The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was held in January and as predicted there was lots of exciting new mobile technology on show.

Sony showed off their new Xperia Z smartphone. This is a mammoth 5 inch device, with a 1080p display, and quad-core processors. Sony is clearly aiming at the top end of the market with this product, and if you are planning on buying a large form factor device this year then this should definitely be on your list.

The CES also saw the unveiling of the Pebble, billed as a Smart Watch. This device syncs with your phone and shows caller information and text messages. You can also push custom alerts to it and run basic apps. All this functionality is wrapped up in a tiny form factor that actually manages to look the part.

However one of our favorite new products at the show, and possibly the most low tech, was the CardNinja. This is basically a bit of fabric that sticks to the back of your phone, and forms a sort of pocket. You can then put all your cards and cash in it, removing the need for a separate wallet. It looks slim and almost too fragile (you can find more pictures here) but it is designed to be strong enough to do the job. It might not use an HD screen or the latest ARM processor, but products like this show there will always be room for good design.

I was recently invited to speak at the Second Annual Symposium on Communicating Complex Information (SCCI). The goals of the conference, sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (SIGDOC), were to clarify the state of the art when designing for the communication of complex information, identify current major research issues and define methodology to transform research into practical applications.

My presentation, “It’s Not About Usability”, described how usability typically refers to post-design measurement and testing. I argued that what’s needed to create complex systems that are both usable and useful is not usability but Design. Companies that attempt to address the issue of poor design by handing the problematic screens to usability professionals are treating the symptoms rather than the disease.

At D³ / Infragistics Services, our User Experience Architects, Designers and Developers collaborate in a research-informeddesign process that drives the creation of innovative applications based on a thorough understanding of the relationship between what users want (requirements they can express) and what users need (requirements they don’t realize they have).

I would love to speak to your organization. Send me email at krichardson@infragistics.com.

Kevin Richardson has been working in the area of user experience for over 20 years. With an advanced degree in Cognitive Psychology, he has experience across business verticals in the fields of research, evaluation, design and management of innovative, user-centered solutions.

Kevin’s experience includes web sites, portals and dashboards, enterprise software and custom business applications for medical, pharmaceutical, communications, entertainment, energy, transportation and government users.

On the weekends, you can find Kevin on his motorcycle, riding for Infragistics Racing at a number of different racetracks on the East coast.

One of my most popular conference talks is now  available as an on-demand webinar!

Who is this webinar for?

More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This session is targeted at developers who know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#.

What is covered in the webinar?

We look at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provide a quick intro to the Apple world. I present everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we build our first simple iOS project for the iPhone. I make several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we take a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

If you’ve always wanted to take a look at iOS development, this is the webinar to get you started.

Watch the Webinar Video

The webinar video is available on YouTube. You can start it with the video image link below:

Download the Materials

The webinar slides and demo are available using the links below:

• Download the webinar slides here
• Download the webinar iPhone demo application SpanishQuiz here

Noteworthy Links

• Register at developer.apple.com
• Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
• Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
• Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
• Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
• Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
• Recommended Books:
  • iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
  • Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
  • iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
  • Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Learn More About NucliOS

I mentioned NucliOS only briefly in this webinar. To learn more about our native iOS controls, make sure to watch our NucliOS launch webinar from a couple months ago here.

To try the NucliOS Samples Browser app on your iPhone or iPad, download it from the iTunes App Store here.

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this webinar, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick. Also make sure to let me know what other topics you’d like to see in future webinars.

This last Wednesday, we hosted a webinar called Intro to Sketching Prototypes.  We posted the recording on YouTube, so thought we should let you know in case ya missed it.

Webinar Description: Sketching prototypes? Yep, you heard that right—you'll have to watch to learn what it means! :) This webinar tangos with the theory behind effective prototyping, illustrates some of the tools at our disposal, and demonstrates how to effectively leverage a new software prototyping tool that tackles this practice head on--Indigo Studio. You'll come away more empowered to design software that exceeds expectations.

Enjoy!

