Urban Potato

Manuel Clement on Sparkle

Manuel is a graphic designer on the Sparkle team. It's always a hoot to watch him work with Sparkle; he seems to jump around the application at random and can produce beatiful designs in minutes. If you are at the PDC and have a spare time slot at 1:00 today, you should check out his talk! It's in 403 AB.

Which Designer do I use?

Which Designer do I use?

We just announced a bunch of design tools, two of which specifically target WPF: Sparkle Interactive Designer and the Cider extensions for Visual Studio. Why two? And which one should you use?

The reason for two designers is with WPF we’re really trying to rid the world of the need for graphic designers and developers to interact by sharing bitmaps. We do this at Microsoft all the time. I get emailed a bitmap of new UI from our design team and craft it all over again by hand. The design team needs to annotate the UI with pixel offsets, color RGB values and other data so I can create the UI.

That process is very awkward. If the design team instead used Sparkle Interactive Designer to design the UI, I could edit it directly in Cider. But graphic designers and software developers have very different expectations for a tool. Have you ever used PhotoShop? While I use and love PhotoShop, I would never want to use it as a designer for software development. I want to focus on event handling, data binding and good software factoring, not layers, bitmaps and effects.

While there is a lot of overlap between Sparkle and Cider, each designer is “tuned” to its target audience. If you’re a software developer accustomed to the Windows Forms or VB 6 form designers, Cider will feel right at home. If you’re a designer accustomed to Illustrator and PhotoShop, Sparkle should be very comfortable for you.

While we will continue to tune the feature set until we ship, here’s an example of the kinds of differences you can expect:

Sparkle

Cider

• The common usage pattern is to lay out controls first, then apply, create and edit styles of those controls.
• Integrating deeply with project user controls, data binding and code is a key focus.
• The tool palette is dominated by controls from Microsoft and 3^rd parties.

Which tool do you plan to use?

Ooodles of Designers

Today in Eric Rudder’s keynote we announced several design tools: an HTML designer code named Expression Web Designer, two tools for graphic designers, “Acrylic” and “Sparkle”, and one aimed squarely at developers code named “Cider”. We have been busy little bees.

I work on the Cider team. Until today nobody was supposed to know that even existed, so I can now blab, blab, blab. Is there anything in particular you’d like to hear about?

Moroccan Night Out

A couple of nights ago Steve Lasker and I had dinner with a group of Microsoft Regional Directors at a great Moroccan restaurant, complete with belly dancers.

It's Dark Here

Yahoo reports that Los Angeles is having a power outage. That explains why back stage at Hall A is darker than normal. The lights are back on now but they don't yet trust the power so they don't want us back there fiddling with demo machines. I guess it would be bad if the keynote demos had to be abandoned because we fried all the machines.

Arriving in LA

Well, the we have all safely made it to L.A. Mark Boulter arrived this morning and has been working on demo scripts all day. I hooked up with Chris Anderson and Don Box at the airport. Don used to live out here and recommended Tito's Tacos as the perfect lunchtime getaway. About eleven of us, including baggage, descended on this small little taco stand. I've attached a few pictures.

Pointless

Here I am packing for PDC. I had put "workout clothes" on my list. After all, the hotel does have a gym. As I sat there cutting the tags off of the workout clothes that have been sitting in my closet for the past six months I realized how pointless the whole idea is.

On the up side, Mark Boulter emailed us all today to announce that the demos are all working great and Eric Rudder is very happy with what we plan to present. Mark has really been putting in overtime the last couple weeks (and that's a lot of extra time in Microsoft terms), so this is a great accomplishment. The rest of the team has been at Mark's every beck and call to fix bugs and add polish, but Mark's clearly been calling the shots. Go Mark!

PDC 2005 is going to be great

I've resurrected a blog format for this page because I want to post heavily about the PDC, but my web site's typical "article" format doesn't really cut it for short posts. Thankfully, since my web site is a prime example of over-engineering, adding a format like a blog was very easy.

Like hundreds of other people at Microsoft, I've been spending most of my days preparing for the PDC. There's so much to do, between reviewing slides, helping to polish demos, and fixing bugs in early product code so those demos work, well, mostly the way they should.

We've had a philosophy on our team that we would not demo anything that wasn't working for real. Of course, when the rubber meets the road and you just have to have that last cool feature in the demo, sometimes you cheat a little bit. Luckily, we haven't had to cheat very much. I've been very impressed: areas of the product that were not even scheduled to work until much later in the cycle are humming along nicely. It's amazing how strong a "forcing function" a demo in front of hundreds of people can be.

What are we showing? Well, come to the PDC and see!