Monthly Archives: December 2010
Fail.
December 27, 2010Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I saw the brief note in my inbox. Mr. T, a kind older gentleman at my church, was in critical condition at the hospital. The reason? While at the mall, Mr. T had guided his wheelchair down what he thought was a wheelchair ramp. It turned out to be a set of stairs. Consequently, he tumbled down the stairs and was now seriously injured. Words like, “life threatening”, “spinal injury”, “head wounds”, “major surgery”, and “possible paralysis” peppered the email. After the first gasps of horror and the slow head-shakes that expressed dismay, the next natural reaction was to cry. As the tears stung my eyes and the message blurred on my monitor, I couldn’t help but wonder how something like this could have happened. How, in these modern environments filled with signs and arrows pointing in every direction, could someone have missed the fact that the passage in front of him was, in fact, a potentially deadly set of stairs? More…
XAML Organization
December 8, 2010We’ve worked on countless WPF and Silverlight projects over the past several years and throughout that time, we’ve refined both our process and the organization of our solutions. We pass off front-end code to our client developers. So clean, understandable organization is extremely important for an effective transfer of knowledge.
Most of the development teams that we work with are well versed with c# code, programming methodologies, and best practices. But typically we find that XAML is not something that they care much about. Due to this lack of interest folks tend to not put much up-front thought into how their Resource Dictionaries are organized, nor is there much in the way of guidance from Microsoft. So then 3 months into their development cycle the application looks great from a code perspective, especially if the Model View ViewModel (MVVM) paradigm is followed, but digging into the various styles, templates, brush resources, etc… reveal a lot of problems. More…
I Should be Number 1!
December 6, 2010The other day I came across one of these many lists ranking the 10 most promising professions for 2010 and although Design researcher, Interaction designer or Visual designer was not directly on the list, I did find a few professions on the list that certainly made our future at projekt202 look pretty bright. On most of the lists, number 2, 3 and/or 4 was Computer software engineer or Software Analyst, which is probably not a surprise to anybody since pretty much everything nowadays involves a computer or piece of code in one way or another. However, the upswing on this is that everyone knows that these people also need a designer like us at p202 to make their creations user friendly through some amazing User Interfaces (UI). More…
Beginnings
December 5, 2010We’ve talked about having a blog for a while now and we’re happy to have it go live. projekt202 has a lot of brainpower and experience within our studio walls along with the call to share. You can expect to see topics ranging from research findings, to interaction challenges and techniques, to my favorite, front-end technologies and the UI development problems we solve.
So follow along on our journey. We hope you find some level of inspiration and insight into our areas of expertise. More…