Design for Innovation

Take a look at Chralie Kindel’s post today to see why I’m so excited about the Windows Phone 7 Series developer experience.  If you know what I’ve been working on lately or what I’ve been working with for the past three years, this is very exciting.  Meet me at Mix March 15-17 in Las Vegas and we’ll see this very cool developer platform together.

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The SuperPreview thumbnail display shows which part of a web page is displayed—a real time-saver for really big web pages! You can even navigate from the thumbnail display; just click and drag the highlighted area.

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Hello all and wow it’s good to be back with a video for the site here. Taking some time off at the end of last year and then the setback of transition to Azure hosting of the videos it felt like I blinked and I was three months behind.

Well it is time to kick it back into high gear and I have several videos lined up and I hope to make a real nuisance of myself here in the very near future.

In this video I take a look at building a simple website in Blend using states and behaviors to manage the content and storyboards to add another level of interaction to the site with a simple color changer.

I hope you get something out of the video and as always I invite you to drop a line here in the comments if there are any questions or comments, if there is something you might like to see highlighted in a video or to just say hi.

Thanks,
J.

Click Here To Watch States, Storyboards, and Behaviors.

Here is a zip of the project solution for you.

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SuperPreview displays critical parameters when you click on an individual element. The Tag display shows the element’s type, position, size, and class/ID name.

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Are you a website designer or developer either as a profession or even as a hobby?  If you are, then you may want to attend a free webcast coming up on Wednesday, March 3, 2010 at 2PM ET (11AM PT) where we overview the features of Expression Web 3, Microsoft’s latest website design tool.

To sign up for this free webcast, click here and use the following sign-up code:  10BC45

This overview session will highlight some of the great features of Expression Web.  By the end of this session, you will:

• Understand how Expression Web 3 fits into the Designer/Developer workflow for building web experiences
• See a tour of some of the most important features of Expression Web 3, including
• The Web Editor
• CSS Management tools
• Web Standards Management
• Language Support (including native support for PHP!)
• SuperPreview

If you’ve never heard of Expression Web, then this webcast will likely surprise you as this a fully professional tool to help you build visually appealing, dynamic and standards-adhering websites.  And to answer your question, no, this is not FrontPage vNext.  FrontPage (thankfully!) is dead, never to come back. 

To give you an example of what is possible with the tool, Morten Rand-Hendriksen has built some great sites built using Expression Web 3 which warrant highlighting:

• Design is Philosophy
• By Land or Sea or Air
• Design School Kids

-Paul

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It’s time. So what’s cooking, you may ask? Fun stuff; interviews, special guests, robots,  reviews and, as always, more sketching and prototyping goodies. I will be taking suggestions as well. If there is a topic or idea you would like to hear about, shoot me a DM @ssummers. In the meantime, I will get the new redesign up and going right quick.

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Yesterday was a pretty big day for Microsoft and one that I had been anticipating for a long while.  At the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, we finally unveiled to the world what our next generation of Windows Phones will look and act like – we introduced the Windows Phone 7 Series mobile operating system (watch the announcement here).  This introduction represents a truly radical change in Microsoft’s mobile strategy and already it has been garnering very positive feedback from the public (read Engadget’s review here; my initial search on the Twitter tag #wp7s is extremely positive as well).  You can expect smart devices featuring Windows Phone 7 Series in time for the 2010 Holiday season.

Background

Over the past months (and even years!), Microsoft’s mobile strategy has been questioned and blasted as being yesterday’s news, with very little to bring to the table in today’s highly competitive mobility market.  In complete honesty, I really can’t disagree with a lot of the criticism.  While I am enjoying Windows Mobile 6.5 on my Samsung Omnia Pro II (the device is the best I’ve had in all the smart phones I’ve owned), the experience simply does not rival other mobile OS competitors in the space (notably the iPhone and Android, but also RIM’s Blackberry OS which has very strong traction in North America).

The mobility space is undeniably the “new battleground” in computing.  True, the desktop and laptop computer space continually has iterations of improvement both in software and hardware but the industry has largely become commoditized.  The truth of the matter is that consumers, businesses, software vendors, developers and designers are all looking to the smart device market as the new frontier of computing and a focus for building useful, new and innovative software experiences.  Without a doubt, the market for smart device software has become white-hot.

