The “Twitter Quitter”

Heck yeah, sometimes we’re just not in the mood…and that’s OK. A busy day for most can render Twitter a complete distraction. At times I personally push far away but eventually return.
Saw this article today called “Twitter Quitters Just Don’t Get It.” This discusses how 60% of twitter’ers are dropping it after the first month. [...]

Heck yeah, sometimes we’re just not in the mood…and that’s OK. A busy day for most can render Twitter a complete distraction. At times I personally push far away but eventually return.

Saw this article today called “Twitter Quitters Just Don’t Get It.” This discusses how 60% of twitter’ers are dropping it after the first month. While Twitter may not be for everyone, it is a great way to get connected and grab information, in short form, quickly and easily. However, the act of posting twitter messages is just something that may require time to develop your voice. That is something that may come from quitting, coming back, quitting again, and coming back again… And repeat a few times more.

I’m a Twitter’er and a certified Twitter Quitter. To date, I’ve quit Twitter about 137 times. And while I enjoyed the article mentioned in this post, the name does not quite fit with how this nice article flows. This article mentions, “Follow people. A lot of people.” Personally, I totally disagree. It’s been my observations both personally and in advising people to follow LESS people. Especially in the beginning. Spend a few minutes hitting the follow button on just a few who you find to be extremely interesting. 90% of their posts should appeal to you. The last thing you need in the beginning to to get a bunch of stuff streaming across your screen that is meaningless to you. Choose wisely and make sure that each post inspires or enlightens you in some way. Then, as you want more, go get more.

In summary, here are a few thoughts that might help those who are just jumping in. Maybe in some small way this will assist your beginning experience and thus reduce the “Quitter” quotient. From the biggest Twitter Quitter in the world (@cronan) these are my top five (IMHO) suggestions for beginners.  Hope this makes your twittering enlightening and more fun, rather than hard labor:

• Follow fewer, better: Find a few of your closest friends, people you really look up to or respect. Follow them first.
• Be entertained: OK, so there are some celebs out there who are fairly entertaining and some on this list might be appealing to you. You might learn something from people with huge followings…and be entertained in the process.
• Find the right (desktop) tool: If you’re a mac, try Tweetie. If you’re a PC, try Twirl or TweetDeck.
• Beware the “Device Updates:” You’ll figure that out eventually. But in the beginning it’s just more noise. And, in today’s environment you don’t need distraction. Using the right tool will be a good start. Although there are a few good tools for your handheld device that are far better for the beginner than the SMS messaging utilized in the “Device Updates.” Until you’re feel’in it, leave the “Device Updates” off.
• Un-follow Fast: If someone you are following is not interesting to you, un-follow fast. There’s plenty that will be great for you to follow.

May the Twitter forces be with you. It’s easy and you’ll pick it up fast, especially if you’re opening impression is strong.

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/e4HJZu1…

Texas DUCATI Owners Club Launches!

As some of you may know, RD2’s founder, Chris Ronan, is a passionate Ducati rider. With a bike of his own and frequent visits to the shop during the week, Chris rolls into the office most mornings with helmet in hand and clothed in Ducati gear. When Scott Davison (GM @ Advanced Motorsports) and [...]

As some of you may know, RD2’s founder, Chris Ronan, is a passionate Ducati rider. With a bike of his own and frequent visits to the shop during the week, Chris rolls into the office most mornings with helmet in hand and clothed in Ducati gear. When Scott Davison (GM @ Advanced Motorsports) and Chris started talking about the need to create an online community for Ducati owners in the Dallas area, RD2 and Advanced Motorsports felt the timing was right to think about community in a totally different way. The Texas Ducati Owners Club website provides an interactive space for Ducati club members to communicate with each other and around the Ducati brand. The website combines sleek Ducati inspired design elements with a long list of community features that makes it truly original.

We took an experimental approach to developing the Texas Ducati Owners Club website. The goal was to give our designers and developers room to stretch their legs – an approach that’s resulted in a unique website and an engaging experience for club members. Developing the website in Typo3 gave us the opportunity to build on a new platform and more importantly, customize extensions to develop exactly what we wanted.

Along with the website, our team created a new identity for the club, taking inspiration from the Ducati logo, but keeping with the club’s origin. The educating content, sleek design, and professional photography on the website, work together to create a clean and engaging user experience, setting the website apart from many club websites, forums, and blogs.

A visit to the website will make you want to become part of the club!

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/AIyOAAs…

Knockout Type in Silverlight

Text rendering is much improved in Silverlight 3. Much improved. I do have a bit of a hack to make text look better in Silverlight 2 and also to slim down the stroke weight on knockout text in Silverlight 3.
I noticed in many blog posts that demonstrated rotation in Silverlight that the text looked significantly [...]

