UX

User experience musings

Using the predefined buttons styles for the ApplicationBar in Windows 8

When you create a new Windows 8 application, the Common folder contains a file named StandardStyles.xaml. Amongst other styling resources, this file contains a trove of application bar buttons styles, including Microsoft Design-like icons. In order to use these styles, however, you need to uncomment the corresponding one. Microsoft commented these styles out, because otherwise they would be instantiated by the XAML parser when the app starts, which would cause some delays and use unnecessary memory. ...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, March 25, 2013 3:25 PM | Comments (1)

Session material from TechDays BE and NL

UPDATE: Added the videos Note: Like all material on this blog, this blog post and all the referenced material are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. You are free to reuse material from this post and from the referenced material, but you must attribute this material to me, and link to this blog post, or to my website. Thanks! I had the chance to be invited again to speak at TechDays in Belgium (Antwerp) and in the Netherlands (The Hague), and delivered 3 sessions ...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, March 10, 2013 6:29 PM | Comments (3)

Oredev 2012: Summary and source code

This week, I had the pleasure to be invited to talk at Oredev, a really cool conference taking place in Malmo, Sweden. The whole event is awesome, including a very special dinner on Monday including sauna and swimming in a 6 degrees cold Baltic sea, and a reception with dinner at the town hall, including the mayor himself. Considering Malmo is a town of 300'000 inhabitants, it is a pretty nice occasion and the historical building itself is really worth seeing. For those interested, I placed my pictures ...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, November 11, 2012 9:27 PM | Comments (0)

Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, September 25, 2012 9:41 PM | Comments (1)

Adventures in Windows 8: Understanding and debugging design time data in Expression Blend

One of my favorite features in Expression Blend is the ability to attach a Visual Studio debugger to Blend. First let’s start by answering the question: why exactly do you want to do that? Note: If you are familiar with the creation and usage of design time data, feel free to scroll down to the paragraph titled “When design time data fails”. Creating design time data for your app When a designer works on an app, he needs to see something to design. For “static” UI such as buttons, backgrounds, etc, ...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, September 05, 2012 11:53 PM | Comments (10)

Adventures in Windows 8: Placing items in a GridView with a ColumnSpan or RowSpan

Currently working on a Windows 8 app for an important client, I will be writing about small issues, tips and tricks, ideas and whatever occurs to me during the development and the integration of this app. When working with a GridView, it is quite common to use a VariableSizedWrapGrid as the ItemsPanel. This creates a nice flowing layout which will auto-adapt for various resolutions. This is ideal when you want to build views like the Windows 8 start menu. However immediately we notice that the Start ...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, September 01, 2012 3:19 PM | Comments (8)

Metro design inspiration

[This is the English version of an article I wrote for the Netzwoche publication in Switzerland. This is part 2 of a 3-parts article about Metro. The original article in German can be found online on the Netzwoche website.] With Windows 8, Microsoft is going to potentially install their new design language called Metro on a massive amount of computers of all shapes, from thin low-powered slates to full scale PCs. However Metro was not born overnight and in fact a lot of research was put into it. ...
Print | posted on Posted On Friday, April 27, 2012 9:52 PM | Comments (11)

Slides and source code for my past talks this year

I had the chance to be invited to talk at various conferences this year already, and I promised to post the slides and source code, so here it is! MVVM Applied: From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8 Belgium, Netherlands, Bulgaria The Model-View-View Model pattern is a common denominator between applications using XAML to create the user interface. First applied in WPF, it was then easily ported to Silverlight and Windows Phone development. With WinRT and the Metro-style applications, XAML ...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, April 18, 2012 12:28 AM | Comments (1)

My thoughts about Build, Windows 8, WinRT, XAML and Silverlight

Last week, Microsoft held their long awaited Build Windows (or simply "Build") conference in Anaheim CA. About 5000 people packed the convention center to discover the latest version of the Windows operation system: Windows 8. This is a very major iteration (much more than the Windows Vista –> Windows 7 transition) (and also, it is an early preview so it is quite unfinished ;) As such, we will definitely need a bit more time to play with it before we can express a truly informed opinion. Of course ...
Print | posted on Posted On Saturday, September 17, 2011 9:32 PM | Comments (56)

The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 2, More about Search

This is part 2 of a multipart blog post about the gestures and shortcuts in Windows 8 consumer preview. Part 1 can be found here! More about the Search charm In the first installment of this series, we talked about the charms and mentioned a few gestures to display the Search charm. Search is a very central and powerful feature in Windows 8, and allows you to search in Apps, Settings, Files and within Metro applications that support the Search contract. There are a few cool features around the Search, ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, March 20, 2012 6:53 PM | Comments (1)

