Designer WPF

I apologize for my extended sabbatical here… I’ve recently gotten married, which has thrown a bit of a wrench in my blogging commitment.

I’ll start posting again with some regularity in about three weeks, at which point I will also  start working on my first line-of-business Silverlight project. Until then…

I swear… I’ll get back to the tutorials any day now!

 By in the meantime, I’m doing some form redesign and I wanted to praise to the heavesn Luke Wroblewski, whose many blog posts on form usability is some of the best, most practical stuff I’ve ever seen.

Stuff I’m reading and using right now:

• Guide for aligning input fields and labels - Left align? Right align? Top align? Get some guidance here.
• Best Practices for Web Form Design - a PDF on “the importance of Web forms and a series of design best practices culled from live to site analytics, usability testing, eye-tracking studies, and best practice surveys.”

UPDATE: It turns out that Luke was at MIX… a tragedy that I’m discovering this just now. You can see his panel “The Business Value of Design” or read more about it at his website.

I wanted to take a moment to apologize to everyone to whom I promised more Wii goodness on my blog. I couldn’t get internet access from my hotel last night (despite a 45 minute conversation with a tech support guy). And, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, the internet access here at MIX08 is pretty miserable.

 As in… I have trouble even pulling my own blog up half the time.

 So I’ve decided to wait until I get back to Salt Lake City before I try to finish all my posts.

Put me on your RSS feed… I’ll be going nuts on the blog over the next week putting up all the WPF/Wiimote stuff, catching up on my normal WPF tutorials and starting to dive into Silverlight.

And, because I know that my wonderful fiance is reading this (as well as picking me up from the airport)… I’ll see you this evening, lovely.

In a development certain to inspire renewed confidence in the company that has shown us technological marvel after marvel, Apple has filed a patent elucidating the innovative use of fingertips to drive interaction between people and electronic devices.

“It’s something we feel that Apple is uniquely positioned to bring to the table, given our overwhelming superiority with all technology… at least as percieved by our more rabid devotees” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “This patent will help us corner the market on interactive innovation or, as I like to call it, Appleactive iMacopodovation. TM.”

Under the patent filing, Apple has been granted the exclusive right to develop applications responding to input stemming from the distal phalanges. The company has not been forthcoming with specifics of any application development this may open for them, but the excitement seemed barely containable.

Steve Jobs shows the latest innovation from Apple… fingertips

Continue reading ‘Apple Patents Use Of Fingertips as Interaction Devices’ »

Because I’ve noticed that some of my posts are running a bit long (I just finished writing one that weighs in at 6 pages and 1200 words) , I’m going to start using a “Continue reading this post” tag so that it is easier to browse the post topics rather than scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll your way through a post you don’t care about.

Because here at Designer WPF, we aim to please.

This is a blog dedicated to WPF guidance for designers. The reason I’m creating this blog is because there seems to be almost nothing out there in helping designers to really get into WPF in a meaningful way.

Which is because there aren’t enough good WPF designers to write blogs.

Which is because there aren’t enough good WPF designer blogs to train designers.

 It’s really kind of a vicious cycle.

So this is an attempt to put more out there for designers.

This blog is a continuation of Xaml for Morons. Feel free to head over there for some additional WPF help.