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One Rule of UX Consulting

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One Rule of UX Consulting

There is a rule in consulting that many professionals don’t seem to understand (or want to believe). This rule applies regardless of your specialty. It doesn’t matter whether you call yourself a UX Architect, a Design Researcher, a UI Visual Designer, a Production Artist, an Intern or the local big cheese. If you are a consultant in this wild and wonderful profession of ours, this one rule applies to you. Are you ready? Here it is:

It’s Not the Client’s Fault

I’m serious. Repeat it over and over until it’s inscribed on your brain and in your heart. Now write it on the palm of your hand. In ink.

Yes, It Can Be Your Fault

Think back on the difficult projects in your past. Did the client make many “busy work” requests of you? Require more revisions than you felt were necessary? Were your ideas not immediately understood? Did the client ask for “more” or simply not like some aspect of your work? Have you felt put upon by clients that just don’t get it? Be honest now. We’ve all had this experience. What I’m suggesting to you is that you were the cause of it all. That’s right – it wasn’t the client’s fault. It was yours.

I can hear you mumbling, “Yeah, right” as you shake your head. You’re thinking you can lump my rule in with clichés like “The Customer is Always Right” but you’d be wrong. The truth is that the customer isn’t always right. That cliché is simply a way to guide employee behavior in the face of situations over which they have no control. It is an ex post facto piece of advice. As a consultant, you can (and, by definition, should) have control over the situation. That’s what makes us consultants. We are the experts, the hired guns, the people with the experience and the answers. It’s why the client is paying us. And this is where many consultants get it wrong. They think, through hubris or inexperience, that because a client is paying you for your big ideas that they will, nay should, be satisfied with what you deliver to them. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

A Consultant’s Lot

In addition to technical expertise, a large portion of a consultant’s job is to educate and lead clients on the journey that is their particular project. Clients want to understand why you made particular design choices (especially when they differ from the choices they would have made). They want to be part of the design process. After all, they have to live with these designs long after you move on to greener pastures.

Here are a few things you should be doing as you work with your clients to ensure that you are keeping them engaged in the process:

  • Make your design rationale clear to themas you are designing. Include clients in your work by sending them early, unfinished versions and walking them through your thought processes.
  • Pick up the phone and talk to your client about that idea you had for resolving a particularly sticky problem. Their problems are your problems. Don’t wait for the next regularly scheduled review meeting.
  • Design collaboratively! Use time actually spent with your clients to get together in a room and work through design issues on the fly. Use the whiteboard. Sketch on large sheets of paper. This may sound a little like “writing in the coffee shop window,” but it’s important. Not only does it reinforce your expertise and expose your design rationale but it allows the client to understand, first hand, how this thing called Design works.

Remember, technical expertise is only part of consulting. Good consultants can see beyond the client’s requests and deliver on the client’s needs. That’s what consulting is all about.


Exclusive Interview: Microsoft's Jay Schmelzer

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We recently had the opportunity to chat with Jay Schmelzer, Director of Program Management at Microsoft. Jay shared his thoughts on why Office-inspired apps are so popular, where he sees Office in the future, and more. Read on for the full interview!

Thanks for taking the time to chat with us, Jay. Tell us a little bit about yourself!

Well, I’ve been at Microsoft for a little over 11 years, and I’m currently the Director of Program Management for the Visual Studio Cloud Platform Tools team. I started as a Program Manager for the Visual Basic debugger and IDE, and now I’m leading the PM team responsible for the CLR, .NET Framework, Managed programming languages (VB.NET, C#, F#), Visual Studio tools for building applications on Azure, Office 365 (SharePoint and Office) and business applications (Cloud Business Apps and LightSwitch).  Prior to Microsoft, I spent 10 years as a consultant, building custom business applications.

In your experience, why do you think people build apps that look like Microsoft Office?