Microsoft’s Strategy with Windows Phone 7 Series:  The User Experience Comes First

Microsoft believes that a user’s affinity with a given mobile platform is with the experience it provides.  That is to say, the platform allows the user to be the most productive and delighted when using the device.  While the hardware devices themselves are a large part of this experience (nobody wants a clunky-looking smart device), I would argue it isn’t the main reason people are intrigued and itching to get into the industry.  It’s the ability to create powerful user experiences through software that are driving this fervor in the mobile space.  The hardware in of itself can shift the paradigm (see:  iPhone) if the features of the handset have compelling functionality (such as the accelerometer and multi-touch), it’s the software that ultimately drives the experience and differentiates one mobility platform from another.  With this in mind, the Windows Phone 7 Series product team spent much of their time and focus making the experience as user-centric as possible, thereby making the user the most important part of the experience (see a video on this here – please note that you may be required to sign in to view it; the sign-up is free, however).

To get a feel for what the Windows Phone 7 Series experience is like, check out the following video:

Building Compelling User Experiences for Windows Phone 7 Series:  Designers and Developers are First-Class Citizens in this Process

One thing Microsoft understands is its partner community.  You hear it coming from almost anyone who works at Microsoft:  we are successful only when our partners are successful.  As such, we are working hard to make sure that you, as a designer or developer, can build the best smart device experiences on our platform with minimal effort and minimum barrier to entry.

Microsoft will be providing several compelling technologies to build great applications for Windows Phone 7 Series, many of which will use or build on skillsets designers and developers may already have. While as of right now, details on how to develop applications for Windows Phone 7 Series are a little light,  more application development details will be forthcoming at our MIX10 event March15^th through 17^th (if you register before February 21^st you can save $200 off of the registration fee).  You can expect many more details throughout the coming months and in particular at MIX10 where several breakout sessions have been dedicated to the design and development of applications for Windows Phone 7 Series.

As a Windows Phone 7 Series specialist from Microsoft Canada, I will be at this event, so if you have questions or want to book some time with me at the event, let me know!  I can be reached at paul<dot>laberge<at>microsoft<dot>com or via my Twitter handle, @plaberge.

While I don’t have much information to share with you on the application design and development process yet, rest assured it is coming and once we have publicized that information I will be very happy to go through it with you in more detail.

So, What’s in the Box?

I’ve listed some of the most interesting features that will be included in Windows Phone 7 Series below.  While this is obviously not an exhaustive list, this should be enough to get you thinking about what the platform can do (for a more complete list of features, please check out Joey deVilla’s Windows Phone 7 Series blog post on the Developer Connection blog):

• Capacitive Multi-Touch Screen:  The screen for Windows Phone 7 Series will feature 4-point multi-touch. 
• Task-Centric UI:  The UI focuses around what is most important to the user rather than having to navigate through several apps to get to what you want.  This is accomplished through the use of…
• Tiles: At first glance, tiles are just a fancy name for icons, but it’s much more than that.  A tile might take the form of an application’s icon, or, more intersesting, bits of user-centric information.  These tiles can be customised by the user to help get access to the information most important to him/her (example:  a tile linking to the user’s Facebook or Twitter profile).
• Accelerometer and automatic screen rotation:  The ability to sense and capture motion from the hardware.
• Games:  Yes, Windows Phone 7 Series will allow you to run/build games which can also include linkage to XBox Live
• Consistency across hardware buttons:  Each Windows 7 Phone Series-enabled smart device will have 3 buttons – a Windows (aka:  “Start”) button, a Back button, and a dedicated Search button linking to…
• Context-Sensitive Search:  Search allows you to find info locally to your smart device and also web search.  The search results are context-sensitive, meaning, for example, if you are looking for an address, it will launch Bing Maps.  If you’re looking for a email it will look for that email locally or on your email server.
• Social capabilities:  You have the ability to manage and track your friends through your Windows Phone 7 Series smart device across multiple email clients and social networking applications.
• A new version of IE:  Microsoft has stated that the browser included with Windows Phone 7 Series will be the most advanced browser we have produced.
• Media:  The ability to store and play media (music, photos and video) is native to Windows Phone 7 Series.  If you are familiar with the Zune HD interface, this will look very familiar to you.
• Mail and Calendar:  Very rich functionality associated with email and calendar functionality is included in the platform (which you would expect, of course!)

Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list but it does provide a list of features that might be compelling to software developers and designers. 

-Paul

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You’re hearing all about Windows Phone 7 Series—now learn all about it at MIX10.

Everything you could ever want to know about Windows Phone 7 Series is at MIX10. You’ll preview the new development platform, show you how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series development tools, and give you a tour of the Windows Phone Marketplace. All MIX10 attendees will receive access to the Windows Phone 7 Series development tools and have access to a dedicated track on the Windows Phone 7 Series platform that runs throughout the event. MIX10 attendees will also receive exclusive free developer support for the Windows Phone 7 Series development tools. Don’t miss this unique opportunity -attend MIX10.

