I thought some people might enjoy reading a little “behind the scenes” story about the most high-profile piece of software I’ve been involved with so far. I feel pretty lucky to have had the chance to work on a unique product and to have what I helped work on be so central to the user experience as it is on the HP TouchSmart PC. You may interpret this post as highly egotistical and self-centered, and I suppose it is. But I feel like telling a story. My story. I will go over most of the non-confidential details of the events as I remember them. Since there’s a lot to talk about, I’ve decided to split the story into a mini-series. This is part one. Here we go.

My involvement with the HP TouchSmart PC began in about December of 2005. The decision was made to invest in software that would be best suited for the touchscreen that the unit would have. One of the results is HP SmartCenter as seen here (screenshot from my developer machine, not necessarily representative of the final product):

We had tight deadlines. Our final bits would be due in about six months, around June / July 2006. Our product marketing folks decided they wanted the touch application to provide quick access to TV and music as primary features. Windows Media Center was our software of choice for delivering TV and music experiences, and so we made HP SmartCenter run within Windows Media Center. This helped to avoid waiting for Media Center to start up when the user wants to watch TV or listen to music. In other areas the choice created lots of challenges. The initial one was picking a software development technology.

I had just attended PDC05 and was pretty excited about Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and the speed I could sense it would give developers and designers for rapidly creating exciting software. I had learned that Media Center in Windows Vista would support WPF, and my recommendation to use it for our apps to make the deadlines while delivering a polished user interface was accepted.

An interface developed in HTML would not have had the same quality (read: look-and-feel). Using the Media Center Markup Language (MCML / SplashFX) was not an option, since that was not going to be revealed in any useful detail until about March 2006, way too late for us to learn how to use it and produce a product.

At PDC05, it had been mentioned that a well-know design company had worked on some XAML styles for the show. We approached them to help out with the application design and asked them to deliver their stuff as working XAML / WPF code. They were pretty excited about the idea and signed on.

—

That’s it for now. Check back soon for the next installment of this mini-series, where I’ll show you a few screenshots of very early prototypes.

Update (2008-04-30): Parts two, three and four are now posted.

Categories: Personal, Software, Vista, WPF
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Our family attended a Tom Chapin concert recently. For those of you with kids out there and who may not know him, he’s a great children’s singer/songwriter whose music you can take along on a roadtrip and listen to for days without getting tired of it. He’s also got quite a few great albums for grown-ups, incidentally.

Anyway, he performed a song I hadn’t heard before (although it’s over a year old by now). It’s a commentary on the state of elementary education in the U.S., and it hits the nail right on the head, if you ask me.

Check it out at www.tomchapin.com (to download and pass along) or watch the video below:

Categories: Personal
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I had almost forgotten about the OLPC give-one-get-one campaign I took the opportunity to participate in last year. Well, the thing finally came today. I wasn’t really all that anxious to get it, so it didn’t bother me at all that it took a while. I thought it was more important that the real recipients get theirs first.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of a kind of unboxing. It’s really more of a series of pictures of the packaging/parts, since I had already unboxed the thing by the time I took these.

Simple cardboard packaging and plastic bags for protection

All parts arranged on the open box

Front of welcome brochure and power brick

The OLPC itself with the two random color elements that make it “unique”

Back of the OLPC, with battery removed

Battery and welcome letter

Inside of welcome brochure

Back of welcome brochure

The battery actually came mostly charged, which was a nice surprise. Turning the laptop on for the first time took me through a simple naming step and then right to the “hub”/home screen. It took a while to get there, but it was really, really simple. No series of screens that ask for all kinds of information, like on regular PCs.

My initial exploration of the software took me around to the Journal, Webcam app (called Recorder), Paint, Measure (seemed to enable you to analyze / show the sound from the microphone), wireless setup, Browser and a few other things. Looks very interesting so far.

Both my kids have expressed interest in fiddling with it. Should be a lot of fun.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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Here’s a quick tip: If you’re a Netflix subscriber and are having problems with the WatchNow feature, take a look at whether you have any caching proxy servers between the PC you’re using to watch a show and the Netflix servers (yes, that’s a long path and a very general statement, I know).

If, for example, you have a home network server with a caching proxy feature, try turning the proxy feature off. That helped me with MediaError(1400) problems, anyway.

If your ISP has a caching proxy, see if there’s a way around it, too. It may be a source of problems.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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I have the good fortune to be able to attend SD West this year. I’ve heard people at work rave about this conference right in my backyard, and was lucky to get approval to go this year.

Unfortunately I’ve been so swamped with work (really exciting new stuff, too) that I haven’t been able to prepare at all. In other words I still have no idea about what sessions to go to. Argh. To add to that frustration, the SD West website doesn’t make it really easy to plan your days for maximum efficiency. Double Argh.

Here’s how I like to plan my attendance: I have an idea at a high level about what kind of sessions I’d like to focus on (in my case .NET and People, Process & Methods mostly). So I need to be able to filter all sessions by those high-level criteria. Next, I need to figure out which sessions in those high level tracks are available at what time and how they may conflict relative to how interesting they sound to me.

The information provided on the SD West website provides some ability to filter and search for sessions, but it doesn’t help you with detailed planning.