The gestures of Windows 8 (Consumer preview): part 1

This blog post started as a simple one, but grew to be quite large and time consuming. I am splitting it, because I really want to publish the first findings already. Stay tuned for more! I am sure that you heard that Windows 8 was released last week in an early although quite stable stage called "consumer preview". Windows 8 is an interesting mix of touch-based and mouse/keyboard based system. Some aspects are a bit annoying (see my post about the "split personalities" in Win8 to see what I mean!) ...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, March 05, 2012 9:38 PM | Comments (2)

Impressions, slides and code from TechDays Belgium and Netherlands

Update: Posted the video of “MVVM Applied” below. This week I was “on tour” in Belgium and Netherlands and presented 3 times: “MVVM Applied, From Silverlight to Windows Phone to Windows 8” (in Belgium and Netherlands) The goal of this session was to make people feel confident that the skills they acquired working in various XAML frameworks (Silverlight, Windows Phone, WPF, Surface, etc) are going to help them tremendously when developing Windows 8 applications. It was a session packed with code, ...
Print | posted on Posted On Sunday, February 19, 2012 11:30 PM | Comments (3)

Screenshots of my #mvvm demo at #techdaysbe

Today I gave a talk in TechDays in Belgium about MVVM in Silverlight 5, Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8. This was the first time I gave that particular talk, and in addition keep in mind this is a developer preview, meaning that it is not finished, and not always stable. I had a few surprises with this build. For example from time to time, the new “Metro style applications” just cannot be launched anymore. Nothing that a simple reboot cannot fix… but I’ll come back to that in a moment. A couple of ...
Print | posted on Posted On Wednesday, February 15, 2012 11:52 PM | Comments (2)

Three years at IdentityMine–and more to come!

Today is the first day of my fourth year at IdentityMine. I can hardly believe how fast it went, and how exciting the trip has been so far. In the past three years, I have had the chance to work on exciting technologies like Windows Presentation Foundation (which is still very much active, and even more exciting since we now have the possibility to add Kinect interactions to any WPF application!), Silverlight, Windows Phone 7 (for which we have a lot of work right now), Microsoft Surface (for which ...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, December 01, 2011 5:40 PM | Comments (2)

Steve Jobs, the legacy

Today is a weird day. I just got the news, as I woke up, that Steve Jobs passed away last night. This news affected me more than I thought it would. I felt the need to write about these emotions, and about my history with Apple. This is probably more for myself than for the reader, so feel free to skip ahead if you don’t like this, but it felt appropriate to keep a few thoughts at this time. I first used a computer at pre-university, probably when I was 15. It was an Apple Macintosh SE. Before that ...
Print | posted on Posted On Thursday, October 06, 2011 9:42 AM | Comments (4)

My Windows 8 slate has split personalities–and what Microsoft could do to improve that

I had dinner the other night with my good friend Josh Smith, and of course we started talking about Windows 8. Something he said was pretty much spot on: He said that Windows 8 feels as if it has split personalities. There are the WinRT “Metro-style” apps and there is the “classic” Desktop, which looks and feels like Windows 7++ (optimized for touch, and actually a real delight to use with my fat greasy fingers). Side note: I really dislike more and more the name “Metro-style” for the WinRT apps. ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, September 20, 2011 11:04 PM | Comments (12)

//build conference in Anaheim: Keynote notes #bldwin

As usual when I attend a conference, I like to take quick notes to remember what it was all about and take some time later to analyze it. Since Windows 8 is going to be the next big things, let me share my notes with you! Today is a launch Start by talking about Win7 450000000 copies of win7 sold Win7 usage is finally greater than XP usage 520’000’000 people using Windows Live services World of computing is changing especially since 1995, last big Windows overhaul Touch is very important in Win8 ...
Print | posted on Posted On Tuesday, September 13, 2011 7:41 PM | Comments (2)

Real life UX is still UX

Note: I posted that on Posterous, but on second thoughts it belongs on this blog too. After all, making UX better is what this is all about, in the end, and not just for computer applications. So apologies to those of you who read that on my Posterous already! The user experience at the Unispital in Zurich is so bad I had to laugh in the face of the receptionist. You *must* have a card on which the appointment is written. It doesn't matter that I made this appointment by phone, and thus it couldn't ...
Print | posted on Posted On Monday, June 06, 2011 9:59 AM | Comments (2)

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