In the years prior to working for Microsoft, my clients always wanted their business applications to look like Office.  Every time Office introduced a new UI paradigm, that was the model our clients wanted.  I think there were a couple factors that motivated this.  One was just the fact that it resulted in applications that had a consistent look at feel.  The menus and toolbars (now ribbons) had commands in the expected place, making them easy to find and reducing the time necessary to train the end users on the application.

Building apps that look like Office also meant that the apps looked good! I mean, let’s face it: Office apps look good. The team [that creates them] spends a lot of time thinking about the look and feel of the Office products.  So why would we not capitalize on that for our apps?

So in trying to emulate that style, what are the common mistakes that people make when targeting Office?

Of course just blindly following that UI model isn’t good either.  In my opinion, the thing the Office apps did well was identify the common tasks and workflows users would have within the app and then design around the product to make those tasks simple and productive.  If you just try to re-create the Office look and feel without spending the time to identify your users’ common tasks and workflows they’ll experience in your business applications, you’ll end up with a pretty application that doesn’t function well.

Good point. What are are some of the coolest solutions you’ve seen where a customer (or even someone internally at Microsoft) built an app that looks like Office?

Wow, there are a lot!  I think the Dynamics team actually did a really good job of applying the Office look and feel to a core business application. They really succeeded in taking advantage of that instantly familiar experience while also staying focused on the common tasks and workflow unique to their application.

What do you think Office will look and feel like in 15 years?

Well, I’m not on the Office team so I’m speaking from personal opinion here! But, I think the mobile app experiences are going to be very unique compared to the more traditional desktop experiences of the past. Great mobile apps - the ones we like using - are very task-focused and optimized for the device form factor you are on.  Rather than a single application that does everything, you find yourself moving between multiple apps that are designed for the specific task and integrate well with each other.  I expect that in the future we’ll see apps designed to take advantage of the unique input capabilities of the devices (like camera, touch, location, etc.) in really cool ways.

To get started on creating Office-Inspired apps of your own, be sure to download Infragistics Ultimate today.

Infragistics Reporting Release Notes – June: 13.2, 14.1 Service Releases

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With every release of Infragistics Reporting comes a set of release notes that reflects the state of resolved bugs and new additions from the previous release. You’ll find the notes useful to help determine the resolution of existing issues from a past release and as a means of determining where to test your applications when upgrading from one version to the next.

The Release Notes are available in PDF format and summarize the changes to this release along with a listing of each item. In order to download the release notes, use the following links:

Reporting 2013 Volume 2

Reporting 2014 Volume 1

Mobile Access to Analysis Services Reloaded with ReportPlus v3.0

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As I mentioned in the release blog post of ReportPlus v3.0, we have invested in improving the overall experience of working with Analysis Services cubes from mobile devices, to define queries, and author dashboards with the result of those queries.

Specifically in version 3.0 of ReportPlus support for Analysis Services connections has been improved in the following ways:

New Tree Editor for Hierarchies and Measures

The user interface to edit connections to cubes has been improved to introduce a tree editor to navigate the hierarchies of a cube’s dimensions, and measures. The area for the dimensions navigator has been extended, and can be customized with the slider. When the visualizations panel is expanded the tree view display is resized automatically.

ReportPlus AnalysisServices Editor

Named Sets Support

Analysis Services allows the user to group information in a cube in a structure called named sets, which simplify the querying process. This user defined structures are supported with version 3.0 of ReportPlus.

Folders and Measure Groups

Support is introduced for groupings of metrics in cubes using folders and measure groups.

Calculated Fields for Analysis Services

The ability to add new calculated fields in Analysis Services data sources is introduced in this version. For instance if a query from a cube retrieves sales from America, EMEA, Australia, China and Japan, a new field named APAC which adds sales for Australia, China and Japan can be added.

