Somehow I missed that this was out and available. Swift3D rocks! It has Silverlight support whoohoo!http://www.erain.com/products/swift3d/Silverlight/default.asp

Possibly my favorite thing I have ever seen on the net is a showcase example of what you can do with Swift3D. http://www.tokyoplastic.com/dm.html 

Speaking of erain… I am reading through the user assistance in Zam3D and I gotta say by far this is the most entertaining software help I have ever read.

Quoted from the Advanced Modeler Overview:

Would you like to play with LEGOs or Clay today?

I have to admit I was always a LEGO guy. There was something about seeing all the individual pieces laid out in front of me that fostered a sense of creativity, comfortably leading my brain down the road of creation. In comparison, when the teacher set that big amorphous lump of clay in front of me and said “create,” I just wasn’t sure what to do next. It was as if the limited set of shapes contained within my LEGO collection helped jump-start the creative process, where the limitless potential of the clay seemed to transform my creative juices into a somewhat more viscous state.

Since its inception, ZAM 3D has offered a modeling process that’s similar to the LEGO-style approach of assembling more complex objects from basic building blocks, which is one reason the software is so popular with people delving into 3D design for the first time. Since we’ve all used building blocks of some form or another, it’s a pretty easy transition into the world of modeling with ZAM 3D. The one limitation with this creation method is that occasionally you find circumstances where the exact building block you need for your model simply doesn’t exist. And although it’s often possible to find some sort of workaround using a combination of other shapes or just settling for a less-than-what-you-had-imagined model, neither of those solutions is ideal.

How could you not love docs with this much personality?

Electric Rain wins for creating the most functional sidebar gadget yet. And it has a frog on it

You just create a project in StandOut Designer and register this instance of the sidebar gadget with that project and then when you drag and drop assets that you want to use for your presentation into the gadget these items show up in your project in StandOut Designer. Very cool!

Browse some of the design kits to see a sampling of beautiful, professionally coordinated design kits for presentations.

Make sure to download the Vanilla Kit. Its a basic design kit that can help teach you how to create your own professionally designed kits.

I’ve had a lot of people disagree with me on this one but I just ran into another case where this was incredibly annoying and proved it’s importance once again deeming it blog worthy.

Naming every object in your XAML is just good practice. I think we can all agree on that. Of course it’s just a matter of how much time we have to be tedious and do this. Naming is what unites teams and allows multiple people to work together on a project independently. It also allows markup to be self documenting. (Comments in XAML in Blend is a difficult thing because they read better when declared before markup but do not travel with markup when they are moved via the Objects and Timeline Panel in Blend.)

It is the naming convention where we usually have some controversy. So far I’ve worked with a lot of companies who have their own naming conventions that are born out of the companies internal platform specifics. Another legacy implication on naming conventions is the notation that the developers adopt. This is just about a religious issue that is always an uphill battle.

What do I recommend… I always recommend redundantly naming your object type in the name. For example “StopButton”, “StopButtonStyle”, “StopButtonControlTemplate”, “StopButtonStoryboard” etc.

First, I always explicitly spell out these things to follow .NET framework general naming conventions. For those of you out there who want to abbreviate things with “btn”…. stop it. Unless you can package yourself up in your code so you can translate for me or can send me back to school to learn a standards defined pidgin code. Nothing aggravates me more than having to try and figure out what people are alluding to when there really isn’t a strong technical argument for reducing characters in code in .NET.

Second, providing an object type as a suffix solves a huge problem that developers don’t have to experience as intimately as designers/integrators using Blend have to… In Blend we use the Objects and Timeline panel extensively. The result is that we are very dependent on two elements that are displayed in this panel. The icon and the actual name text.

Now take this case for instance:

Here I am creating a custom control template for a TreeViewItem… You know its a control template because I can see it in the title. That’s not what I want to focus on here. More importantly note the item named “Expander”. This is the items name not for an Expander control but for a ToggleButton… Which there is no way for me to know except for to “View XAML”. Not only do I not have a clear picture of the structure of my control, but this a red herring that is making me think that TreeViewItems have Expanders.

Ok now here is the same structure in XAML with the elements named more clearly:

With this I can understand not only that Expander is a ToggleButton, but also that Bd is a Border and it is used for the Header of a TreeViewItem and I now know that the ItemsHost is laying out using a StackPanel. 3 words displayed in a TreeView and a world of difference in understanding the structure of a control.

What could make this better? Expression team if you are listening. Tooltips with some valuable information in the Objects and Timeline panel. Imagine mousing over an object and seeing the Object Type and all the applied properties… A quick summary of what that object is without having to browse the Properties Panel. Should be a simple addition… It’d be nice to see these tooltips in the Artboard as well.

