fignewtron was here

Today turned out to be a nice lazy Saturday.  After looking on the TV for something mind numbing and finding that all too quickly, I decided to read some blogs with my RSS feed reader.  I've been using RSS Bandit (I'm a PC) but there have been a couple of bugs with it.  I could go into why I don't use a Firefox add-in or, IE8, or even an online service.  I used to use NewsGator but didn't re-up when they wanted my annual fee.  With the web based and browser based tools, I don't like the layout.  Since I'm a developer, I like something I can see the source code for too.  If I really want to change the layout or add a feature that makes sense to me, I can.

I did a little more searching on the Wikipedia Comparison List of Feed Aggregators and didn't find anything exciting.  I decided to search for anything new written in WPF.  As luck would have it, I ran across Paperboy, an RSS reader up on Codeplex.com/Paperboy.  It syncs with IE8 Feeds so I was back to using IE again as an underlying aggregator.  It turns out to be ok.  Paperboy is a desktop application which uses the WPF FlowDocument.  It uses an HTML to XAML conversion to be able to display content.  I'm probably going to see the FlowDocument evolve over time.  For now it provides a nice common layout for all the text.  So, the distraction of viewing a different font for each different blog is reduced.  I can also just open up the blog entry in a separate tab and see the original page in a standard web browser control.  So, to me, that is the best of both worlds.

Paperboy has far fewer features than RSS Bandit.  Also, the authors haven't done any work on the project it seems since August 2008.  But it is stable enough and simpler features don't get in the way of what I really want to do.  Keeping track of all the blogs I subscribe to just got a little better.

If the FlowDocument ever makes its way into Silverlight, I may have to port Paperboy into a nice little web application. 

This application was the first I've developed that uses the new Silverlight 3 Navigation feature.  It navigates through a wizard-like set of pages to demonstrate the capabilities of One App.  From the site, "Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games."  Click here to check out the demo, and go to http://www.microsoft.com/oneapp for more info.

(Bubble animations adapted from code in Foundation Silverlight 3 Animation by Jeff Paries)

This site was a real collaboration with the team of designers and idea gurus at Waggener Edstrom Studio D.  We all had fun with this one.  It is full of subtle "easter eggs".  I wanted to put a couple more in there but we ran out of time.  The one on the phone callout links back to a site we completed after this one, windowsphonesforstudents.com.  Head over to the link and click on the "8 Months Later" banner when you get tired of the first screen.  Turn the volume up too because Silverlight can do MP3 and Wav Audio!

This site was completed a few weeks ago.  I'm really happy with the challenges it provided and the techniques that came out of working through the challenges.  It is a very eye catching site with one major transition.  It goes from the intro full screen background to a resized background banner.  The background height and margins are changed with a somewhat integrated set of layout controls and storyboards.  I'd love to post the code but it is so specific to the project as to be of little reuse.  It simply proves that such a transition can be done.