Last week I had a really cool opportunity.  The organizers of VSLive San Francisco invited IdentityMine to present their third day keynote.  We said yes, of course, and I ended up being the lucky guy on stage. 

I’ve had a number of opportunities to talk to people about WPF, but usually at a technical level in the context of a training or presenting a singular aspect of the platform.  The keynote was cool because it gave me a chance to step back a little and talk about WPF at a higher level and share some thoughts about the “why” of WPF instead of the “how.”

This had some pretty good convergence with some thinking that we’ve been doing at IdentityMine about how to communicate our thoughts about WPF and the software we build with it.  That resulted in our “Love Your Software” campaign (the manifestation of which is loveyoursoftware.com).  The convergence of the two resulted in the title of the keynote which was “Love Your Software: Real World Development Using WPF.”

We’ve been amazed by how many people have responded to the love your software concept.  In the past, we’ve talked about software that “wows” you, etc. but this never really captured the whole picture and it feels a little empty.  The best experiences are more than the exciting first impression.   Great software is about working, looking and feeling great over the long term.  While it’s true that there is an emotional component to great products of any kind, “wow” in the beginning is not going to be enough.  Especially when “wow” become “annoying” over time.

As I was building the slides for this, I wanted to quantify the elements one could consider when building software that people will love.  I wanted a list along the lines of: useful, intuitive, beautiful, etc.  I had a lot of adjectives, but the list felt like something was missing.  If design is communication + art, then I think it’s the art part of the equation that was difficult to nail down.  As I was trying to get my head around this, I came accross something that I thought was interesting. 

When I was at Microsoft I had a chance to be involved with some usability testing for new behaviors we introduced in a handful of the controls (bonus points to anyone who can find those).  It was a cool experience and I completely get the value.  It was great to confirm our suspicions about the particular issues we were considering and also change our thinking on some.  Overall, it was a pretty decent attempt to quantify the quality of that particular experience.  

I read (somewhere–couldn’t find where, so consider this an anecdote for now) that Apple doesn’t do that.  They don’t do usability testing on their software.  I don’t believe that Apple software is untouchable in terms of experience, but on the whole they build software that many many people really love (including my wife whose feelings toward her Macbook have some serious emotion behind them).  That must be where the art is.  It’s amazing that they have that kind of confidence about the experiences they create. 

I hesitate to leave the impression that building great software isn’t something that can be learned, though.  I think it can.  In fact, maybe it’s better to think about the art of creating great software as more of a craft, an applied art.  Every time I talk about to developers about WPF, I meet a handful of people in the group that really get excited about the potential.  A lot of these guys are designers in cocoon.  If that’s you, I hope you feel empowered by what WPF brings to the table and not initimidated. 

Well, the conference was great (even without the list).  It was great to finally get my thoughts down about how WPF fits into the UX equation, how it is that WPF really enables better experiences.  It was great to share my excitement about the platform and the opportunities it creates and also feel that excitement from the attendees.  Thanks to those of you who stuck around to talk afterward.

If you want, you can check out the slides here (the link works now!).  I left my notes in but I’m not sure if they are all in tact.  Hopefully you can follow along.  The demos I showed are also all available online: here’s a video of the Accurent real estate app, source for the healthcare app, and a download page for the Seattle PI reader. 

Enough said.  I know this and you know this, but let’s just move on.  I realize that my committment to the blog has a tendency to wax and wane a little, but right now it’s waxing.  So I’m just going to roll with it.

I just approved 10 comments.  Some were over a week old.  Unfortunately, my overly aggressive spam filter is misreading some of you.  Sorry for the delay on approving those and thanks for the comments.  I’ve tried to adjust the filter so I miss fewer next time.

Let’s start at the beginning.  “Royale” is the name of the theme that ships on Windows Media Center Edition (and it was also called Electric Blue or something along those lines on the Tablet release of XP).  Royale was blue and, in fact, looked a lot like the blue version of the Luna theme, but shinier (and prettier, but if it’s shiny, doesn’t that go with out saying?).

Well, when the talented folks at MSX were creating Royale, they also created a rogue version of the theme called Royale Noir.  Somehow it got signed and then unofficially distributed internally.  It was really cool.  It actually made XP look really great and it was common for people to think I was running Vista when they saw my machine with Royale Noir.

In fact, this became a bit of a problem.  I would purposely turn Royale Noir off if I was going to be showing my screen in public (at conferences, etc.) to avoid questions about the rogue theme.  I forgot a lot, though, a lot of you saw it and asked about.

So the good news: first, Royale Noir actually leaked a week or so ago.  You can get the leaked version here.  I wish this had happened a year ago.  It’s kind of crummy timing for MS, really, because XP now looks much cooler and right on the eve of Vista’s launch.  It’s great for XP users though.

Now for the twist.  Today, Nathan sent me a link to this.  It’s a refactored version of the Royale Noir theme that they are tying to the Zune.  Interesting.  Unfortunately, I can’t try this out because I don’t have a machine that boots to XP these days.  That’s right, I’m a serious self hoster (even on my MacBook!).  Word is, though, that it’s cleaned up, a little grayer and has an orange start button.  In case you missed the earlier link, get it here.