Design time comment attributes would be a thing of beauty as well… For example:  d:DesignComment=”This border element is here for a reason don’t delete it.”

In the Brushes panel if you have “gradient brush” selected and use the eyedropper, you can drag a range between two points to create a gradient brush based on the values between those two points.

Wish I had stumbled on that earlier.

Got an invite to DeepRockDrive… Totally cool premise. And all of a sudden I get the social network thing… Actually Robby added me to his facebook account and I just realized why I didn’t get it before… I just dont have a lot of friends… But Robby does. Holy Cow! 120 people… When you have connections you see the value… i just need to start being nice to people.

Nice thing about DeepRockDrive is all of a sudden I realize there is a community that I actually care about hearing their opinion… Musicians.

DeepRockDrive lead me to Last.FM which is pretty sweet too. Nice way to get a recently played feed generated.

I am finally starting to see a value for audience specific social networks (just as long as they jive well with all the other social networks) (if they dont they arent interesting).

Umm no Im not. But this is: http://www.viewmyworld.com/ (click the silverlight guy) or maybe you can find the real deal here: http://blogs.msdn.com/mharsh/

Cool website although it’s Flash based! I tend to agree with Drew’s post about this kinda problem… Of course I’ve been on the inside and know that these projects start along time before they see the light of day and thus probably haven’t been able to be XAML’d yet.

I won’t bore you with my own personal review… you can read one here if you need one although I dont personally think Radiohead is a band that can be reviewed….
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/cd_reviews/article2621947.ece

The cool thing is the online experiment that they are doing… I woke up and immediately went to inrainbows.com to download the new album that released today but not via any major record labels…. I was willing to pay about anything because I am a huge fan of Radiohead… Turns out Radiohead is letting the listener choose how much they want to pay for the album…

Interesting thing that I was willing to pay anything for the album but when given the choice I opted to only pay a buck for the album… Im a die hard believer in micro transactions…  10 songs 10 cents a piece… Seems like the right amount considering they will still make  millions of dollars at that price range… Especially since they have eliminated the middle men.

As a designer and a content generator I would love to be able to make a living via micro transactions.

I wish there was a model that you could buy the album for free and vote with your money how much you like the album after you have listened to it… Suppose I can just go back and buy it again to tell the band that I love the new album… Shyeahright…!

The album is fantastic by the way and I am only 3 songs in!

Ouch… $100,000 to get a touch screen at Neiman Marcus:

http://www.neimanmarcus.com/store/sitelets/christmasbook/fantasy.jhtml?cid=OCBF8_NMO2807&cmCat=christmas

Makes the Microsoft Surface “somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000″ price tag seem pretty great!

Speaking of Ars Technica had a great article on surface the other day. http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/surface.ars/1

This rocks… I knew that Make Control via F8 or Tools Menu > Make Control was an incredibly easy way to make user controls in WPF apps, but I didnt know that it applied in Silverlight as well.

Just select an object or group of objects and hit F8 and it will pop a Make Control dialog.

This will create a new xaml file that copies all the appropriate XAML from the previous xaml file. For example, in the previous screen shot I have selected the group CardViewCanvas and hit F8. I chose to name my user control “CardView.xaml” and as you can see in the screen shot below it has automatically moved all this over for me.

Now I can go back to my original page and delete the original elements I used to create the user control.

Using the Asset Library I can add my CardView to my page.

And like that oila! All the heavy lifting has been done for me.

Been playing with http://flotzam.com/

Jared Potter spent some time explaining Facebook with me. I do get the premise of Social Networks and the value. In fact in early work we were doing with WPF/WCF apps I was really hot onto doing stuff with Friendster in MediaMania… (ahem NetFlix Friends made that real… made it cool). But then the social network site phenomena exploded and I think it just scared me off.

So now Im trying to get my head around this before I start to feel really old.

Im twittering, facebooking, etc etc. I guess with these social websites is nice to have a  platform to merge web apps/services… (This is sweet example in Facebook http://www.travellerspoint.com/ ) Social networks seem kinda forced to me though. (Kinda like Shared Folders in Messenger… its backwards…)

At the same time though I did find some colleagues from college and highschool that I didnt know I would ever see again (or really care to think of again…) I guess that was kinda cool.

Speaking of feeing old… I have a 7 month old daughter who hasn’t really taken to sleeping which has really got me feeling old and recognizing all sorts of stuff that makes me feel older. Like um… I didnt even know what High School Musical was and its the top selling CD of 2006. And uhm… dont tell Than and his brother in law… But Ultimate Fighting just doesnt have the same draw that Fight Club had when I was younger. Im getting soft… Wait a minute..no I’m not… I loved 300.

Yeah I’m on one of my typical blogging streaks again. My head came out of a project long enough to get excited about blogging again.