Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category.

Introducing Pillbox for Windows Phone

Meet Pillbox. Pillbox is an open-source Windows Phone 7 application we’ve put together that helps you track medications and take care of your friends and loved ones.
Pillbox Home Panorama
We know how hard it can be to take care of friends and relatives (and yourself) when you have multiple prescriptions that need to be taken on strict schedules. So we spent a two-week iteration to build a proof-of-concept app that tracks medication schedules, gives you more information about the prescriptions you have (and when they need refills or renewals), and helps you communicate and coordinate with fellow caregivers and family doctors.

We designed it to integrate with Microsoft HealthVault, so all of this information would be stored securely in the cloud.

Contact Details and Medication Schedule Screens

Richard Wulfenstein was our visual designer on the project, producing all of the Illustrator comps, helping map out the information architecture, and learning Expression Blend and XAML within the two weeks, to boot.

Joe McBride was the team’s lead developer, setting up the project with the Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF) and a flavor of Rob Eisenberg’s Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) that kept everything wonderfully “Blendable” with design-time data throughout the project. He also cooked up some handy swipe-gesture Blend Behaviors for rolling your Panorama view (as you may have already seen on the blogs here).

Matthias Shapiro orchestrated our initial user research interviews, collaborated to develop our personas and scenarios, and pinch-hit with some of the early integration work.

Jason Alderman was the user experience designer on the project, working with Matthias to conduct user research and refine the scenario, leading the team in whiteboard sketch sessions, designing animations based on the existing samples, planning out the application flow and interactions, and integrating Richard’s comps into XAML.

It was a rewarding experience for all of us, and we’re excited to share it with you. Read more about the project and download the code here, and let us know what you think.

Windows Phone 7 Panorama Behaviors

I created a couple Windows Phone 7 Behaviors that you can use to easily add swipe functionality. Download the source here.

You can find a couple other great Windows Phone 7 videos by Roger Peters (SmartyP) here.

MIX10 “Information Visualization in Silverlight” Slides

For everyone who wants to take a look, here are the slides for my MIX10 information visualization talk.

MIX10 “Effective Information Visualization in Silverlight

I’ll post the code from the presentation when I catch my breath.

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

I’m in the middle of trying to update my life to Silverlight RC0. Starting in a week or so, I’ll be trying to update my samples to RC0 and I’ll be creating new Silverlight samples in RC0.

I’m putting the color picker control on hold until after PDC so that everyone is on the same Silverlight page.

Thank you for your patience.

Trigonometry and Interaction Design

Over at Project Rosetta they have the post I’ve been waiting for: How to use mathematics to enhance user experiences.

They basically walk step by step through how we can use mathematics to create easing equations and pseudo-3D effects. They then use these principles to create the following application. Click and drag on a name to spin the interface.

Get Microsoft Silverlight

Awesome.

Usability Design For Forms: Luke Wroblewski

I swear… I’ll get back to the tutorials any day now!

 By in the meantime, I’m doing some form redesign and I wanted to praise to the heavesn Luke Wroblewski, whose many blog posts on form usability is some of the best, most practical stuff I’ve ever seen.

Stuff I’m reading and using right now:

UPDATE: It turns out that Luke was at MIX… a tragedy that I’m discovering this just now. You can see his panel “The Business Value of Design” or read more about it at his website.

We Are Experiencing Delays

I wanted to take a moment to apologize to everyone to whom I promised more Wii goodness on my blog. I couldn’t get internet access from my hotel last night (despite a 45 minute conversation with a tech support guy). And, in a somewhat ironic turn of events, the internet access here at MIX08 is pretty miserable.

 As in… I have trouble even pulling my own blog up half the time.

 So I’ve decided to wait until I get back to Salt Lake City before I try to finish all my posts.

Put me on your RSS feed… I’ll be going nuts on the blog over the next week putting up all the WPF/Wiimote stuff, catching up on my normal WPF tutorials and starting to dive into Silverlight.

And, because I know that my wonderful fiance is reading this (as well as picking me up from the airport)… I’ll see you this evening, lovely.