We shall see

In any event, I’m currently downloading expression suite 4, the demo.  I’ve read a wonderful FAQ which tells me that I don’t have to purchase a new one since I already have a licensed copy of Expression Studio 3.  I just need to download Expression Studio 4 and bing-bam, it’ll be a full registered version.

Yay!

So I am now downloading the trial for Expression Studio 4 – and kind of excited about it.  I had dread towards the coming of Expression Studio 4 because I had only JUST obtained a full copy of 3 the week prior, when suddenly there’s talk of a soon to be releasing 4 with sketchflow.  If ever there was a time to shake my fist at someone, I surely was struck by the desire at that moment.

In any event – here I sit – 28% downloaded with 72% to go.

just a quick note: This has nothing to do with Expression Blend, Design, or anything relevant aside from a personal victory in hard times

Long time no post.  I’ve been debating if I’m going to use this as a true blog or hold true to it being a design blog.  Jury is out on that, but today I want to post as if this is a normal personal blog, so here’s my blog.

Its now been 4.5 years, my lovely truck, I love you so much, you have 1 more payment to go and that’s IT!  You’re officially MINE!

But I have 1 thing that I want to do.  The envelope. 

The last envelope . <— (imagine that sentence in scrolly looking font)

 I feel the urge to go out and purchase some of those seriously tacky envelopes which are prescented for the feminine in you – just for the use of sending this very last check.  Can one do that?  Send a sarcastic envelope?  Do you think it’d be recognized as such or just end up in the pile of envelopes which the billing dept likely puts in some sort of waste basket (recycling hopefully?)

 I’m debating on this, but I think I may just have to see if I can find some of those dang things.  Never in a million years did I think I’d ever be contemplating the purchase of scented envelopes… but then again, the sweet sweet act of sending the final payment on a truck which still mostly feels like new… perhaps the time is prime for some smelly paper.

88mile. Where insanity rules.

btw – I so very much am jealous of his waacom super powers. I’m make it shiny and look real girl. He’s Mr. Artisté ( not that you can see that on his blog, but I’m sure it’ll come out eventually).

Always have someone who’s better than you in your life. I swear. It keeps you in your place.

Anyway, check out his blog!  http://www.88mile.com/

This month’s Speaker, Ken Becker, an Information Architect at Wirestone and is going to be discussing the place of an IA in the Development and Design process and how they work with both groups to improve overall user experience.

If you’re in the area, I seriously recommend making room on your calendar to join Interact Seattle on Wednesday, November 18th at 7pm Pacific Time

Click Here for more information.

I was reading a site that I’d stumbled upon (ok, not quite stumbled, I was directed there by someone on the IxDA  discussion boards) and decided to read more than the person had posted their discussion thread about.

A few blog posts down, I find something that hits home for me pretty hard.  Updates on software.

In my every day work, I have updates coming at me from every direction.  iPhone updates, iphone app updates, Windows updates, winamp updates, windows media player updates, Adobe (everything) updates, quicktime updates, flash… ARG!

The “remind me” button is pressed on a few occasions – and by a few, I mean a few occasions a day.  I need to move forward with my work, but everything from iphone use to computer use, there are updates all over the place. 

Heck, on occasion I actually feel “punished” for updating as suggested.  One day, my iphone’s skype works great, and my twitter application is awesome.  I update, and suddenly, I can no longer make calls on skype from my iphone and my twitter now has advertisements along the top and sometimes it overlaps different people’s tweets requiring me to exit and reload the thing just to see everyone’s tweets.  I understand the need for the application development group to make money, but don’t break the app for the sake of advertisements, for crying out loud!

There has been one occasion where the updates were so entirely intrusive, that I just absolutely stopped using the software.  That’s you, Firefox.  That’s right – I stopped using you because every other day, you wanted to update.  Again.  and again.  – if I asked for a “remind me later”, then every time you loaded up, you’d have a pop-up starting firefox wizard that I had to go through just to use your dang browser in “safe mode”.  Bloody hell!  I just want to use the dang application already! 

Shocking as it seems, I switched to IE8, which I really never thought I’d do.  I have a completely illogical reason as to why I refuse to use Google’s Chrome.  In my opinion - choose a better name and stop confusing people.  Chrome is the dang thing around a Window’s … window.  Ever try having a conversation with multiple people where each one may have a completely different thought as to what you’re talking about?  Thanks google for adding greater levels of confusion.  So I litterally will not use it because of its name.  Perhaps that’s the worst reason for not using an app, but there it is.

Ok, so you get it – I’m frustrated about these dang updates and perhaps a little less logical than I’d like to believe myself to be.  Usually I’m the type to see a problem and come up with multiple scenarios that could be used/taken to understand the issue - which often leads me to find alternative means to reach a solution for the issue or at least a less intrusive meeting ground.  I’m a solution finder – drives some people nuts when all they want to do is vent.  (That’s what blogs are for!)