Developer News - What's IN with the Infragistics Community? (6/16-6/22)

Building Office Inspired Apps with Infragistics Ultimate

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Office Inspired Apps

I'll never forget TechEd 2006 when Microsoft introduced the Office Ribbon with the Office Fluent User Interface in Office 2007 to developers.  During TechEd, The Infragistics booth was buzzing with customers asking “when will Infragistics ship a Ribbon control”.  The Ribbon UI was literally rolled out 24 hours earlier, yet the developer market already knew that this new Office Ribbon was going to be baked into their apps sooner or later.  Fast forward to 2014, and pretty much every internal & external corporate line of business application includes an Office style Ribbon.  In fact, most apps that you see on the market today resemble an Outlook-style UI, or a Word-style UI.  So why is this?  Why do customers and business ask their developer teams to deliver this Office Inspired experience?  The answer is easy – ease of use & familiarity for their users.  The Office suite is the most widely used business tool on the market, so if your apps can mimic that experience, the cost of training and understanding of the user base goes away.  Microsoft spent tens of millions of dollars (or maybe even more) convincing the market to use Office, to use the Ribbon, so you might as well take advantage of that education.  Make your users happy – build them Office Inspired Apps.

And that really sums up one of the huge benefits that Infragistics Ultimate brings to the market – we enable developers to deliver pixel-perfect Office Inspired experiences to your customers.

WPF-Themed-1[1]

So let's take a look at what Infragistics Ultimate offers in terms of helping you deliver these pixel-perfect Office Inspired apps to your customers.  Across all of our products we have literally hundreds of UI components that help deliver Office experience, like text editors, status bars, Word  and Excel libraries to name a few, but for this blog, we will focus on the key UI elements that give your customers the true Office App feeling. 

Office Inspired Windows Forms Apps

In Infragistics Windows Forms, we have pretty much every control you can imagine to build a rich, modern, touch-enabled experience for your users.  To build an Office Inspired UI, it takes only minutes, are you can see in this how-to video.

[youtube] width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/dCTmWjN3WkA" [/youtube]

We bring the key controls, like the Office Ribbon, Outlook Bar, Grid& DockManager to help you build a great experience.  And the Grid is not just any grid, it includes all of the interactivity your users expect, like sorting, grouping, filtering, editing and more.

And even cooler UI control added in 2014 to the Infragistics Windows Forms product is the Pivot Grid, which allows you to build Excel-like interactive pivot tables on the fly in your apps.

Office Inspired Apps

If you are looking for a more modern, Windows 8.1 style experience, we also include the Radial Menu control, which is a touch-friendly UI for modern apps.  This control is available in Windows Forms, WPF & jQuery in Infragistics Ultimate.

 Office Inspired Apps

 

To learn more about building Office Inspired Windows Forms apps, check out these resources:

How to Create a Pivot Grid in Windows Forms 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0gl8dQy_EM

Building an Office Style UI in Minutes with Windows Forms
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCTmWjN3WkA

Windows Forms – Deep Dive into the Data Grid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WWddNMuMoU&list=PL0E38885A100B2C8A

 

And the easiest way to get started building Windows Forms Office Inspired apps is to fire up Visual Studio - you can now find a new set of Infragistics templates in the File - New Project dialog.  These templates are designed to help you get started with a functional, well-designed, and fully-styled application.

  • Inventory Management
  • Outlook Inspired Template
  • Project Manager

Each Starter Kit includes real data so you don’t have to dig around to figure out how to do the basics to get up and running in delivering stunning apps to your customers!

Office Inspired Apps

 

 

Office Inspired WPF Apps

The story is similar in WPF, we include all of the key UI elements that would make up a stunning Office UI, including the Office 13 Backstage experience.

 Office Inspired Apps

 

But we’ve gone even further in the last 12 months with some really cool Office Inspired controls.  We now ship a  Word-like Rich Text Editor which literally mimics the experience you get in Microsoft Word, with all of the formatting capabilities and features, even reading & writing HTML, RTF & Word.

Office Inspired Apps

We’ve also shipped previews of our Visio-inspired Diagramming control, and our Excel-inspired Spreadsheet control.