Any good .NET developer knows that the web is packed full of useful news, tips, and code examples. A lot of this content can be found in blogs; here we present 5 such sites that you really should be reading:

• ScottGu’s blog:
  • Scott Guthrie (offical site) is a corporate vice president in the Microsoft developer division. He developed ASP.NET with Mark Anders, and as a result his blog carries considerable weight in the community. Rightly so! For someone so senior he posts pretty regularly. Content mainly relates to product announcements for the tools and apps he is responsible for, but there is always something interesting to read. Well worth a look.
• Scott Hanselman:
  • Another MS employee, and another Scott. Scott Hanselman works in the web platform team at Microsoft, and his blog covers a wide variety of topics.  Expect to find posts on .NET, web technology, and the joys of remote working.
• Ode To Code:
  • This blog is run by a .NET consultancy company and is updated regularly with practical code examples and tutorials. A really good blog for those wanting to improve their coding skills.
• Weblogs.asp.net:
  • Not a single blog as such, but a community of blogs from a huge number of contributing authors. This site features some famous names (Scott Guthrie’s blog, above, is hosted here) as well as lots of authors posting tips and tricks from their day-to-day experiences. Well worth a casual read; even more valuable to search if you have a particular problem or issue to solve.
• Fear and Loathing: 
  • This blog is written by Bil Simser, a solutions architect specializing in .NET and SharePoint. A good read for anyone wanting to know more about .NET and SharePoint, this blog also offers an interesting mix of technical and nontechnical articles, all written in a really readable style. Also features some great Windows Phone content.

Styles are the means using which you can implement a consistent look and behavior in WPF applications. Using styles, you can easily change the visual appearance of a control.

Through styles, you can apply a set of one or more properties, resources, and so on to one or more elements.

Consider a UI screen designed with plenty of controls. The controls belonging to each type, such as TextBox or Button need to look similar for overall consistency. This can be achieved through styles.

The Style element is used to define styles. It has a TargetType attribute specifying the object to which the style will be applied and a Key attribute uniquely identifying the style. A Style element contains one or more Setter elements, each of which has a Property attribute and a Value attribute.

The Property attribute specifies the property that the Setter willchange while the Value attribute specifies the property value.

Following are some important points regarding styles:

• Any element derived from FrameworkElement can have a style applied to it.
• You must set the TargetType property when you create a Style, failing which, the XAML processor throws an exception.
• Styles can be defined using either attribute syntax or property element syntax, though the preferred approach is the attribute syntax.
• A style defined inline instead of in a resource is limited in scope to the containing element. It has no resource key; therefore, you cannot reuse it, even for other elements of the same type.
• A style defined in a resource is more adaptable and useful, and is strongly recommended.
• It is invalid to specify more than one value in a single Setter element.
• If there is more than one setter in the setter collection with the same Property value, the setter that is declared last is used.

Examples:

Some examples of defining and applying styles are shown here:

Example 1:

This code defines a style resource named MyButtonStyle that creates a font style that you want to apply to objects of type Button. The Style contains only one Setter element that sets the FontSize property. In the preceding markup, four controls are created within the StackPanel. However, the style is applied only to the Button controls, and not the RadioButton control. This is because of two things: firstly, the TargetType of the style is set to be Button and secondly, the Style property of the Button controls is explicitly set to MyButtonStyle.

Even if you tried applying the MyButtonStyle to the RadioButton control, it will fail because the TargetType of the style is Button.

Example 2:

The following example defines an inline style with a custom linear gradient brush to a button.

You can reuse an existing style to create a new style and add additional Setter elements if required. The BasedOn attribute of a Style element enables you to implement this functionality. Inherited styles, also called BasedOn styles, are a great way to apply multiple styles to a control, because you can’t use more than one style key in the StaticResource reference.

For example, you could reuse a style named MyStyle which sets font size to 12 and add a new Setter element to set the background to Orchid as follows:

In this code, InheritedButtonStyle is a style that inherits an earlier style, MyStyle.

Styles versus Control Templates

A style determines the individual properties of a control, whereas a control template determines how the control displays bound data. With a control template, you can assemble several smaller controls into a single control to present varied views of the bound data.

There’s no question business has gone mobile. Between client calls, bicoastal business meetings, ever-expanding sales territories, telecommuting, and more, the need to access business data from remote locations has skyrocketed.  This is consistent with the adoption of tablet devices.  According to McKinsey & Company’s Telecom, Media & High Tech Extranet report, “Nearly 90% of employees use smartphones and tablets to do at least 25% of the work they formerly did on their PCs.” 1

What’s more, mobile device usage for business is not limited to any class of employees; it’s not just the tech enthusiasts or the C-Suite anymore.  Tablets and smartphones have truly reached a mass audience.

