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March 6, 2010

Better than Paper and Pencil?

As beautiful as the iPad is (and as vaporously strategic as the pundits predict it to be) the functions demo'd so far are sleek but kind of pedestrian (with the exception of Brushes).  It seems to offer the same kind of child-ish experience that the OSX mail program does. Something that drives me to distraction (Apple, if you give me resize handles on embedded images, really, I won't hurt myself).

This however promises something quite different.  If it works, as fictionally demo'd, I think it could really be something that improves upon raw paper and pencil for ideation and creative thinking:

Is it real?  Apparently not - it's just a "concept car" ... but hopefully the iPad has ruffled Microsoft enough that they get serious about pushing it out of the lab, or out of the UX designers heads, whichever the case may be.  Windows Phone 7 series is a good sign...but I've seen pretty designer videos before, like the one above, that come to nothing.  And finally, Microsoft, please don't invent some new UI platform for this - that's what your Silverlight investments are for.

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February 28, 2010

If the straightjacket fits...

In the last few weeks I finally got around to publishing the source to a Silverlight TestHarness application I've been working on for a couple of years.  That's not two years of dedicated work, rather this is more like a carefully crafted piece of re-usable scaffolding I've built up to assist in my other developments over that time period. 

The concept of a rapid-and-simple-to-use UI TestHarness (like the one embodied in this piece of work) is something I've always done for as long as I can remember.  It's so integral to the way I work and think that I am often amazed that people can start any kind of significant UI effort without something like this in place.  Well, turns out I'm often amazed (or too easily amazed) and this is not so common.  People I think generally do "something" as scaffolding around their UI work, but what the TestHarness does is automate as much of that throw-away work as possible, allowing you to write the absolute least amount of code to get your UI up, on screen, so you can start prodding and poking it.

I am opening this up for anyone else who thinks like me and would find this kind of thing a useful addition to their bag-o-tricks.  It also allows me to wrap up (and publish as open-source) the Open.Core libraries I've been developing.  The TestHarness uses these, but so does everything else I work on.  This is where I put that fiddly, low-level, UI stuff that you do over and over again and you just don't want to write (and test) on every new project.  There's no profit to be had in gritty infrastructure stuff like this, and as such there's much greater value in sharing openly.

Accompanying the source is a blog where I am publishing technical articles about how to get started and use the TestHarness. 

http://TestHarness.org

 

 

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