Late night here in Vegas and Im totally trying to get work done getting ready to deliver our Nerd+Art talk tomorrow. Listening to NIN Ghosts I-IV. Pretty sweet… Add this to Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” because I wanted to support an artist who is testing the waters with direct distribution. (It’s ironic that Im excited about this announcement of not so direct distribution)

Anywho… its been an amazing day at Mix. The Guy Kawasaki interview with Steve Ballmer was fantastic. Totally gave me a new respect for Steve. I love competition and somebody who is passionate about changing the world and giving other people the same opportunity.

IdentityMine hosted another industry influentials dinner at Zeferino tonight and it was amazing. Definitely the place to be. I met some new faces like Jeremiah Morrill who won the Flotzam contest. Very cool website that I will be adding to my blogroll. Got to visit with Than, Rob Relyea, Karsten, Laurent, Grant, Nick, Dr. WPF (you had to be there to figure out who he is… my lips are sealed… hint the mustache is a dead giveaway). We also had some great appearances by Scott, Brad and Miwa among many many others.

Any conversation that ends debating whether designers should be allowed to create dependency properties and routed events is a good conversation in my book.

Karsten and Jaime’s white paper on “How XAML Transforms the Collaboration Between Designers and Developers in Windows Presentation Foundation” is included in the goody bag (that Mark so graciously gave me since speakers don’t get one…lame)

This is a really nice addition to the “mix” of stuff that we get here.

Well here we are… Mix 08. My third year here and it is feeling routine to be in Vegas every spring. Pretty exciting to see everybody. Laurent has already been here for the pre-sessions and has been blogging like crazy.  I’ve already run into Walt, Mike and Joe, Darren and Nathan… I know that Than and Grant are running around here somewhere.

Really excited about the keynote tomorrow. Since a lot has already been announced Im really curious as to what kind of stuff we will hear about tomorrow.

Network is slow… That’s because every nerd in the hotel is in his room surfing the web or at the blogzone party. (which now that Ive blogged I think I can officially go get a free drink…) Let the party begin! Oh wait… still gotta work on our talk too.

Terrific news! We’ve just announced our next two Blendables Mix products. 3D and Layout.

Check them out at http://www.blendables.com

It seems like there are 2 holy grail pieces to really getting 3D to come into its own in WPF… The first piece, Interactive 2D on 3D has a pretty cool solution on codeplex.

The second piece, for me has been taking the simplicity of the WPF layout system and making it easy to create rich experiences using 3D as a tool for data visualization and interactivity. The Blendables 3D Mix does just that for me… Now I can stack objects in 3D space, lay them out in 3D grids, and more… This is very cool stuff… You really need to check it out.

The Layouts Mix is amazing too. It’s all about SwitchPanel for me…With this panel you can automatically “switch” from one layout to another and get “layout to layout” animations. This is a really effective technique for feedback animations when filtering on content or looking for pattern recognition when animation from one view of data to another view.  You have a ton of control over the animations in this panel including variables like force and resistance. As well these include “Penner Animations” so you can tweak the easing to your hearts delight.

Also in the layouts Mix is CameraPanel and PerspectivePanel… You gotta see these ones to really understand them. But you can do some really cool stuff with them. I’m already plotting how I am going to take over the world using CameraPanel and RandomPanel together to create a cool visualization for Flotzam… (Karsten: Im about halfway done with a Blendables Flotzam skin… was too busy to get it done for the design contest)

It’s pretty exciting to see the Mixes coming online!

“Express Yourself! Create and share your work with other members of the Expression Community. Get inspired. Get creative. Get noticed.”

http://expression.microsoft.com/en-us/default.aspx

Also check out ScottGu’s demo of Expression Blend working with Silverlight 2.0.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/02/28/first-look-at-using-expression-blend-with-silverlight-2.aspx

You would probably only know this if you had installed the Syndicated Client Experiences starter kit or recently downloaded the latest version of the Seattle PI Reader but now the two are integrated.

Now that there is more than just the MSDN Reader in the list you can start to really see the value of this experience. I just finished rebooting after installing SP1 and noticed the little orange icon in the task tray updating. When i clicked on it to open the Subscription Center I saw that the PI had been updated and I was able to browse the most recent stories without having to commit to opening up the whole app. Clicking a title reveals a bit more information and double clicking launches the reader.

If you haven’t used the PI reader, its a great app and there are some really notable new features. For instance now you can drag articles into a “reading list” and then you can twitch navigate through that reading list… Its a very cool scenario. Spend a few minutes browsing the section fronts and add articles to the reading list (hint: you can flick them into the reading list very cool metaphor that has very low dexterity required). After you have built your reading list grab a cup of coffee and kick back and really read… I mean really read. We don’t do that very much anymore.

I do love hearing things like that… Especially in the context of what’s on the roadmap for WPF in the future.

DataGrid, HW accelerated DropShadow and Blur, better Media and Video support, WriteableBitmap and more.

Wow.. Great website using Silverlight… Cant wait to see the movie too…
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/trailers/jumper.html

I especially like how easy and fast I was watching the trailer in full screen. Just one thing… Why in the heck do we always implement the “Hit Esc to exit fullscreen”. Doesn’t anybody use this stuff? Its totally aggravating when I have to wait a few seconds with an ugly message overlaying my video that I am trying to watch. How about positioning it in an lower third of the screen. Or start up at center and immediately to the bottom of the screen..

Schweeetnesh!

http://blogs.msdn.com/windowssdk/archive/2008/02/07/windows-sdk-rtms.aspx

It looks like its official… Robby and I will be doing a session at Mix 08 this year…

https://content.visitmix.com/public/sessions.aspx

Nerd + Art: Ten Code Snippets to Empower Your Inner Artist
Speaker(s): Nathan Dunlap, Robby Ingebretsen (Identity Mine)
Audience(s): Business, Creative
Session Type: Breakout
Learn how to increase what a designer can do with Windows Presentation Foundation and Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 using our designer’s code “toolbox”-10 simple concepts that will give you an edge when making your best ideas a reality. We share the code, teach you how to use it and introduce the concepts behind it.