Text rendering is much improved in Silverlight 3. Much improved. I do have a bit of a hack to make text look better in Silverlight 2 and also to slim down the stroke weight on knockout text in Silverlight 3.

I noticed in many blog posts that demonstrated rotation in Silverlight that the text looked significantly better in the rotated version (example). So I tried out a few things and found that if you rotate your canvas a very small amount, text looks better with seemingly no adverse effects. This is very similar to the text-shadow trick for doing this in CSS/HTML.

<Grid Background="#333230">
    <Grid.RenderTransform>
        <RotateTransform Angle="0.00001" />
    </Grid.RenderTransform>
    <TextBlock Foreground="#CACACA" Text="About RD2, Inc." />
</Grid>

Example

This particular hack improved text rendering regardless of color contrast in Silverlight 2, but thankfully now the only thing it is really needed for is knockout text. Please let me know if you find any issues with this technique.

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/jzEDLIS…

Blend Might be Your Next Prototyping Tool

RD2 has been immersed in prototyping with Expression Blend due to a perfect storm of opportunities in recent weeks. First, we have several clients that are taking a serious look at building web and line-of-business applications in Silverlight. We’ve also been working with a great team at Techsys that’s already well-versed in Silverlight workflows. Lastly, [...]

RD2 has been immersed in prototyping with Expression Blend due to a perfect storm of opportunities in recent weeks. First, we have several clients that are taking a serious look at building web and line-of-business applications in Silverlight. We’ve also been working with a great team at Techsys that’s already well-versed in Silverlight workflows. Lastly, the new features of the upcoming versions of Silverlight and Blend have really shown a strong committment to facilitating user experience design and cross-discipline teamwork.

If you’re building Silverlight or WPF apps, then it’s pretty clear that doing your prototypes in Blend is a great choice. But I’m here to tell you that you might find Blend to be a great choice for prototyping regardless of the final product.

Generally you should strive to keep the technology behind your advanced prototypes as close to that of the final product as possible. I’m not trying to argue against that, but I also believe that the faster (and therefore cheaper) your prototypes are to produce, the more prototyping you’ll do, and that leads to a better informed development phase.

Paper and pencil are super fast, so we go through a lot of that at RD2. Very soon you want to get to the good stuff and begin to see things realized on screen. Current and soon-to-be-released features of Blend make on-screen prototype exploration very easy.

SketchFlow

SketchFlow is the biggie. It is a exploration-oriented and iteration-enabling framework in Expression Blend for tying in all sorts of assets into your application design process. Go watch this video. It is not in the current Blend 3 Preview, but it is scheduled for inclusion in the Blend 3 official release. SketchFlow seems to be such a comprehensive prototyping solution that it will probably render all of my remaining points irrelevant once it is released.

Importing Adobe Files

Most of my conversations with visual designers regarding the Expression Studio tools start with me explaining that it’s not really “Microsoft’s version of CS” and hit a few bumps when I explain that it’s Windows-only. That’s OK, because Blend is not a “everyone has to switch to Windows and use only Microsoft tools” situation. Blend 3 has importers for both Illustrator and Photoshop files. It doesn’t require any work on the part of the Adobe applications; it just works. There is also a great export plugin for Fireworks from Infragistics. I’ll cover more about these flows in another post.

Silverlight Navigation Framework

This is currently my favorite new feature in Silverlight. Tim Heuer published a great screencast of this new framework. It goes beyond prototyping, but it enables easy navigation between content and persistent URLs for specific views. This means you can take all of your prototype pages and link them up in a real navigation scenario pretty quickly. I will definitely be posting more about this.

I remember thinking when Fireworks CS3 came out that we were seeing a great step forward in the evolution of prototyping tools. Looking at Blend 3 makes me think this will be a giant leap forward.

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/GJBMFzW…

Explain it Better with Expression Blend

The number of tools and methodologies for prototyping is pretty staggering. Personally my prototyping tool of choice for the past few years has been Fireworks. The 9-slice scaling, custom symbols, UI element library, and the ability to create multiple pages in the same document and share layers across those pages make me incredibly productive in [...]

The number of tools and methodologies for prototyping is pretty staggering. Personally my prototyping tool of choice for the past few years has been Fireworks. The 9-slice scaling, custom symbols, UI element library, and the ability to create multiple pages in the same document and share layers across those pages make me incredibly productive in working out UI designs and communicating those designs to a wide range of stakeholders.

But interactivity was a key thing I felt was missing from my process. I am not an expert with Flash, so I never really got into using it for interactive prototypes. I’ve done many clickable prototypes with Dreamweaver and hand-coded HTML, but the former never worked well for me and the latter always took longer than expected.

Eric and I just finished a round of prototypes for a client where we used Microsoft’s Expression Blend. Our attempts at communicating the design simply through paper or flat mockups were not going well; this particular item really required the ability to click through the process. So we started down a new path of creating a working prototype in Blend.