Whether your enterprise has a corporate policy on tablets or it’s a “bring your own device” culture, enterprise tablet adoption has ramped up and will continue to grow by almost 50% annually.2

Mobility gives enterprises and their employees the freedom to be productive beyond the office’s walls, but it’s not without its shortcomings.  Ease of setup and security are the two biggest concerns, for businesses and employees alike.

ReportPlus is a self-service business intelligence tool that gives users secure access to enterprise data and allows the creation of reports and dashboards on the iPad.  The simple deployment and intuitive user interface eliminates any IT resource drain, as time spent configuring devices and training is minimal.  ReportPlus empowers users to access critical information to help them make informed business decisions, no matter where they’re working.  It is a noteworthy business application built for the tablet movement.

Whether we are in a post-PC era, where acutely portable devices like tablet computers and mobile phones eclipse the personal computer in terms of usability, convenience, and popularity, tablet devices are here to stay.  While they bring with them new challenges – security, policy, support, and so on – they also provide a promiseland of opportunities.  Once enterprises determine their approach to tablet devices, they outfit their employees with portable, user-friendly business supercenters.  Applications like ReportPlus empower businesses and their employees to be completely, securely, intelligently productive from a workplace that is increasingly 24/7 and increasingly mobile.

Download our White Paper to find out how ReportPlus fosters self-service BI form your tablet.

Sources:

1. McKinsey & Company.  BYOD: From company-issued to employee-owned devices.
2. http://www.forbes.com/sites/markfidelman/2012/05/02/the-latest-infographics-mobile-business-statistics-for-2012/

I’m on the road again for my second user group tour of 2013.  This time I am headed to the great state of New York.  I am calling it the I-90 Tour, mainly because all the groups I will be speaking at are located along the I-90 New York State Thruway. 

On March 26 I will be speaking at the Microsoft Developers of Western New York in Buffalo.  Then, the next day (March 27), I’ll be heading over to the Visual Developers of Upstate New York in Rochester.  Finally, I’ll be wrapping up my tour in the city of Syracuse at the Central New York Developers Group on March 28.

So what will I be talking a bout?  Well, in Buffalo and Syracuse I will be giving a session on “WPF for the Real World”, and in Rochester they have opted for my ever so popular “Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism” session.  You can read the session abstracts below to get an idea of what will be covered in each session.

Topic:  WPF for the Real World
Level: 100
Description:
Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) is becoming more and more popular as businesses begin to convert their legacy Windows Forms applications and write their new line of business applications using WPF.  WPF provides developers with a unified programming model for building rich Windows smart client user experiences that incorporate UI, media, and documents.  With WPF, you can create a wide range of both standalone and browser-hosted applications.  This session is aimed at giving you the knowledge required to get started writing line of business WPF applications so that you can become a more important asset to your employer.  There will be no spinning buttons, no rotating cubes, and no silly or impractical tricks.  This session will concentrate on the basic building blocks required to be a successful WPF developer.  By the end of this session you will know what XAML is, how to manage layout in your application, define controls in your views,  style and template your views, handle events, and manage data with data binding and the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern.  Come join me in this interactive and fun learning experience where you can control the direction of the talk and emphasize what you are most interested in.

Topic:  Building Composite XAML Applications with Prism
Level:  300
Description:
In this session you will learn how to design and build Windows Phone, Silverlight, and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) desktop applications using loosely coupled components that can evolve independently but which can be easily and seamlessly integrated into the overall application. This is an introductory talk that concentrates on the basic concepts required to build a composite application with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices Prism framework which includes the boostrapper, regions, modules, view composition, and different techniques for communicating between loosely couple components.  Various development patterns and technologies will also be discussed including Inversion of Control (IoC), Dependency Injection (DI), Unity, MEF (Managed Extensibility Framework), commanding, event aggregation, and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).

Unlike my BAM! User Group Tour, I will not be flying everywhere, but instead I’ll be driving.  That should make for a much less stressful trip and I’ll get to sightsee out my car window.  I hope to see you there, but if you can’t make it, you could always request me to come speak at your user group.

