XAML: The language for the Program Manager

or, The Three Little Pigs: Then and Now.

Chapter 1: Then

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away lived 3 little pigs in a wood. One pig was a graphics designer, the other was a program manager (business analyst, if you like) and the third was a developer. They all lived in harmony until new features came along. When that happened, it was usually the program manager (PGM) pig who started all the fuss.

The PGM pig took his primitive toy, or worse still - paper - and squiggled some lines and boxes and wrote up some lines, aligned them all and gave it to the graphics designer (UI) pig.

The UI pig dressed it up nice and fine - added the right colors, hue, gradient, font. He created a lovely looking picture out of it and sent it to the developer. And he would throw the squiggly paper thingy away.

The third (DEV) pig looked at the picture and set to work. His job was to bring the picture to life, and get it to do something. Working on a blank canvas, he painstakingly tried to recreate the picture - each color and image and box and words. Days turned into nights, and then, finally the pig was done.

When the PGM pig saw it, he was huffing and puffing (and blowing the house down!) The buttons should be a little lower! There's too much whitespace on the right! I want all this in the same window! And other things that left the DEV pig scratching his chinny-chin chin.

Some more printouts.
Some more squiggles.
Some more hue, alignment.
Lots of throwing away. Paper, Beautiful old pictures. LoC*.
Some more vigorous hacking.
More scratching the hair on their chinny chin chins.

Vicious Cycle.

The next day, they were confronted by the Big Bad Wolf (the Project Manager) asking them to present their work on time or I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house away!

More huffing and puffing.
More days turning into nights.
More throwing away.
More wishing this was all over.

Little did they know that their lives were about to change.

Chapter 2: Now

One day, the King of Far, Far Away decided "enough is enough. Lets put an end to the pigs' misery!" And so he did.

He created a new way for the designer and developer pigs to talk to each other. Now, these two pigs each use their own toys (for the developer, for the designer) and each toy could talk to the other. No more pretty pictures thrown away. No more starting off from a blank canvas. You could change things completely before you said "Oink!".

And the two little pigs lived happily ever after.

"No, no! Wait for me!" cried the little PGM pig.

Huh?! And the two little pigs lived happily ever after.

"But you don't know this language. All you know is English. Very good English, but its - just English!" Said the DEV pig. Take a look:

<Button>Control.Background PE
<Control.Background>
 <LinearGradientBrush StartPoint="0,0" EndPoint="1,1">
   <GradientStop Color="Yellow" Offset="0.0" />
   <GradientStop Color="LimeGreen" Offset="1.0" />
 LinearGradientBrush>
 Control.Background>
Button>   

"C'mon, its almost English**!" said the PGM pig. "We could all finish up before the Big Bad Wolf came, and go home."

"I hate it when you are right - it usually means more work for me!" conceded the UI pig. "You really needn't know all of it, you know. Just the essentials."

"Sure, anything that means less work" said the PGM pig.

So the PGM learnt to use the new language -XAML - just the essentials. Soon he could make his own tweaks,** and use the designer's tool for all his squiggles.

And so, the three little pigs lived happily ever after.

The End.


*Lines of Code.
** Must read link.

p.s.:
XAML is a MS specific technology, used when the UI is written using WPF or Silverlight.
Wanted from MS now: A tool that functional analysts can use to capture business requirements and draw up screens.

Round up of “Expression around the clock”

The Expression around the clock event happened yesterday in Bangalore at Fuga, a cool venue for an even cooler event. This was a global designer conference(taking place simultaneously in 10 venues around the globe) aptly themed “Design is back!”

The event started with out with registration, Microsoft had a very strict registration and confirmation process for this event and inspite of that the place was packed with people. There were about 200 people and seating was available only for about 70 people.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Shelly Armstrong of the Microsoft Design team. Shelly has been involved in various projects in Microsoft, including the interaction design for the XBox and the Zune. Her talk was totally targeted towards designers and tips on improving UX, design, importance of keeping up with latest trends, networking etc.

After this there was a break, with the bar being opened up [:)]. There was more action ahead though. The next session was by Supreet Singh, an UX designer and Pandurang, a dev. They started out with a desinger dev duel and demostrated how Expression Studio supported the designer-dev collaboration with ease. This was pretty interesting, with Surpreet putting in a video on to his canvas and then Pandurang writing a bit of code for the play and pause functionality.

The dev, (as they put it, didn’t have much idea about UX) and hence he puts up text messages for play and pause. Surpreet then takes this XAML and immediately ports this message into a cool button.

The next part was demos - impressive stuff overall, though I had seen most of them before. The demo which impressed me the most, was the one of a Silverlight video player being able to play 10 high definition videos simultaneously with ease, and the ability for the user to seamless switch between them with no system overload.

Post this was the usual networking session (with more beers though!). Met a couple of interesting people and managed to market our UX blog. People seemed to be very interested by this, especially because we are not a design only firm.(Thanks Ram ! for mentioning our blog in your post.)

At the end, Microsoft gave away a goodie bag to each participant. It had a 60-day trial of the Expression Studio, a design magazine and a Reebok t-shirt!.

Tafiti - Silverlight Live Search

Tafiti is a mashup that uses the resources of Windows Live Search driven by a Silverlight user interface. The result is a search engine with a totally new experience.
Tafiti (which is the Swahili word for "do research") uses a desktop metaphor to search across media types and even filter your data result set multiple times. So here’s my take on Tahiti.

The good
1. Provides a stack view of my search results – Ability to drag multiple search results on to the right pane and to label a stack of results.

2. You can email items of a stack to people, which is pretty useful.
3. Ability to blog about a stack you have created on your Live Space account.
4. Ability to pivot the search results by RSS feeds, books, news items, images. I found this to be very useful . It does not stop here, you can in fact view contextual information on a book. (This feature however doesn’t seem to be working currently)
5. Here is one cool feature, though it took me some time to figure out how to get to this – On your web search results, there is a tree icon and clicking on which provides a real tree view visualization of your search results. You can choose to view how many results you wish to see and hovering over a result provides a brief description of the same. Very cool, but doubt if people will find value.



The bad

1. A somewhat jerky experience throughout, not as smooth as WPF desktop applications.
2. There are some issues with resolution, does not run perfectly on lower resolutions.
3. No pagination for search results – there’s only a more link which is not great usability.
4. There’s a text box for filtering the search results – where you can actually type and I figured that it does a text comparison with the search results and pivots them. Not a common standard for filters - users might be expecting a drop down etc.
5. Try right clicking on the site and you will notice only one option called ‘Silverlight configuration’ clicking on which provides a note about silverlight. I am really hoping that this is customizable ?
6. It opens up all the search results in a new IE window, which is not great usability.
Overall, it’s worth a shot, though I am sure that Microsoft realizes that no one is going to use this as a search engine, it’s more of an effort to showcase the power of silverlight and maybe the future of rich internet applications.