 

Office Inspired Apps

 

The nice thing about the Excel Spreadsheet control that's built on top of our Excel library, which we've been building over the last 10 years to pretty much include every feature you can imagine that Excel delivers.  So while technically challenging, it wasn't that far of a leap to build a great Office UI on top of the Excel library.

Office Inspired Apps

 

To really show you how to build an Office Inspired experiences in WPF, we've shipped a pixel-perfect Outlook app built using Infragistics WPF controls. Get it from the WPF product page, just scroll down to the Application Samples.

Office Inspired Apps

To get started with building an Office Inspired Outlook UI in WPF, check out this video and more tutorials on YouTube:

[youtube] width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/lmk4cDsXrOk" [/youtube]

Explore the WPF Diagram Control
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp4Q3Lz1shQ

Getting Started with WPF Ribbon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHpQJcPVaX0&list=PL70D9EF2166B6B667

Read Brian’s blog on the latest Office capabilities in the XAML products.

Wrapping it up …

As you can see, you are not that far from starting to deliver beautiful Office Inspired applications.  We covered the key UI controls in Windows Forms & WPF in this blog, but it does not stop there.  Our ASP.NET & jQuery / HTML5 products both have key UI controls that can help you deliver Office Inspired to the web.  And don’t forget about custom styling … we ship modern Office & Windows themes in every platform, so making your next app a Pixel-Perfect Office Inspiration is right around the corner!

Get started today and download Infragistics Ultimate!

If you can't seem to find the Office UI you are looking for, shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com and let me know what's on your mind!

Infographic: Why You Should Build Office-Inspired Apps

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Why do many custom-built apps fail? Because they aren't familiar to their users. Check out the infographic below for more information on why you should build Office-inspired apps, and how Infragistics can help you!

You can also view the full-size infographic HERE.

Sources: Microsoft by the Numbers; 2012 Infragistics Survey

CEE MVP Open Days 2014–Event Recap

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CEE MVP Open Days 2014 was held on June 18 – 22, 2014 in Moscow and Rybinsk, Russia.

CEE MVP Open Days is annual event for Microsoft MVP Award Program members who live in Central and Eastern Europe.

 

The program included three events

MVP Day in Microsoft Russia, Moscow/Russia June 18th– public event where MVPs from across CEE will present technical sessions for local technical community in Moscow, Russia. It is first “community for community” event in Microsoft Russia, so the MVPs will contribute to it-community ecosystem in Russia – around 300 attendees.

CEE MVP Open Days 2014, Rybinsk, Russia June 19-20th– the conference itself, the special event for MVPs, where all the content are confidential and under NDA – around 50 Microsoft MVPs

MVP Upper Volga Tour, Uglich/Kalyazin/Russia, June 21-22st - special networking activity for MVPs who wants to participate voluntary

 

Infragistics was presented by me as a speaker – CEE MVP Open Days in Rybinsk.

 

Summary:

  • There was 17 presentations in 3 tracks in Moscow
  • Around 300 attendees in Moscow – MVP Day .
  • There was 16 presentations in 2 tracks in Rybinsk – CEE MVP Open Days
  • Around 50 MVPs from 8 countries  (Russia, Belarus, Slovenia, Slovakia, Czech Republic,  Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria)

 

The conference venue in Rybinsk

 

 

Just before the first session

 

Bernardin Katic is talking about how to organize community events

 

Only Microsoft MVPs

 

 

Infragistics participation in the event:

Follow news from Infragistics for more information about new Infragistics events.

As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch on Facebook, Google+ andLinkedIn!

 


iOS Quick Tip: Find the Size of a NSString

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When writing an app, you sometimes comes across situations where you need to adjust the position and size of a label based on the size of the text. And that size could be different based on a particular font you're using. So, today i'm going to show you how you can quickly grab the size of a string with a specified font. Prior to iOS 7 you could use: CGSize size = [@“Infragistics" sizeWithFont:[UIFont fontWithName:@"Avenir-Book" size:20]]; However, in iOS 7 that method was...(read more)

WEBINAR Q&A : How to Build Office-Inspired Apps

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The following are the answers to the questions that were submitted to the Q&A box during the webinar on 6/19/2014.  Thanks again for attending.