Come snow or high water, Infragistics was committed to being a part of World IA Day, and for good reason.  Our meeting of the minds of technologists throughout business, policy, academia, and more was a smashing success.  The day was chock full of networking opportunities, presentations about “the architecture part” of information architecture, and spirited dialog from our most valuable resource – you!

If you weren’t able to make it to Infragistics’ Headquarters for World IA Day, you can still tap into the knowledge base (Links To Presentations Below).  After all, isn’t that the point of technology?

And keep an eye out for future events at Infragistics, including World IA Day 2014.

The Impact of Rich Iterations on User Experience Design by Tobias Komischke, PhD

Rich internet and desktop application frameworks provide advanced features like direct object manipulation and advanced animations that can enhance the user experience. This paper traces the history and evolution of rich applications and in front of the background of the T.O.T.E. framework discusses the benefits that rich application capabilities provide for the human-system interaction.

UX of Windows 8 by Kevin Richardson, PhD

Maybe I’ve been around site maps for so long now that I think in those terms without realizing it. Maybe the hierarchical structure represented by a traditional site map taps into something primal in the human brain. Folks with library science or neuropsychology backgrounds will have to weigh-in with a more definitive answer. This talk will describe my experience creating the information architecture and page layout for an app destined for use on an MS tablet PC and contrast it with the more traditional organizational structure found in Websites and iOS applications.

Having Fun With Indigo Studio by Ambrose Little and George Abraham

In this talk, George and Ambrose will introduce you to a new user-centered, rapid prototyping tool called Indigo Studio. See how fast and fun it is to bang out your design ideas with this tool that you can start using for free on your next design challenges.

Data Viz from a Developer's Perspective by Will Robertson

Create great, compelling data visualizations in your application. Covers iteration and working out how to define where you data can be visualized and what makes sense, understand different visualization requirements for different platforms and audiences. This talk addresses the challenge of visualization the right data in a right way - code demos will showcase examples and best practices.

Useful, Usable and Desirable: Designing for People by Jessica Ivins: (email Jessica for a copy of her presentation)

"It needs to be easy to use." We've heard this many times before from stakeholders, clients, and colleagues. But how do you go about making a website--or any product or service--easy to use? While there are plenty of industry leaders, books, articles, and best practices to learn from, what matters is context. For whom are you designing? What is this person's goals, motivations, and pain points? What is he or she trying to accomplish? Good design solves real problems. It doesn't just decorate. How can you design to solve real problems for real people?

This session will explore the fundamentals of user experience. We'll explore industry best practices and examples of websites that solve real problems for real people. There are many tools and disciplines within user experience, from content strategy to information architecture to user research. By understanding these tools and when to use them, and by understanding the context of each design problem we are faced with, we can begin to understand how to utilize design thinking and creating user experiences that are useful, usable, and desirable.

Visual Design Principles and Applied Examples to Interaction Design by Marcela Esteves

Visual design not only enables an aesthetically pleasing user experience but should also help convey the interaction design model and serve as user guidance. This presentation will cover visual design principles and how they were used to enhance the user experience in two Healthcare applications.

IA and VUI Design: Huh? Why Should I Care About IA With a Speech UI? by Larry Murphy

This talk will discuss the importance of collaboration between IA and VUI Design disciplines, present examples of existing IA structures that restrain modern VUI Designers from producing UIs that could thrill users and propose thought-provoking IA and VUI Design partnership ideas that can deliver user-inspiring designs.

Congress' Wicked Problem: Seeking Knowledge Inside the Information Tsunami by Lorelei Kelly

The lack of shared expert knowledge capacity in the U.S. Congress has created a critical weakness in our democratic process. Along with bipartisan cooperation, many contemporary and urgent questions before our legislators require nuance, genuine deliberation and expert judgment. Congress, however, is missing adequate means for this purpose and depends on outdated and in some cases antiquated systems of information referral, sorting, communicating, and convening. Prior to 1995, Congress had deep pools of resident expertise and was a global leader in science and technology. Most of that support system was eliminated, however and today the absence of basic knowledge management in our legislature means Congress struggles to make policy on complex issues while it equally lacks the wherewithal to effectively compete on substance in today’s 24 hour news cycle. This paper points out that Congress is not so much venal and corrupt as it is incapacitated and obsolete. And, in its present state, it cannot serve the needs of American democracy in the 21st Century.

