More proof that WPF is a ripe platform for developing rich multimedia graphic novels… It looks like Im way behind the times though as there is a very good looking graphic novel called “The Many Worlds of Jonas Moore” coming that will be delivered via iPod. This totally upholds my “comfort” argument about reading experiences moving to devices. Wierd question is when will they have a larger iPod that focuses on reading experiences. Im really excited about developing reading experiences for Ultra Mobile PCs but not as excited about developing reading experiences for mobile devices like phones where the form factor dictates that reading is a secondary experience.

 Unfortunately the current delivery experience was very “web” and left me watching some well thought out live action sequential art in a 320×240 experience that studdered because there was a bandwidth bottleneck… Very frustrating to see something like this get trashed in the medium.

Still worth a look see http://www.jonasmoore.com

Since we were on stage showing off our comic reader experiment we did last week I think its only appropriate to call out that today, May 5th, is Free Comic Book Day… http://www.freecomicbookday.com/sponsors.asp

Im gonna rustle up some neighbor kids and take them down to our local shop and see what we can find.

I was pretty excited when I got to the airport on Wednesday to fly home and I saw Arturo Toledo reading comic books at the gate.

A great write up on our talk at http://www.tcj.com/journalista/?p=348

A couple of unfair statements but overall somebody who is as passionate about this as we are.

One hard quote is “Dunlap and Ingebretsen make it sound as though they were among the first people to come up with the idea of digital versions of comic book; far from being leading-edge in the matter, however, they’re actually eating vapor trails.;”…. Fortunately all the sessions are available online so you can clearly hear us say that we dont feel like we are doing anything innovative here.

Really the major motivation was to create a comic reader that took advantage of WPF platform benefits like hardware acceleration and XAML support. I think we did that and I think the reading experiences is all the better because of it.

We worked really hard to make sure we maintained a consistently high frame rate for our animations while supporting very high resulotion artwork that can scale across multiple media types. Something that I havent seen in the other CBR and CBZ readers. No real magic here… We just figured out how to use the BitmapScalingQuality features of WPF at the right time.

Great conversation about the business model in this post… Honestly we dont have much to say about this…yet. Agenda #1 is done (Mix 07) and now we are on to figuring out where we go next with this project. Im hoping we do something because it would be sweet to keep working with the comic book industry and helping to forward a group of artists that I have immense respect for.

I will keep yall updated on comic book happenings and will be categorizing my posts under “comics”. We will have an aggregated Comics feed at http://blog.identitymine.com/blogs/comics soon too. (Check out the post about how we created artwork for IdentityMen that is already there)

The talk is live on the web! streaming via Silverlight!

Will be a bit before we get the digital version of IdentityMen v1 published. For those lucky enough to have been there in person we have printed a limited edition v1. Very cool…

In todays demo you saw me show off our video content solution built in Silverlight and hosted in WPF… Here is the Silverlight video:

http://identitymen.com/comics/v1/extras/video/

Just now got Media Encoder downloaded and installed and am going to give the http://silverlight.live.com/ media streaming a go… Very cool service… Been avoiding posting video to my blogs because the bandwidth would actually go over my cheaply hosted website. But now I can go for it.

Also a very cool tidbit that I didnt get clarified today but am doing now is running both the release versions of Blend and the May CTP of Blend 2.0.

Tools support for Silverlight rocks! Its amazing what good tools will do for ya.