Q:  Is the new control (xamDiagram) available to WinForm application?

A: The control is currently built in XAML – however you could use this WPF control within your Windows Forms application through the use of Element Host.

Here is a Microsoft article walk-through that shows how you can do this. You can use any WPF control that you like: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms742215(v=vs.110).aspx

 

Q: For WPF Excel component, is it possible to hide the header and left most column (ie. the A,B,C and 1,2,3) so a user wouldnt realize its a spreadsheet?

A: Yes, this is possible – the Worksheet object has this property: http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.DisplayOptions~ShowRowAndColumnHeaders.html

So, you would do something like this: MyWorkSheet.DisplayOptions.ShowRowAndColumnHeaders = false;

Just get a reference to the Worksheet in the Worksheet collection or whenever you create and add a worksheet, keep track of the reference to that worksheet.

Worksheet Class http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.Worksheet_members.html

WorksheetDisplayOptions class: http://help.infragistics.com/doc/WPF/2014.1/CLR4.0/?page=InfragisticsWPF4.Documents.Excel.v14.1~Infragistics.Documents.Excel.WorksheetDisplayOptions_members.html

 

Q: Will you have any more in depth webinars on the WPF IG Outlook sample...?

A: We currently do not have any scheduled at the moment, however, we will give your suggestion to the product / marketing team for future webinar possibilities. And, as you know, you can always get in touch with our Developer Support if you ever had any questions on how to go about building this, or if you run into any problems, questions, or not sure which direction to go when putting this together.

Submit Support Request:

https://www.infragistics.com/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fmy-account%2fsubmit-support-request%2f

Five interesting web development trends so far this year

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We have hit the half way point of the year, so it seemed a good time to take a look at some interesting trends we have seen so far in 2014. Hopefully you will recognise the majority of these, and will have touched them in your work at some point. Add a comment below with your thoughts.

Web Development Trends1. Flat Design
Our first trend affects designers, UX/UI professionals, and developers alike. All of these people will have struggled to escape the launch of iOS 7 late last year, and the focus it brought to ‘flat design’ (and the end of the principles of Skeuomorphic design). 2014 has seen flat design go nuclear, with websites large and small looking to redesign themselves to fall inline. Even Google got in on the act.

As demonstrated by: iOS 7 and nearly every website launch and mobile app of 2014.

2. The continuing popularity of CSS frameworks
Tools like LESS and SASS are continuing to find favour with web developers. Such frameworks offer well-defined programming constructs (such as code blocks and variables) in the traditionally fast and loose world of CSS. The old school development community might see this as a fuss about nothing, but those who have struggled to tame CSS over the last few years see such CSS extensions as really useful innovations.

As demonstrated by: Google’s unwavering support for pre-processors being matched by Microsoft (The recent Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 added much improved support for SASS editing).

3. Single page apps
Chiefly a response to the need for better HTML5 mobile apps (less round tripping/data requests and slicker user experiences), the single page app is just that - a website consisting of just a single page. Such apps - where the data and presentation layers are totally separated - are designed to look and behave like native phone or tablet apps, with background data refreshes and rich UI interactions. The term ‘single page app’ was actually coined in 2005, but 2014 has seen huge growth in interest and adoption..

As demonstrated by: Google’s much loved (by most) AngularJS framework.

4. The rise and rise of JavaScript frameworks
In 2014 the JavaScript framework is, in itself, nothing new. But this year we have seen some very impressive innovations. Take Famo.us for example, an open source framework designed to help developers build complex user interfaces. More than that though Famo.us is the first framework to offer its own rendering engine (separate to the browser it is running in), which it can do by taking advantage of client GPU acceleration. This allows for some impressive effects like 3D processing and physics simulations. Truly a step forward for JavaScript.