Today is an exciting day for me.  My book, Designing for Windows 8, officially released today and is now available.  Those of you that pre-ordered it early might already have it or are receiving it today!  

When I got contacted back at the beginning of May, I wasn't sure if writing this book was something that I wanted to commit to or not.  I received a lot of advice from colleagues.  Some were in favor of the idea and some said I should run away from it as fast as possible.  Thankfully, I decided to do this because it has been a very rewarding process. Now, I just have to wait for the UPS guy to bring me my copies.

So, you might be wondering what's actually in the book and why you might want to pick up a copy.

What's in the book?

The book uses the Running Total reference application that was built using Infragistics Win UI controls as an example throughout the book.  Full access to the source code for this application is provided with the book.

Chapter 1 introduces you to the inspirations behind the Microsoft Design Style.  This is something I covered in my design series earlier this year.

Chapter 2 goes into detail about the Microsoft Design Style principles.  I discussed these at some length in the design series starting in part 3.  The book goes into greater detail on each.

Chapter 3 is all about design strategies.  This chapter will help you design the right app and produce the right design for it.  Part of this chapter deals with prototyping, which is something I have started a series for using Indigo Studio.

Chapter 4 discusses the "basic building blocks" of Windows 8 design.  ListView/GridView, App Bar, Navigation Bar, and Semantic Zoom are all covered in this chapter and design strategies for each are introduced.

Chapter 5 deals with the Windows 8 platform and some specifics you will need to consider in your app design.  These include designing for touch and designing for the form factor.

Chapter 6 is a brief chapter with practical information about bringing existing apps (both desktop and other tablet platforms) to the Windows Store.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below or find me on Twitter @brentschooley.  You can also email me at bschooley@infragistics.com.

Anytime you approach a new library or set of controls sometimes it’s nice to get a helping hand. In an effort to make it drop-dead simple for you to learn how to get started with Ignite UI, I am announcing the release of Fundamentals of Ignite UI.

This video series will acquaint you with Ignite UI from some of the high level architectural constructs down to the details a control’s API. The first batch of videos in the series includes 15 videos which introduce Ignite UI as a whole and then moves into working with the particulars of the igGrid control.

Ignite UI Introduction

• Introduction
• Coding Approaches and Server Support
• Browser & Environment Support
• Licensing
• Prerequisites
• Installing & Exploring Ignite UI on Your Machine

igGrid Introduction

• Introduction
• Features
• Architectural Overview
• The Basics
• Basic Options

igGrid Interactive Features

• Filtering
• Sorting
• Selection
• Paging

I am splitting up the total of the grids features into interactive, customizable and editable features. This batch just gets you warmed up to the igGrid and then reviews the interactive features. Later customization features will include features like cell merging, column resizing, column moving and the like. The last section will take you through the features which support CRUD operations in the grid.

The long-term goal is to go through as many controls as possible, so there’s a lot of content ahead!

Please let me know what you think of the videos and feel free to suggest what you might like to see covered in an upcoming video.

Another one of my popular conference talks is now available as an on-demand webinar! Excited?

Who is this webinar for?

You can approach this webinar from many different perspectives, depending on whether you are a:

• .NET Developer: You already know Visual Studio, C# and/or VB.NET, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Silverlight or WPF. You’re now ready to make the jump into the world of mobile development. Windows Phone is a natural transition as your current skillset translates very easily to this platform.
• Windows Phone Developer: You’re already familiar with Windows Phone 7.x but maybe you haven’t had a chance to explore the new consumer and developer features in Windows Phone 8. This webinar is a great way to get started on your ramp-up.
• Mobile Developer: You already know mobile development on iOS, Android or maybe jQuery Mobile? Windows Phone is a platform that is definitely worth exploring. The market share may be small today but it is growing fast, especially given the similarities between Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Windows Store apps. This webinar does go over some of the reasons why you should care about Windows Phone too.

What is covered in the webinar?