Unfortunately for this particular frustrating issue, I just don’t know if there is a good solution.  Perhaps if the team at Microsoft gave permission for 3rd party vendors to have their updates checked and added to the windows update catalog, that might help.  I’m  fairly certain it’d be a very chilly day in hell before that happens, but that is the only solution I can see that may actually pull back on the intrusiveness of the showering of update application requests, and even then – it would only take care of a percentage and might put Microsoft at risk if the updates aren’t managed by the 3rd party vendor well.

So like I said, I don’t really see a good solution to the issue, but it is an issue, and its seriously irritating.

The original blog that spurred my blog post can be found at –> UITrends.com

*rant off*

The solution to this is just simply to build your project (ctrl+shift+b).  If you’d prefer to do it via the menu strip, click on Project->Build Project.  You can also do a rebuild.

Now why would this occur?  You might have a custom control instantiated into another xaml file, or development which has been updated that changes the visual elements, and sometimes you’re like me, applying something, and its just not showing.  Heck, 2 days ago, I spent at least 5 hours banging my head up against a wall because I couldn’t get a custom control to actually show in the design view, there weren’t any exceptions either.  It just wasn’t there.

I got to the point where I decided that perhaps I’d forgotten a step, so I popped into MSDN and started going through “Try It” sections.

… I discovered that all I needed to do was to rebuild, everything else that I was doing was correct.  I rebuilt the project and vwalla – there it was. 

 Hopefuly I learned that lesson well enough to not encounter this particular “issue” again. 

I hope this helps others who encounter the exception issues as well!

Finally, this week, work has let up a bit and I’m able to spend some time playing around with the SDK and how things work in XAML and C# on a Surface app differently than with WPF and Silverlight.

Well I’m designing away on this cute little idea of an application and I decided to give it a whirl after adding a few objects and I’m discovering something that is not anticipated.  Some of my objects are stretching!  What the heck! 

Of course I was doing the usual, overthinking the issue - I start looking for some sort of “constrain proportions” or “stretch to screen” or something to that effect.

After scratching my head for at least 2 hours (and in the process, discovering a whole lot of other things I might tinker with in the future), I finally discovered the problem.

Height and width were set to something similar to the below:

 width: Auto (96.0230004)
height: Auto (96.024)

This is easy to resolve. Clicking where the dimensions are, the numbers in parenthesis display. Once the numbers are there, I scale them down to a less specific number (i.e. turning 96.0230004 to 96.023) and hitting enter.

Running the application shows my objects no longer stretching. Hurah!

Interact

First on the list is the name. We’ve decided that it would be best to simplify the name. We’ve renamed the group to, simply, Interact.

An official logo hasn’t yet been created, but we have a placeholder to assist with the transition created by David Kelley. I have a feeling that we’ll be holding onto this for a few weeks.

More interaction more of the time

Seattle D2ig (Seattle Developer / Designer Interaction Group) had its first meeting in October in 2008 and since has met every 3rd wednesday of each month. These meetings have been excellent and we’ve seen new faces presenting and attending since the group started. Presentations have occupied a variety of content including the workflow of iphone design and development, the change in Flash to seperate development to Flex, The Design Developers of the Zune, Microsoft Silverlight, and much more. But these are only once a month, and very overview with topics fitting into an hour and a half, sometimes two hours with a small group getting together for food and drink afterwards. The “but” in that is the overview “not enough” feeling.

Plus, the majority of those who join are either heavy on the Flash or on the Silverlight side of technologies – or somewhere in between. Because of this, we have 2 virtual SIGs that will soon be “live” to further the education growing cooperations between developers and designers.

What the heck does this mean?

It means that we’ll be meeting on 2 more occasions, but earlier in the day and virtually through Windows Live Meetings which will occur the first and second wednesdays at noon every month.

Wait, that’s lunch time! Yes, yes it is.(click on the links below for details)

Have Lunch with Interact on Silverlight
Have Lunch with Interact on Adobe

This is a very new chapter in this organization and as we grow, who knows – maybe more virtual meetings will come in the future.

Now there is a slight bit of an unfortunate circumstance with this new look to my site. I have this incredible plugin, but in the process of configuring it, I thought it might be beneficial to upgrade my wordpress to the latest version. Unfortunately, that broke the little font-page content scroller. I’ll either poke around into the files and see what I can do about fixing it or I’ll just wait until the original author upgrades their plugin to support the latest version of wordpress.

As to the recent upgrades, I’d have to say that I was very close to moving entirely away from wordpress – until the last week or two. I upgraded to the latest version. Not only is the administration far cleaner, but the plugins that 3rd-party authors are creating seems to be of higher quality as well. Sounds like the same story that many other software groups are going – better/ more usable design, cleaner coding, hightened standards.

So I give a huge shoutout to all who are developing and designing for Wordpress. You guys are rockin’ at all that you’re doing!

This is a test of the content population after a post has been made. I wonder if the actual content level is determinate of the string error that I’m seeing on the front page or not. We shall see as I’m typing quite a lot. I have to say that Pandora is great, though sometimes it seems that they are rating based on the thumb-ups matrix and not off of the thumb-down, so I’ll end up getting a series of horrid music and after a while, will just go to a different station that I’ve created. It would be nice to have it weigh my music listening off of the data of the down thumb as well as the thumb up.

Ah well.

Ok, was that enough content?