As demonstrated by: Famo.us has just opened its beta program to all developers.

5. Web based development environments
The web development community is used to pushing the power of the browser. In 2014 we saw it able to harness that power for its own means. A number of browser based Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) have surfaced which give developers a realistic alternative to traditional desktop tools. Google has its own effort called Spark, and Pario attempts to give less technical users something they can use to create code.

As demonstrated by: Google Spark, Codio, and countless others.

Infragistics Web Design Council

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Hey, do you know about the Infragistics Web Design Council? If not, read on!

What is the Infragistics Web Design Council?
It’s a select group of Infragistics customers who want to have early access to what we are working on to provide early feedback and help shape the Web products to better suit your needs.

Why join?
In this program, you will have access to exclusive information, early-preview software, and avenues of feedback. Under a mutual Non-Disclosure Agreement, we can more freely share information that is not released publicly yet and thereby better integrate you into our design and development process, which means you know what is coming and, more importantly, you get to help shape the future of Infragistics Web tools to maximize your productivity and effectiveness.

How does it work?
The primary mode of involvement is through a private mailing list. Once you are a member, you will be able to send to and receive from that list. When we are ready to share new software builds, we’ll email the list to let you know about it and how to get it, as well as the timeframe for feedback.

If you are interested, you can grab it, try it out, and let us know how you think it could be tweaked to help you and your company more.

We may also just ping you with general questions, maybe even share some prototypes, design docs, etc. Our goal is to get you involved more and earlier so that what we make is as close as it can be to what you need.

How much time does it take?
That’s pretty much up to you. It’s not going to be a high volume list most of the time. Traffic will come in spurts around when we send out questions/things for review. It’s totally up to you if you respond and participate at any given time.

Okay! How do I apply?
Send an email to igniteui [at] infragistics [dot] com with your customer information and asking to join our private Web Design Council. We will then pass along our mutual NDA form that we’ll need you to sign for your company and either scan and email or fax back to us. After that, we will add you to the email list, and you’re in!

(If you think you already are under an NDA with us, let us know who your account rep is so that we can verify.)

That’s it. We hope you will join—we want our customers to feel empowered to shape the future of Infragistics Web tools.

Oh, and by the way, another great way to contribute to the future of our products is by suggesting and voting on product ideas—we use that to help us prioritize what we do for you! Drop by any time—we want to hear from you!

Android L Developer Preview

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During the Google I/O conference yesterday, Google revealed their brand new Android L Developer Preview. This is actually the FIRST time Google is releasing a developer preview, so it’s a pretty big deal.  Not only does Android L have a new enhanced look, but it also has deeper ties to the web making it more user friendly. 

For More In-Depth Info about Android L from Industry Pros, Check Out:

Releasing Update 1 for Indigo Studio (v3)

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In version 3, we added the capability to create custom UI libraries using screenparts. If you haven't tried this yet, you are missing out :D.This was one of the top requested ideas. And with that, it's time to move on to even bigger and better things. Keep the ideas rolling in!

To kick off the "update" season for Version 3, we added the following new features in update 1:

  • Image thumbnails in the prototype viewer
  • New fonts for offline/online use in your prototypes
  • Minor UI improvements

Image thumbnails in Prototype Viewer

When we have shipped the Table of Contents in the prototype viewer, it showed the names of the screens. We figured viewing the screen thumbnails makes it a more recognizable experience. So now when you pull out the table of contents, you see screen names + thumbs. I know, not earth shattering, but it's a nicer experience.

Prototype Viewer Table of Contents

New Fonts for Designing Prototypes

Quite of few of you have been requesting more fonts for Indigo. It's not because we aspire to be stingy about this, but given the focus on rapid prototyping, we felt a smaller font list will be quicker to help you pick a reasonable one, and move on the bigger things :D. But we understand that sometimes fonts can set the mood, and may be important. With this update, we added support for Source Sans Pro, Roboto and Roboto Condensed.

