Windows Experience Blog : WPF

Seesmic Moving to Windows Platform, Announces Seesmic for Windows

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:05:41 GMT

During this morning’s keynote at PDC09 – Seesmic Founder Loic Le Meur joined Ray Ozzie on stage to make a very important announcement regarding the future of Seesmic. Seesmic focuses on bringing many of your favorite social networking services like Twitter and Facebook together into a single application so you don’t have to bounce between those services. They are best known for their Abobe AIR Twitter and Facebook app called Seesmic Desktop today.

While on stage with Ray, Loic announced the launch of Seesmic for Windows.

With the vast majority of Seesmic users coming from PCs running Windows, the move to the Windows Platform made sense. By moving development to focus primarily on the Windows Platform, it will allow Seesmic to focus on providing the best user experience to the majority of its users. This includes addressing issues with performance. Loic also announced that Seesmic for Windows will allow developer to write plug-ins that can run securely within the application.

As part of today’s announcement, Seesmic is releasing a Preview release of Seesmic for Windows. Seesmic for Windows is Seesmic’s brand new desktop client developed on the Windows Platform. They have been working aggressively to have this Preview release ready for you today.

Seesmic for Windows provides an excellent way to manage tweeting on Twitter. It helps you stay on top of what your friends are tweeting and what the latest trends on Twitter are.

Seesmic for Windows provides a “tabbed” UI (left-side of the app) that lets you filter your Twitter “stream” of tweets. You can filter by account as Seesmic for Windows supports having multiple Twitter accounts signed in, searches and Twitter’s latest new feature called lists. Everything can be filtered into specific columns. You can drag the columns into whatever position you like and scroll right to left to view your columns. And the new posting bar in Seesmic for Windows makes it easy to switch from one account to multiple accounts.

I’ve had the pleasure of using Seesmic for Windows for the last few weeks now and it works great! I’m currently managing 2 Twitter accounts, a few lists and use the Twitter Search capabilities track tweets on Windows 7, Windows Live, and more. I am very excited about what’s to come for Seesmic for Windows. You can expect to see Seesmic for Windows take advantage of the Windows Taskbar enhancements in Windows 7 and when Twitter adds support for dynamic location, it will use Windows 7’s Location and Sensor Platform!

Seesmic for Windows was released to all Team Seesmic members during the keynote this morning. If you are a Team Seesmic member, you should have an email from Loic in your inbox with a link to download Seesmic for Windows. If you’re not a Team Seesmic member, don’t worry. Join Team Seesmic to download the Seesmic for Windows Preview and receive the latest and greatest builds. You can also head on over to Seesmic.com right now and sign-up to receive Seesmic for Windows when it becomes available as well. Give Seesmic for Windows a spin and be sure to follow @windowsblog and @mswindows!

Loic also demonstrated Seesmic ported over into Silverlight and running as a Silverlight-based app. Seesmic is also excited about the possibilities Silverlight will provide in regards to eventually creating a cross platform application.

For more on today’s announcements from Day 1 of PDC09, click here.

UPDATE: For more information on Seesmic’s announcements today including Seesmic for Windows, check out Loic Le Meur’s blog post!

Twitter with Friends Using the WPF Client Witty

Brandon LeBlanc — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:05:00 GMT

Twittering with friends seems to be the new "thing-to-do" on the web these days. Many bloggers are using it and it has even made its way into an episode of CSI! So what exactly is Twitter you ask? Twitter is an online web service that lets you post what you are doing - in 140 characters or less - in which those who are "following" can track what you're doing based on what you post. Bloggers sometimes also use Twitter to share URLs and to share quick thoughts on a variety of topics.

Now I said that Twitter was a web service right? Well the Twitter developers have released an API in which developers can use to create "Twitter clients" to be used outside the web browser.

Alan Le, from the company Vertigo, has utilized the Twitter API and designed a WPF Twitter client called Witty that extends the Twitter experience into Windows Vista. If you recall, WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is built in to Windows Vista.

I also blogged about another awesome product from the Vertigo folks back in August called Family.Show. Family.Show is a WPF app used in tracking family history and creating a family tree.

With Witty, I can quickly receive updates from people I am following as well as quickly post on what I'm doing (or any specific thought quickly I might have) quickly as the app nicely sits on my notification area of my taskbar.

Download: Witty 0.1.5 (986Kb)

To install Witty, just download the .zip file (above) and extract to a folder on your PC. Once the files are extracted, open the folder the files were extracted to and double click on Witty.exe. Feel free to follow me! You cal also follow the Windows Vista Team Blog on Twitter as well - which will update whenever a new post is made here on the blog.