We presented it yesterday via phone and GoToMeeting, and it seemed to be a big hit. The response from the client was, “Now I get it. When can I click around on this? I really want to try it out.” That’s exactly the response we were going for.

I’m going to post a few more articles about specific aspects of this process over the coming days. If you’re interested in learning more about certain features and benefits of the Expression Studio tools, please leave a comment, and we’ll do our best to cover it.

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/lNXWVQh…

New 3D Features in Silverlight 3

You may have heard the news that Silverlight 3 has entered a developer beta phase. This news was shared at MIX09 on Wednesday. We’ve been fortunate here at RD2 to have been participating in the Silverlight 3 early adopter program for the past couple of months.
What’s New?
You can read about all of the new features [...]

You may have heard the news that Silverlight 3 has entered a developer beta phase. This news was shared at MIX09 on Wednesday. We’ve been fortunate here at RD2 to have been participating in the Silverlight 3 early adopter program for the past couple of months.

What’s New?

You can read about all of the new features on the official Silverlight 3 page. The two main reasons we’ve been involved in the new release are the 3D perspectives and the H.264 support. In this article I’ll discuss the 3D perspectives and leave the H.264 support for a later post.

3D Perspective

Silverlight 3 makes it easy to transform objects on a 3D plane. The Projection property on objects allows you to assign a PlaneProjection that can specify rotation on an X, Y, or Z axis and also specify the rotation point for each of those axes.

C#

Grid g = new Grid();

PlaneProjection p = new PlaneProjection();
p.CenterOfRotationX = 0.5;
p.CenterOfRotationY = 0.5;
p.CenterOfRotationZ = 0.5;
p.RotationX = 20.0;
p.RotationY = 80.0;
p.RotationZ = -30.0;

g.Projection = p;

XAML

<Grid>
    <Grid.Projection>
        <PlaneProjection CenterOfRotationX="0.5"
                         CenterOfRotationY="0.5"
                         CenterOfRotationZ="0.5"
                         RotationX="20.0"
                         RotationY="80.0"
                         RotationZ="-30.0" />
    </Grid.Projection>
</Grid>

You can then animate those rotation values using the standard storyboard animations.

C#

Storyboard s = new Storyboard();

DoubleAnimation d = new DoubleAnimation();
d.From = 0.0;
d.To = -30.0;
d.Duration = new Duration(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1.0));
Storyboard.SetTarget(d, target);
Storyboard.SetTargetProperty(d,
    new PropertyPath("(UIElement.Projection).(PlaneProjection.RotationY)"));

s.Children.Add(d);

XAML

<Storyboard x:Name="RotationAnimation">
    <DoubleAnimation From="0.0"
      To="-30.0"
      Duration="00:00:01"
      Storyboard.TargetProperty="(UIElement.Projection).(PlaneProjection.RotationY)"
      Storyboard.TargetName="target"/>
</Storyboard>

Demo

We’re really excited to be able to show off some demo code for these new features. We have a public project on CodePlex that shows a Flickr user’s photostream in an animated Silverlight slideshow. Feel free to download the source and do whatever you want with it. We’ll make periodic changes to this over the months ahead, so leave us some feedback and ideas as well.

Keep in mind that in order to run this demo on your machine, you’ll need to install all the Silverlight 3 bits which will make your machine a Silverlight 3 beta dev environment. You should really only do this if you’re ready to take the plunge into Silverlight 3 development since you can only target one Silverlight version in Visual Studio. We prepared a short screencast of our project to hopefully convince you to download the new Silverlight and give it a try. Enjoy!

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/gVdi4pI…

To Do’s: Dirt Simple

At least for the time being, we’re using Google Apps. It’s easy, cheap, and so far has been reliable (we’ve not been affected by some of the outage reports lately). Having every to do list manager known to man, I’ve settled into the Google To Do list app, otherwise known as “Tasks.” It’s just a [...]

At least for the time being, we’re using Google Apps. It’s easy, cheap, and so far has been reliable (we’ve not been affected by some of the outage reports lately). Having every to do list manager known to man, I’ve settled into the Google To Do list app, otherwise known as “Tasks.” It’s just a list. You can add stuff with simple keystrokes and hot keys directly from email. You can re-order items. You can assign dates to tasks if you like. Where other GTD managers have been cumbersome (at least for me) is how “organized” they are. This little Task app is stupid-simple. Today they announced a new feature, “Move to List.” This application is so slim that simply moving a task from one list to another has not been an option. It’s a nice feature. Now the challenge is to keep from adding too many lists. Over time, I do hope to see the features mature, but hope we don’t see to many features… in the world of “Task Apps,” doing less better is the best thing a task manager can do for itself. IMHO. Hope it stays Dirt Simple.

Original source : http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/rd2-blog/~3/6DrAx26…