Designer WPF

Due to repeated requests for the source code (and the fact that I apparently can’t brag about it on Silverlight.Net without a link to the source code), I’m putting it up for download.

Presidential Candidate News Tracker Source Code

JSON Data File With Candidate Data (Note: Apparently, Wordpress likes to uncapitalize file names for me, you may have to re-name the file to “CandData.json” to get it to work with the app.)

Warning: This code is a disaster. I was having strange problems getting my custom controls to work and, after a couple hours fighting with it, I gave up and ended up writing the exact same layout and code for 14 separate candidates. Same problem with the “dates-of-note” along the timeline.

Not pretty, but it works. Have fun.

It’s not set in stone, but Brian Peek is trying to see if anyone who has played around with homebrew Wiimote projects and is also going to MIX is interested in having a get together.

If this describes you, please take his poll so he knows there is interest. (I’m voting for Wednesday, since I’m not going to be able to make it on Thursday). This is really a selfish plea on my part, since I’d love to meet so many of the great minds behind the Coding4Fun site and the Wiimote projects.

UPDATE: I’ve made the source code available for download here.

Yeah, yeah… I know it’s long past the time when anyone want to revisit the wonders of the 2008 presidential campaign, but the stars aligned for me to build this thing.

Star #1: I’m been meaning to learn JSON forever because everyone is talking about it.

Star #2: I’ve been meaning to get into pulling data from a publicly available API using a Silverlight application.

Star #3: I’ve been meaning to do something with information visualization in Silverlight ever since I got Ben Fry’s terrific book on Visualizing Data.

Star #4: Tim Heuer challenged his readers to create a Silverlight infoviz application with a time constraint of six days.

And so, due to several late nights and the infinite patience of my wonderful wife, I’ve finished my first data driven Silverlight information visualization. An explanation follows below the app.

The application visually displays how many stories in the New York Times in a given week mentioned one of the presidential candidates. If your favorite candidate does not appear, I apologize. I chose the seven most frequently mentioned candidates in each party.

My journey of exploration began at the New York Times developer site where I got my developer key and started exploring the data from their brand new Article Search API, with which you can search articles in the New York Times as far back as 1981.

Because the NYT API returns a JSON result, that meant I had to learn JSON. I highly recommend it. Super easy. I ended up scraping the data I needed and parsing it into a custom JSON file of my own so I wasn’t making a couple hundred calls to their servers every time I wanted to run my application.

From there, it was actually a simple matter to pull the idealized data into my application and start visualizing it. In case you’re wondering, the placement on the map doesn’t represent anything at all… I was just looking for a good way to show the data and I liked this one.

A special thanks to my wife, the math genius, for reminding me to take the square root my data so that my circles ended up with proportional areas (instead of exponential ones).

There are, of course, several things I would change about this if I had the time. The slider can be flaky, the fonts could use some more work and the code in general is a bit of a disaster. But this is all the time I had and I think it works pretty well.

I finally got my MIX 10K Challenge submission up! For those of you who don’t know, the MIX 10K Challenge is a  contest realted to the Microsoft MIX conference to create an application is 10K of code or less. There are all sorts of great prizes and I would really like one of them.

It’s called Zombie Zapper and I think it’s pretty cool. Sadly, I submitted it and then, while I waited for it to get accepted I made some tweaks that made it much better, so the older, not-as-good version is online there. You can play the refined version here.

But, if you like it, PLEASE go vote for me.

The way this works is like so: The white boxes are like trampolines that you can control. When the zombies are walking on the trampoline, drag down on the white box and when you release it will propell the zombie into space.

I’ve signed up for MIX 09, so I’ll be headed to Las Vegas this March. If you’re thinking about it, they’re having a pretty solid promotional where you can register for 40% off the standard cost with the RSVP code “MIXspecial1″.

Go do it

Interesting stuff happening at MIX this year…

Johnny Lee, whose idea of using the Wiimote for multi-point interaction I shamelessly ripped off,  will be giving a session on Interaction Techniques Using the Wii Remote (and Other HCI Projects). I’m curious to see if this gives us anything more than what we’ve seen in his previous videos.

Robby Ingebretsen is running the Design Fundamentals for Developers workshop. Robby has a great design sense and his talks are always entertaining. On the other side of that, there is the Cynergy workshop with Rick Barraza, Michael Wolf and Jose Fajerdo on Developing for Experience with 3 Heads. It would be a tough task to find a better design/development team and I look forward to their workshop.

Anyway… have a great holiday. I’m probably going to be offline for a while…