Please note that the latest version of Witty released is 0.1.5 - which is what I recommend you use. My screenshots reflect 0.1.6 but it is an early alpha (pre-beta) version of Witty I am helping test out for Alan. For future versions of Witty, feel free to leave comments and I'll make sure Alan gets them!

Building your family tree with Family.Show

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 23:58:00 GMT

A few weeks ago Tim Sneath, who is a Group Manager and Evangelist at Microsoft, posted about Family.Show which caught my eye. I decided to give it a try. Family.Show is a genealogy application built on the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) by a company called Vertigo. Family.Show is a very slick application for building your family tree and tracking your own family history. Tim Sneath also points out that Family.Show is an excellent example of WPF in a "complex, realistic" scenario for developers to take a look at.

In giving Family.Show a try - I discovered I really would like to know more about my family history. I had such a great experience with it I decided to create a small video demo of how Family.Show works in managing and tracking your family tree:

Video: Demo: Family.Show

Forgive the video's abruptness and pace. I didn't want to bore you with filling out a complete family - rather simply to highlight how easy it is to create your family in Family.Show.

The ability to drag and drop images into profiles of family members is an excellent showcase of some of the advantages with building apps with WPF for Windows Vista. But in regards to Family.Show - using WPF allows me to easily navigate through my family tree entering details on family members quickly and efficiently and is not overly complicated for my needs. Family.Show stores your .family files in a directory in your Documents folder which is also easily movable and backed up as well.

Click here to install Family.Show via ClickOnce. You can also view Vertigo's Family.Show site here.

Testing out Roxio Central

Brandon LeBlanc — Sat, 05 May 2007 07:32:00 GMT

Today I spent some time testing out Roxio's interesting Roxio Central Preview application. Roxio Central is a free media burning application built upon WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation). WPF is built in to Windows Vista (and available for Windows XP). The idea behind Roxio Central is to showcase the possibilities for UI that media burner applications can have using WPF.

Roxio Central provides the user with the basic functionality of burning CD's and DVD's. You can burn music, create data discs, copy discs, and backup your data. However the key thing about Roxio Central is it provides all this functionality in a unique and impressive way using WPF. The UI is clean, understandable and far less cluttered than my previous experiences using other media burning applications.

You virtually get everything you need from the very first screen when the application starts up. It even sports an Office-2007-like "start button" at the top with a menu for your options.

Roxio Central's UI provides 4 basic options to choose from: Audio, Copy, Data, and Tools.

Burning data or burning music is really easy. The UI gives the user all the options they would need in burning either data or audio onto a CD or DVD without having to dig deeper into the application. For example the option to make a disc bootable when burning data is easily discoverable. The ability to quickly grab audio tracks and throw them onto a disc is really easy too.

One of the killer features for me with Roxio Central is that it supports the ability to burn .iso images. To burn .iso images I usually rely on ImgBurn. But I can't help but enjoy Roxio Central's simplistic UI.

During the burning process, an orb appears in the middle of the application displaying the status of the burn session. If you click on the grey tab on the right of the orb - a more detailed status of your burn will be displayed including how long the burn has taken, how much data has been burned (and sectors) and write speed. As you can see in the screenshot, my write speed was not displayed. I don't think this is a problem with Roxio Central however. I have an old DVD burner that struggles. I expected issues.

Overall I was really impressed with what Roxio has done here and wanted to share this with you. Give Roxio Central a try yourself and let me know what you think.

Roxio is also a Windows Vista Premier Launch Partner with some excellent apps designed to take advantage of Windows Vista - including their Easy Media Creator 9 Suite which is Certified for Windows Vista.

WPF Screensaver Flittrbook from MIX07

Brandon LeBlanc — Tue, 01 May 2007 18:45:00 GMT

Microsoft Technical Evangelist Karsten Januszewski blogs about his WPF Screensaver he created that is installed and running on all the MIX07 PC's called Flittrbook. As many of you probably already know - WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) is built in to Windows Vista which allows for some really amazing things that can be done with applications.

Flittrbook is a WPF mashup of Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook all in to one really cool screensaver. Karsten worked with Tim Aidlin who is a designer at Microsoft to design all the neat visualizations you see in the screensaver. The screensaver is configured to pull MIX07content from Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook but has customization features to pull any content from these three services.

Here is a little video demo of the screensaver in action!

Video: WPF Screensaver Flittrbook

Karsten has put online some of the screensaver bits for download. However he was unable to include Facebook support in this release and there seems to be some issues with the Twitter feed being flakey. This is "definitely v.0.0.0.1" as Karsten notes. Give the screensaver a try and make sure you send in feedback for Karsten! I installed it and love it.

To install the bits, just download the .zip file and extract its contents. Inside you need to find the .scr file and righ-click to install the screensaver on to your PC.

Thanks to Nathan Weinberg over at InsideMicrosoft for pointing this out earlier today.