Incidentally, WPF does support Royale.  By that, I mean that we created a vector version of each of the default control styles for Royale.  But not Royale Noir.  Normally in this situation WPF would fall back to the classic theme for all the default controls.  I think that Royale Noir must have been a modified Luna Silver, though, because for some reason (which I never investigated), that’s what I seemed to get when Royale Noir was running on my machine.  If someone tries out the Zune theme with WPF, let me know what the default controls do.

Yeah things have been pretty static (dare I say stagnant) lately, but I’m back and happy to be writing again. 

The lapse is, in part, due to some big changes for me.  With WPF all but out the door, the team has been transitioning into V2 planning.  There are some exciting things on the horizon for WPF, but, for better or worse, I took this opportunity evaulate my career and found an incredible opportunity outside of Microsoft.

So, I’ve taken a job with IdentityMine.  It’s been awesome.  Working at Microsoft was amazing and moving on was a tough decision.  I loved the people I worked with and I loved the technology.  In fact, I may have loved the technology too much because that’s what drew me to IdentityMine.  I’ve really had a chance to pull out my inner design kung fu and create some neat stuff.  IdentityMine is a design/dev firm with a strong specialty in WPF.  This really is more in line with my passions these days, and it;s been an amazing place to do that.

Along those lines, we’ve really assembled an world-class team and word seems to be getting out because these days it seems like we nearly have more work than we can handle.  Because of that, we’re definitely looking for more great people.  It really is a fabulous company, so if you’re potentially interested please don’t hesitate to contact me. 

One last update: I’ve had lots of requests for an updated version of SplitView.  SplitView is a XamlPad-like tool that I’ve used in presentations from time to time.  It had some features that XamlPad has been conspicuously missing (like Find and Goto Line).  It didn’t, however, have many of the features that you would have come to expect from an editing tool like Save and Open.  Because of that, I really haven’t kept it up.  Instead, I’ve redirected my energy into a new tool called Kaxaml (read kuh-zamel).  IIt’s the best of SplitView meets the best of XamlPad meets the best of Notepad.  ‘ll have a beta up by the end of the week so stay tuned.

A number of people have requested new or updated versions of samples.  I’ll be post those and some cool new stuff in the next couple of days on the new WPF community site.

I just uncovered a number of legitimate comments that had been marked as spam.  For some reason, I get a ton of spam on this site so I filter it pretty aggressively.  I’ve restored and approved the comments I caught.  If for some reason your comments haven’t been approved, please repost or let me know.  Thanks.

I’ve posted my demo and slides here. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t redistibute some of the resources which I used in the actual demo. As I mentioned, I paid $3 for the chalkboard image and unfortunately $3 doesn’t give you a license for redistribution. I recreated a chalkboard image do the best of my abilities, but it’s little marble-y or something. If you want, you can purchase the original image yourself on iStockPhoto.

Also, the DynaPanel that I used is not ready for distribution. I’ve substituted it with Kevin Moore’s Animated Tile Panel, which is also super cool and the precursor to DynaPanel. You can get source for that directly from Kevin.

I haven’t had a chance to post my demo materials yet, but I haven’t forgotten. I’ll at least get the chalkboard demo and slides up by tomorrow.

Just finished watching Bill and Tim O’Reilly do Q&A.  By Q&A I mean that Tim asked questions that Bill answered.  At first I was concerned that the questions had been scripted.  Somehow they came off that way.  It became clear quickly, however, that they were at least somewhat from the cuff because Bill clearly didn’t like some of the questions.

It was interesting to see Bill and Tim spar about the future of software.  The focus was on live/web2.0.  Tim claims these are different names for the same thing.  Not sure that Bill would go that far, but they do share an assumption of connectivity and the potential for collaboration.

Bill was on top of his game in terms of describing the technology.  He presented a vision for connectivity and universal information sharing that was truly awesome.  He proposed an end-to-end where everything from my computer to my car were able to share certain information about me.  The obvious thing here is sharing something like contacts, but what if all of these devices knew my music preferences or my favorite TV shows. 

That said, these apps were connected, but not necessarily web apps.  I felt like Bill wasn’t getting his head around the value of a web community.  Tim brought up the example of searching ranking by the simple accumulation of links.  As the community creates more copies of a link, they implicitly able to implicitly increase that link’s search ranking (and arguably its value).  The community-based spoofing detection in IE7 is another great example of implicitly leveraging the value of a connected community.  Unfortunately, that was Tim’s example.  Bill’s ideas about this were more explicit: community hosted templates, etc. 

Nevertheless, Bill came off smart.  So did Tim.  They only left time for 3 or 4 audience questions, but those came off great as well.  In fact, Darren David was sitting next to me and wondered if they had been plants. 

Finally, it’s worth mentioing that the BBC showed a demo that was clearly built using WPF.  The demo was mostly really smooth, although there appeared to be some issues with the framerate on the 3D animations.  The BBC has an amazing concept.  They want to distribute DRMed content using p2p.  The content would be free for the first week after broadcast and then available for purchase.  It’s like Tivo for your PC.  The frontend was all written using WPF and was pretty nice.  The had good integration of video and an amazing rolodex-like 3D contact picker which supported some level of drag-and-drop and maybe even some element interaction.

Can’t wait to see what’s in store tomorrow.  I believe tomorrow’s keynote has even more WPF demos, including some stuff that should be amazing.