I hope to see you there – it’s going to be very exciting!

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Today represents a very important day for our country – the start of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games.  Over the next 2 weeks, we are going to be witness to some incredible athleticism and stories with the world united through sport.

I can remember vividly watching previous Olympic Games in front of the television, marveling at the sheer talent and determination of the Olympic athletes in their quest for not only Olympic medals, but also personal bests and the pride of representing their country.  The television networks did a very good job at covering all of the activity in a way that allowed you to maximize the Olympic experience from your living room.

That being said, there are limitations associated with watching such a grand event on the television.  The sheer number of concurrent events means that you can’t always watch an event that you wish to see; the television network will carry events that give them the “best bang for the buck” (hey, they paid big money for the rights to broadcast the content so it only makes sense that high priority events take precedence over other events).  While, for the most part, this isn’t a huge issue, it does limit how you experience the Games in general.

With the advent of rich media on the internet, we have an opportunity to truly shape how large events such as the Olympics will be viewed moving forward.  The fact that the internet is, by nature, interactive means that we have the ability to cater the viewing experience for an event to almost whatever you want it to be. 

In 2008, Microsoft partnered with NBC in the United States to stream the Beijing Olympics via Silverlight, our rich online experience platform.  The results of this endeavour were beyond successful.  For example, in the 2 weeks of the 2008 Olympics, the Silverlight-powered NBCOlympics.com site experienced:

• An average online viewing time per session of 27 minutes (the average viewing session time for internet video is around 3 minutes)
• 1.3 billion page views
• 50+ million unique visitors
• 70 million video streams
• 10 million hours of video watched 
• An average of 5,000 on-demand video clips every day
• Hundreds of highlights produced every day, delivered to all the major computer platforms (Windows, Mac OS X and Linux)

With the success from this event, Microsoft has partnered with CTV and its affiliates to provide the same immersive experience for the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver that US-based visitors to NBCOlympics.com had for the Beijing Olympics (and, for the record, NBC has also renewed the partnership with Microsoft for these Olympic Games as well).

When the games officially open on the evening of Friday, February 12, 2010, Canadians will be able to watch the Olympics from their computer through Silverlight.  This experience will allow Canadians full access to every event, both live and on-demand in High Definition with interactive features that will allow the user to select info on the athletes competing, multiple camera angles and the like. 

To access this interactive multimedia portal, simply go to CTVOlympics.ca (for English content) or RDSOlympiques.ca (for French content). 

In addition to the online video and immersive experience through these two portals, Microsoft has also partnered with CTV on a number of other 2010 Vancouver Olympic fronts.  For example:

	Internet Explorer 8 Download the customized IE8 browser (English, Français) for the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games.  Install and enjoy web slices for IE8 specific to the 2010 Vancouver Olympics experience, including Headline News (English, Français), Photos (English, Français) and Video (English, Français).  If you have IE8 but are unsure of how to install a webslice, check out this link to learn how.
	Bing Visual Search and Instant Answers With Bing, you can search athlete profiles and Olympic events in a visual manner, making it fun and easy to find information pertaining to the Vancouver Games. Torch Relay with Bing Maps See where the Olympic torch has been and the route it has taken across our country to arrive at the Olympic stadium in an interactive way with Bing Maps.
	See On-Demand Content through XBox Live If you have an XBox Live Gold account, you can view on-demand content from the 2010 Olympics directly from your XBox 360 console.

With the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Microsoft, along with CTV, has provided a new world of interactivity for a truly immersive multimedia experience.  I think it’s fair to say that as we see more of these types of opportunities, we will be seeing a change in how we experience multimedia events both at home and abroad.

- Paul

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I have Zune Pass – and I love it.  I just found a song that made me smile.  With the Zune Pass, I can select an artist and have it download an entire playlist of music from the Zune Marketplace that is related to that artist.  The features, called Smart DJ creates a playlist refreshes every five days.  The Zune Pass is how I discover music.  I picked an artist that I like, Jens Lekman, and created a Smart DJ playlist.  I’ve found great groups like David & the Citizens and Suburban Kids with Biblical Names. 

A song appeared on that list this week, Dungeons and Dragons by Montt Mardié.  If anyone else grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons and loved Star Wars like me, I’m sure that the lyrics to this song will elicit the same reaction – a smile.  This was one of my 10 free downloads this month with my Zune Pass.

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