In this session I discuss how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and hybrid HTML5 apps (i.e. PhoneGap). We look at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the Windows Store is at, and what the opportunity is for you as a mobile developer.

I present a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dive into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, what the upgrade story is for WP 7.5 devices, and explore some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs, Nokia Maps control and more.

Watch the Webinar Video

The webinar video is available via GotToWebinar. Free registration is required if you did not register for this specific webinar before. You can access it with the video image link below:

Download the Webinar Materials

The webinar slides and demo are available using the links below:

• Download the webinar slides here
• Download the webinar Text-to-Speech demo project here (with links to other demos)
• Download the final app version of the Text-to-Speech demo for free from the Windows Phone Store: talk2me
• Other demos I showed can be found in the Windows Phone Developer Portal at:
• Fast App Resume
• Alarm Clock with Voice Commands
• Basic Text-to-Speech
• Speech Recognition
• Nokia Map Control
• New Live Tile Templates

Noteworthy Links

• Windows Phone Developer Portal: dev.windowsphone.com
• Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
• Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
• Windows Phone Developer Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/ 
• Windows Phone Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/
• Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
• Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
• Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
• Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
• Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
• NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile

Interested in iOS Development?

Windows Phone is a great platform, but you can’t really call yourself a mobile developer until you’ve learned about other mobile platforms, especially when it comes to iOS development. Fortunately, we have another webinar for you!

More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This webinar is targeted at developers who know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#.

Watch the webinar here: iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this webinar, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick. Also make sure to let me know what other topics you’d like to see in future webinars.

It’s DevWeek! The London Barbican Centre hosts the UK’s largest developer conference. Close to 600 developers are here - and so are we. Infragistics is represented with a booth and we’ve had a lot of interesting conversations already.

There are nine parallel tracks, so tons of talks to choose from. Obviously, it’s a developer conference, so the vast majority of talks are development-related. Following the same successful approach from the past years, they organizers have sprinkled in a couple of UX-related talks. I’ve given two out of three:

- User-centered Data Visualization

- How to assess User Experience

The third talk, by the way, was a talk about the Windows 8 design language (formerly known as Metro). For your reference, our very own Kevin Richardson has given a webinar about the same topic recently. See here.

In the “How to assess UX” talk, we’ve had some fun in a live-demonstration of usability testing. A brave guy volunteered to try out a software product: Windows DVD Maker. I often use this product for demonstration purposes because while it’s a very useful application that comes free with Windows 7, it provides some challenges for users.

During the Q&A of my data visualization talk a guy made the great point of saying that visualizing data the right way is just half of the equation. You also have to ensure that you visualize the right data. And that is probably the hardest part. I don’t how solve this problem, especially since it seems to go beyond user experience design, but in my experience it helps to play around with data you have and see what story it tells. Oftentimes, once you have a visualization in front of you, it provokes questions, e.g. “There seems to be a trend over the last 5 years. What about the previous 5 years? Can I extrapolate the next 5 years?”. Anyway, I was just happy to get that kind of thoughtful comments. After all, “visualizing the right data the right way” is of the same stimulative nature than “building the right product the right way” – and that is what user-centered design is all about.

Are you interested in learning how to use the most comprehensive HTML5 / JQ toolkit on the market?  

Please check out our Free video course:

• Ignite UI Introduction: 6 videos
• igGrid Introduction: 5 videos
• igGrid Interactive Features: 4 videos

First off, yes I know it is March and Spring is right around the corner.  However, it’s not Spring yet and when I left home via Newark-Liberty International Airport the plane needed to be de-iced before takeoff.  Snow was coming down, it was cold, planes were being delayed… in my books, that’s Winter and it doesn’t look like it’s going away fast enough for my liking.  So, I’m going south.  In fact, I’m already on my way since I’m writing this from Roanoke (more on that in a later post).

Where am I going?

