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To Code or not To Code

Silverlight, UX Design and Other Random Thoughts

Silverlight Animations: What are KeySplines and why should you care?January 5

If you’ve seen/read/heard anything about Silverlight, you probably know by now that it can do animations. In fact, Silverlight has fairly rich animation support.

I would like to point out right off that I am a developer, not a designer, and that this post is aimed at other developers. As developers we don’t typically have extensive knowledge about things such as easing and keysplines so I’ll try and phrase everything so we can all understand it.

What I’m going to talk about today is something known as easing and how you do it in Silverlight. In essence, easing is modifying the velocity over time of a given animation. This velocity modification is done using keysplines, which is the point of this post. A spline uses points to define a curve. In the case of Keysplines, you have a line defined as moving from point 0,0 to point 1,1. The default Keyspline has the spline definition points at those same locations. By modifying the location of those points, you can change the line into a curve. The shape of the curve determines the speed of the animation at a given point in time. The basic rule is that if the x of the slope is greater than the y, the animation is slow but if the y is greater than the x it is fast.

Confused yet? Don’t worry, I’ve got examples and pictures to help it make sense.

KeySpline Example

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2009 is here – now what?January 2

[Note: This and all posts in 2009 will include Silverlight applications. If you are reading this post in a RSS reader you may not be able to see this application. Please visit the live post to get the full benefit of the content.]

Well here it is, 2009. Did you accomplish everything you set out to do in 2008? I’d say that for most people that is true, even me, but hopefully you did accomplish some big things to be proud of.

And what of 2009? What are your plans and goals? Do you have them? If not then why? We all needs something to strive towards, to push ourselves to accomplish. Without some kind of goal we risk stagnating and hopefully you all know that in our career paths to stagnate is to become obsolete.

So what did I accomplish in 2008? Here’s a bit of it:

2008

• Community
  This past year I started speaking at user groups, code camps and even larger events like the Cleveland Silverlight Firestarter. I also helped organize the Cleveland Day of .NET and the Seattle Developer Designer Interaction Group. Online venues like twitter and Silverlight.net/forums also were deluged by my participation, more at some times than others.
• Technology
  
  

Silverlight Trick: Inline Silverlight AppsDecember 1 2008

About 6 months ago I wrote a little piece about how to create simple animations. It would seem that the thing people liked best about that post was not the animation itself but the way in which I included it inline with text. So here’s a little post on how to create that effect.

Creating this look is incredibly easy. While working on another post here at  Ascentium I built this sample, so now I’ll share it with you. I almost feel silly even explaining this in a post as it’s so simple, but hey, I’ll go for it anyway.

This example is just a hyperlink to Ascentium but has a couple of animations that are beyond what you can accomplish with HTML/CSS.

Silverlight App

Your Silverlight application itself is created just like you would any other and can be as simple or complex as you want. The key thing to remember is that the app needs to be as small as possible. I’ve found that about 12 pixels works great for the height and whatever width fits your purpose.

Silverlight Training: Week 1 – Introduction to SilverlightOctober 31 2008

Over the next few weeks, Gavin Leader and I will be giving lunch-time training sessions on Silverlight to our co-workers at Ascentium. While these classes are limited to Ascentium employees, we will be posting a series of articles chronicling this training process. If you work at Ascentium and are not already aware of these meetings please see Gavin or I, if not, please feel free to follow along with these weekly blog posts and ask questions, add comments or tell us where we screwed up.

Our primary target audience is front-end web developers who are familiar with HTML and probably JavaScript. Some weeks though will be more designer or back end developer focused. At the end of each week’s session we will identify the topic and audience for the next week so everyone knows what to expect.

Agenda

For the 1st week we are going to do an overview on what exactly Silverlight is. We will also delve into the tools needed to build it, resources to use when learning and get into an intr

Architecting RIAs: Do’s and Don’tsOctober 28 2008

As we are working towards creating richer applications for our clients and their customers, we need a set of guidelines on what to do and not to do. Well, we’re in luck. Josh Holmes of Microsoft and James Ward of Adobe teamed up a couple weeks ago to deliver a session at JAOO to discuss the do’s and don'ts of RIA architecture. Luckily for us, Josh went and posted the entire slideshow and a nice write-up of the session on his blog.

While I encourage you to go and read it, there are a few points from it that I would like to point out:

Build for ease of use

The fifth best practice is to understand who your users are and what type of users you have. For example if you have a public facing web site, you'll have something like the curve in the slide with some large percentage of your users being first time visitors to your site, some smaller percentage being repeat visitors and some really small percentage being your power users.

Your goal should be to turn those brand new to the site into repeat visitors and then into pow