Posted by Karim
on February 03, 2009
I’ve authored an entry for the Mix09 10k Smart Coding Challenge called Verdant. It’s an experimental game idea where the player influences the growth of plant vines to collect as many rain droplets as possible.
Contest entrants are limited to 10kilobytes of source code and resource files, so like many others, I was constantly budgeting features, making lots of trade off decisions. It was a very enjoyable exercise, because I ended up cutting all my grandiose ideas like explanatory tooltips, sprite animations for the plants, keyboard input, background music, and lots of nice-to-have game mechanics like power ups and penalties, all of which would’ve been way over budget.
My thanks go out to Adam Kinney and crew for putting the contest together and making that weekend much longer and more enjoyable.
Posted by Karim
on September 22, 2008
Today I released a small pet project of mine on Codeplex, called AttachedBindings. It’s a library for Silverlight which attempts to bridge the feature gap of Bindings between Silverlight and WPF. It contains an attached behavior that implements a form of ElementName Binding between two FrameworkElements.
Here is a simple example, which shows a Calendar control that changes opacity when Slider.Value changes.
<e:Calendar ab:AttachedBinding.Binding=
"TargetProperty=Opacity, ElementName=OpacitySlider, Path=Value"/>
<Slider x:Name="OpacitySlider" Minimum="0" Maximum="1"
SmallChange="0.1" LargeChange="0.1" Value="1.0"/>
Enjoy!
Disclaimer : Thanks go to Neil Mosafi, his ElementNameBinder was first on the scene. I reasoned an Attached Behavior with a custom TypeConverter would be easier to use, and I was able to make some optimizations along the way.
Posted by Karim
on September 18, 2008
After much sweat and toil, we’ve launched not one, but three products aimed at the discerning development shop that need to build non-trivial WPF applications quickly and reliably. Indeed many of the apps we’ve built ourselves, for our customers, leverage these controls, panels and tools. Check out the announcement for the details.
Posted by Karim
on September 15, 2008
Nine Inch Nails, currently touring their Lights in the Sky tour, has raised the bar for live performance visuals. According to Reznor, it all started with a relatively simple idea.
“I wanted to see how I could use video as an instrument,” he says, “and try to really make the stage feel like it’s organic — like it’s part of the overall set.”
They’ve done precisely that, as ~40% of the visuals are rendered on the fly utilizing rhythm, vocal and optical input from the band. Check out this article in wired for tech specs and video.
Makes me really sad I missed it their Seattle show.
Posted by Karim
on August 21, 2008
I’ve been privileged to work at IdentityMine at a time when some truly amazing interaction design and end-user experience work has been happening, but it’s always been difficult to showcase that work to others. This is usually because of contractual obligations, but it’s also a logistics problem. Silverlight work is much easier to disseminate; simply install the plug-in and go to a site with good content, but WPF and particularly Surface have more difficult hurdles to get around in order to have others experience work that IdentityMine has done.
To resolve some of this, IdentityMine has set up some good quality videos on a Vimeo channel, which includes our official Reel. Below is the Surface Promo. Special thanks to Kurt for setting this up!