This trip will take me south through Virginia, North Carolina and then finally on a tour of Florida.  In particular, I will be speaking (or have already spoken) at the following events:

• March 9 – Roanoke Code Camp 2013 – Virginia Western Community College, Roanoke, VA
• March 13 – Triangle .NET User Group Main Meeting – Microsoft RTP, Durham, NC
• March 16 – Orlando Code Camp 2013 – Seminole State College, Sanford, FL
• March 19 – Tampa Bay Windows Developer User Group – AgileThought Tampa, Tampa, FL
• March 20 – SW Florida .NET Developers Group – Polaris Center, Naples, FL
• March 21 – dotNet Miami – Planet Linux Caffe, Coral Gables, FL

After these events occur I will post a follow-up and the list above will light up with links to the follow-up post.  So keep an eye here for those.  Also…

I’m trying something new

There are a lot of things that happen on community trips that don’t make sense to document on my IG developer blog.  The personal side of these trips are every bit as much a part of the trip as the events I’m speaking at.  Sometimes people from the local community are involved, but sometimes I just like to go out with my phone and take a bunch of pictures of the area.  Well, from now on I’m going to use my personal site brentschooley.com to track these things.  If you’re curious about anything other than the events I’m speaking at, that will be the place to go.  I’ve already posted some pictures of Roanoke if you’re curious about the type of content I might post there.

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below or find me on Twitter @brentschooley.  You can also email me at bschooley@infragistics.com.

The first stop on my Brent Goes South For the Winter Tour was Roanoke Code Camp 2013.  This event, hosted by the Roanoke Valley .NET User Group (RV.NUG), was held at Virginia Western Community College on March 9, 2013.  Infragistics sponsored the event at the Gold level and I was happy to head down to give two presentations and help out with the Windows 8 labs.

Speaker Event

Most Code Camps have a speaker/sponsor event the Friday night before the Code Camp.  It’s a great way to meet the organizers of the event as well as the other speakers.  I always plan my travel arrangements to make sure I am able to make it to the speaker event and I would urge fellow speakers to do the same.  The speaker event for the Roanoke Code Camp was held at Shakers Restaurant.  The food and drinks were great, but more importantly the discussions there were fantastic.  We talked about the future of Windows 8, the likelihood of me ever using a Windows Phone full-time, how to get people to develop for Microsoft’s new platforms, and my new book.  It was a great night and it really got me excited for the Code Camp on Saturday.

Session #1: Designing for Windows 8

For reasons that are probably fairly obvious, this is my favorite session to give.  Windows 8 design is something I have devoted a lot of time to and being able to share what I’ve learned about it with other people is something I really enjoy a lot.  Everything from Bauhaus, to Swiss Design, all the way to taking a desktop application and turning it into a Windows Store application just never gets old.  If you’re interested in more information about things I discussed in this session, here are some links:

• Designing for Windows 8– Chapters 1, 2, and 6 take a deeper dive on the presentation material and chapters 3-5 cover additional topics not in the presentation itself
• Helvetica– I mentioned that if you wanted to learn more about how type affects us and why, this is a great film to check out
• design.windows.com– This is *the* place to go for all of Microsoft’s design documentation for Windows 8
• Microsoft Design Style series– This is a series of blog posts I wrote about Microsoft Design Style

Session #2: Creating iOS Apps with C# using Xamarin.iOS

This is a new favorite session of mine.  It’s fairly well documented that I’ve been a big fan of MonoTouch (now called Xamarin.iOS) since the beginning.  Lately, that love has been rekindled with the various advances Xamarin has brought to the table in 2.0.  Since the amount of iOS devices in use continues to rise, it remains the best place to build mobile applications for.  Many C# developers shy away from building iOS applications because they don’t want to learn Objective-C.  Well, with Xamarin.iOS you don’t have to.  You can build native iOS applications with C# and you can even do it from within Visual Studio if you want.  Want more?  Infragistics has native iOS controls with bindings for Xamarin.iOS.  Check out my blog post for getting started with the NucliOS chart.  If you liked this session and want to see it again, a recorded webinar version of what was covered is available on YouTube.

Windows 8 Lab

Joel Cochran, a fellow Windows 8 guru, decided to have a Windows 8 lab after the Windows 8 sessions.  The idea was to give people who were working on Windows 8 applications the chance to ask himself, me, or G. Andrew Duthie (the local Microsoft Evangelist who is razor-focused on Windows 8 as well) questions.  A few developers took part and the discussions we had there were excellent.  I even took the opportunity to give a brief Indigo Studio demo.  If you’re interested in learning how to prototype Windows 8 applications, check out this blog post.

