get my head around the wacky math required to do anything interesting with Deep Zoom.

I had a couple of excellent tech support experiences this week. I had a weird connection issue with Digsby that was easy for me to reproduce, but tough to explain. I sent a bug report through their tool and expected it to vanish into a bug tracker somewhere, but I actually got a helpful response from someone there and managed to sort out a workaround. Digsby is the best.

I also managed to trigger a really weird edge case in the Surface SDK’s ScatterView control. The issue was difficult to describe, but I did my best in a post to the Surface Community site. Surprisingly, someone got back to me and was eager to help. I worked up a simple test case and got it looked at by people who work on the SDK. Awesome.

Aside from triggering weird bugs, this week I’ve been working on one of the controls that will be in a future version of the Surface SDK. I’m just doing pretty production-level stuff, porting the design to sensible XAML code, but it’s cool to actually contribute to the source code of the product.

The image above is a photo of something I’ve been working on for the past few weeks in my spare cycles. More to come on that soon. (Art by Michael Paulus.)

The weekend’s been kind of blah, but the highlight was last night’s screening of Let the Right One In. If you like vampires, go see it. I didn’t know anything about it going in, and I think that might be the best way. Don’t watch the trailer online; I did just now for the first time and I think it sort of ruins it.

Obvious idea: Theaters should offer to sell you the DVD of the movie as you leave the theater. Just swipe your credit card on the way out and it’ll get shipped to your billing address whenever it’s released.

I’ve been struggling to find motivation to do things, so it’s been a pretty unproductive week. I kind of half-heartedly worked on the physics engine some, followed all the PDC announcements pretty obsessively, and tried to teach myself a few things. On Friday I pulled up though and made a proof-of-concept which shows how to use a mobile device as a secondary display for Surface. Hopefully I’ll get to refine that a bit more this coming week.

I’m not much of a Halloween person, but the weekend was alright. Friday was drinking too much with friends, Saturday was sleeping a lot to recover from Friday, and Sunday was a great brunch, a trip to the gym, and now some quality coffee shop time.

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.

I’m slacking on the updates. Here’s what’s up. Last week I spent Thu and Fri in the new Stimulant offices in San Francisco. Everyone had just moved in the previous weekend, but it was looking pretty great already. The main reason I was there was for two video shoots.

The first was for the Surface blog (similar to this one featuring my friend Joel), and was a pretty casual thing where we showed our upcoming music app and the balance board demo, and discussed Stimulant and Surface design/development. That video will probably be posted next week.

The second was a more marketing-ish video for the Expression team that was more about how we use those tools in our project work. This was a much larger video crew with much brighter lights and an actual director. I’m not really sure when that will come out or where it will live.

I’m not much of a slick talker, but hopefully I managed to sound fairly coherent on both shoots. In any case it was lots of fun to actually work with my company in person for a couple of days. I hope to do that more often.

The music app is almost done and will be shown to the public for the first time at the IxDA SF meeting on Wed. I’m excited that it’ll start getting out there, and hope to continue to be able to make fun non-paying Surface stuff in the future.

The physics renderer has taken a back seat to all this but I’ll be putting more time in this week and next.

Been pushing hard this week to get some code back to our Surface client at MS. The current project involves prototyping some new controls. Or, rather, Surface versions of old controls. A button that’s intended to be hit with a mouse is easy, but in a multitouch, multiuser world, it gets a little more complicated. The Surface SDK already has controls like buttons and things sorted out, but we’re working on some things that are a bit more out there.

Rather than prototyping in Flash or something, we’re doing real WPF apps using the real Surface SDK, and it’s great to work with, but pretty hard at the same time. WPF will let you do anything you want, but as with any sort of UI tech, normal forms-based apps are a lot easier to make than ones that feel physical and natural. I scrapped this prototype twice before settling on something I was actually happy with.

That’s been my deal this week. I did get in a little time on the Box2D/Silverlight port and it’s going ok. I’m getting increasingly annoyed at the lack of GetFlattenedPathGeometry() in Silverlight, though. I think I should have more time over the next couple weeks to put in, and should have something up on Codeplex soon.