So I decided to spend a little time pulling down all sessions as an Excel sheet (which the site allows, thank goodness), and started to shape and mold the sheet to my needs. The result is available for you to use as well, in case you’re as late as I am: sdwest08_all.xlsx (update: rename this file to have an .xlsx suffix after downloading, WordPress changed the extension on me).
(I think I have all sessions in there, but I noticed that one session seemed to not be fully downloaded (a session with quotes in the description), so I added it back by hand. Maybe there are others missing too, but I think that was the only one.)

You’ll see all sessions sorted by time, color coded by time slot/event type (keynotes, birds-of-a-feather), color coded by track, and with filters on each column. I also added a priority column at the beginning to perhaps help making decisions if you change your mind while at the event.

And, yes, I will most likely be wearing my Geek Tie at the event (it has a Red Verbatim Store’n'Go USB memory stick and a gray CaseLogic case at the end).

Categories: Personal, Software development
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Okay, time for a little bragging .

I was at the local Fry’s yesterday, buying a new hard drive to replace one that’s about to go bad, and on my way out I stopped by the magazine racks. Imagine my surprise when I saw this on the cover:

How cool to see the product you worked on so intensely be recognized with a magazine cover photo! If you look closely, you can even see one of my photos to the left of the big red circle in the little photo stack.

I’m still pinching myself a little just to make sure it’s not a dream.

The HP TouchSmart PC came in at number 7 on the top 25 innovative products. Not too shabby, I think. And I’m glad to see that the OLPC took third place ahead of it. I’m still waiting for the OLPC I’m supposed to get with my give-one-get-one donation, but I hear it will come any day now.

Here are some more pictures from the magazine:

Categories: Personal
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The Christmas spirit struck today at the GeekTieGuy household. Here are a few pictures of the Lego Christmas trees I built.

Merry Christmas!

Categories: Personal, Pictures
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[Update 2010-01-24:
It looks like Crossloop has gone more commercial and now makes it harder to find the free version of the program. Crossloop's business model now revolves around enabling skilled people help others with computer trouble and to help those two groups of people find each other. Their main product is now no longer free, but an ad-supported version is still available for free on their site.

This post on my blog has been the single most visited post for an amazingly long time and has sent many, many people to crossloop. I make no money off of this post, and I'm not in any way affiliated with Crossloop, their business model or any other aspect of their operation.
End update]

I spent about three hours with my mom today. I helped her pick out photos from a trip we’d taken together this summer for a little presentation she’s going to give to her local community, printed out some information from the web and helped her burn the photos onto a CD. Not an unusual thing for a son to do for his computer-challenged mother, right?

Except my mom lives about 5400 miles away. How did it happen?

Crossloop. A free remote assistance program that even my mom can figure out. I helped her download it, and it worked beautifully. I ran Picasa, MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer, Email and even the installation of the .NET Framework 3.0 for her.

If you’ve been disappointed with the built-in remote assistance programs in Windows XP or Windows Vista, give Crossloop a try. It works very well, almost no matter what kind of firewalls and proxies are between the two computers that are trying to connect.

Highly recommended.

Categories: Personal, Software
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Here are some pictures from a Barnes & Noble store in San Jose, California.

We went to participate in the costume contest. My younger daughter dressed up as Ginny Weasly, hair colored red and all. Alas, she didn’t win anything. We thought her costume was pretty creative. Nothing store-bought. All materials found around the house.

Anyway. On with the pics:

 
Line around the corner

Getting the books from storage to behind the counter

Yes, the line goes all the way to the left side of the picture.

People were standing in line for wristbands that gave you a specific time window after midnight to come back in. When we left the wristbands were for a 5 AM slot. We’ll just wait until later in the morning when things will have died down a bit, presumably. Yes, we’re hooked too…

It was a perfect time to check out the AT&T store across the street. No line for the iPhone today… I had plenty of time to really check out the iPhone’s UI and user interaction. I found several things that bugged me after just a little while. But I also found several things that are pretty cool. Not worth $1200 over 2 years cool, though.

We hung around after the costume contest for a bit, and ran into a family sharing Potter Puppet Pals videos from YouTube on their Apple laptop. My daughter had made friends with one of the girls in that family during the costume contest.

My wife said it was one of the more bizarre things she’s experienced. I wouldn’t go that far, but it was certainly interesting.

Categories: Personal
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I just got back from an amazing trip to the Grand Canyon. This was my first time going there. We chose the North Rim, partly because of a magazine article we’d read recently. The North Rim has about 10 times fewer visitors than the South Rim, which suits our style very well. The views from the North are quite spectacular, too.

The most amazing thing was that we got to experience the solitude and majesty of the canyon all by ourselves. Here’s how you might be able to do it too: Drive to Point Imperial such that you arrive a half an hour before sunset. We arrived right at sunset, so we missed the best light for taking pictures. If you stay half an hour to an hour after sunset, you may find that everyone else leaves because of the lack of picture-taking opportunities. You’ll hear the wind rush through the trees, see bats and swallows flying about to catch insects, and you’ll be able to sit down on a bench quietly and just be.

And you can get some nice pictures, even after sunset:

Categories: Personal
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