Summary

I thought this was a great Code Camp.  It was a smaller event than some of the other Code Camps I have been to recently, but there was just as much energy.  Everybody was friendly and approachable and I feel like everyone (including the speakers!) learned something they could take away from the event.  I’d like to thank the event staff for being very accommodating and helpful throughout.  Also, thank you to everyone who attended my sessions.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I am also documenting things that happen on my tour outside of events over at brentschooley.com.  I have added a gallery of images from around Roanoke and a review of a great dinner I had last night

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below or find me on Twitter @brentschooley.  You can also email me at bschooley@infragistics.com.

Let’s face it, many of you have app ideas but you’re not building the app.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe you need some motivation.  Maybe you’re worried you won’t get any return on your time investment.  Microsoft knows this, but they want your applications.  So they run promotions.  There have been a ton of them already.  Many people got Surfaces just for writing an app.  As long as there is still a relatively small number of applications compared to other platforms, you can expect the trend to continue.  Your best bet is to take advantage of them.  I’m going to introduce you to the big one that’s going on right now and when you’re done reading this I want you to go build an app.

Keep the Cash

This has to be the coolest and easiest promotion to take advantage of yet.  You’re going to want to do this.  It’s called Keep the Cash and it’s dead simple: you submit and get an app accepted to the store between now and June 30th and you get a $100 Virtual Visa Gift Card.  That’s $100 bucks to spend on pretty much whatever you want (like, this for instance).  That would be a sweet enough deal to motivate many of you I’m sure.  Allow me to sweet the pot for you.  You can do that for up to 10 apps.  That’s a sum total of $1000 for submitting and getting apps accepted to the store.  It gets even better if you’re a Windows Phone developer since you can do the same for 10 apps in that store as well.  That’s up to $2000 in Virtual Visa Gift Cards.  I don’t know about you, but I can think of quite a few things I could buy with that.

Ok, what’s the catch?

I knew you were going to ask that.  That’s the best part.  There is no catch.  There are a few guidelines but they are incredibly easy to conform to:

• Offer good only to legal residents of the 50 United States & D.C. aged 18 or older who are a U.S. registered Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store developer.
• Must register for this offer at http://build.windowsstore.com/keepthecash publish an app to the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store between March 8, 2013 and June 30, 2013.
• All apps must comply with the (Windows Store App Developer Agreement) and the App Certification Requirements and must provide their Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store Publisher name and ID (exact match to their Store developer dashboard) and the external URL to the corresponding app.
• All non-game apps must conform to design guidelines for Windows Store and Windows Phone Store; work as described and have a distinct and substantial content and purpose, including functionality e.g., above and beyond launching a webpage.
• The app may not be a modification, rework, redesign or other change to an existing and previously published app.
• Apps submitted with the same code base or clones are not eligible.
• Apps that have been previously published to the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store do not qualify as a new app for purposes of this published offer.
• Offer good only to the first 10,000 qualified applications published in the Windows Store and/or Windows Phone Store, or until the end of the promotional period, whichever comes first.

That last one is probably the closest thing to a catch.  This is first come, first served so get cracking!  Note that basically those bullet points boil down to:

• Write new apps.
• If they aren’t games, conform to the design guidelines (consult this or this for help)
• Do it 10 times per store and do it before the total reaches 10,000.

Like I said, it’s simple.  Now get to it!

Contact

If you have any questions or comments, please comment below or find me on Twitter @brentschooley.  You can also email me at bschooley@infragistics.com.

A former colleague of mine, Helmut Degen, runs a blog about UX from a bird's eye view. He covers UX industry news and a monthly interview with experienced UX professionals. For the newest edition he did an interview with me. Read here. 

I’m proud to stand in one line with folks like Daniel Rosenberg whom Helmut interviewed this past December. Dan’s book “Human Factors in Product Design” (Cushman & Rosenberg, 1991) was one of the very first books I read in college about applying the knowledge of human capabilities and limitations to user interface design. Back then, Human Factors Engineering was still a rather underdeveloped topic. There were not many books available about it, let alone books that were practical rather than philosophical.

If you read Dan’s interview and mine, you’ll see that we disagree a little about the future of the UX profession. He says our formal profession might disappear, I say it will live forever. I believe we both state some good arguments, so this could go either way in the future. What’s your prediction?