Font Cards

There are a few reasons why we are adding fonts (and font weights in the future) carefully. A primary driver has been the need to embed fonts in the prototype so that we can support both offline and online uses. The last thing we want is you being unable to render the prototype correctly when offline. The other aspect we considered is that viewers of the prototype may not have the prototype font, and license restrictions may prevent us from embedding it. In either case, we are exploring ways to incorporate more open fonts and use it seamlessly whether online or offline. For now, your viewers will see exactly the same font you designed with.

Minor UI Improvements

  • The lock and visibility icons were tweaked to better communicate its current state.
  • The IX explorer is now visually integrated with the state name.

How to Get This update?

Here's how to update the version of Indigo Studio installed on your machine:

  • If you have the option to automatically check for updates on startup checked, you should see a dialog box pop up when you launch Indigo. Simply click update, and Indigo Studio will do the rest. This is the easier approach.
  • If for some reason you chose not to automatically check for updates, go to MENU > HELP & ABOUT and use the "CHECK FOR UPDATES" option. Checking for Updates

About Indigo Studio for Interaction Prototyping

Don't have Indigo Studio? Download a free 30-day trial which will let you try all of the prototyping goodness.

Download Indigo Studio

Looking to suggest improvements and new ideas for Indigo Studio?

Submit a new idea

If for some reason you are having trouble with Indigo Studio, check out our help topics, forums or contact support.

Get Support

Follow us on Twitter @indigodesigned

Releasing Update 2 for Indigo Studio (v3)

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In this update, we added several visual improvements to the look and feel of Indigo Studio in addition to adding some requested features. These include the following:

Project Home UI Tweaks

We finally got around to making some UI improvements to the project home. This involved making some of the toolbar actions more obvious.

The RUN button has a more consistent position in the app overall. We made the search feature more prominent and also unified the look of the design thumbnails and titles. Let us know how it's working our for you.

AFTER Update 2, your project home should look like this: Project home-after

This is how it looked BEFORE:Project-home-before

And by the way, the project home will remember the sort order when you relaunch the app (i.e., by name, recently changed).

Clipboard Paste for Images

Quite a few of have been using tools like snagit to capture screenshots. A lot such tools copy the image captured to the clipboard. So we have now made it easier for you to quickly paste it inside Indigo Studio without have to explicitly save this image first.

clipboard paste

This works with other image editing tools as well (e.g., Preview on OSX, GIMP, MS Paint). When editing an image, you can select a region, copy it and paste it on the Indigo Studio design surface.

Recently Used Colors and Eye-Dropper

This feature does not need much explanation :D. It would suffice to say that with addition of recent colors (row), you don't have to look up the color values ;).

color picker

The eye-dropper, like in other tools, will let you sample and match colors from other images or colors on the design surface.

Recently Used Fonts and Font Picker

In update 1 (for v3), we introduced three new fonts. With update 2, once you pick a font, Indigo will remember it for the project. So if you started with Roboto, you can continue to create new text based elements without having to set it again.

font picker

On a related note, we minimized the font list when you initially load it up. This way you don't have to hunt for the new fonts we added. The open fonts we have selected to include for now are pretty resilient and should serve you well. You can, of course, expand to view all the supported fonts. Indigo warns you about unsupported system fonts (on OS X).

How to Get This update?

Here's how to update the version of Indigo Studio installed on your machine:

  • If you have the option to automatically check for updates on startup checked, you should see a dialog box pop up when you launch Indigo. Simply click update, and Indigo Studio will do the rest. This is the easier approach.
  • If for some reason you chose not to automatically check for updates, go to MENU > HELP & ABOUT and use the "CHECK FOR UPDATES" option.

Checking for Updates

About Indigo Studio for Interaction Prototyping

Don't have Indigo Studio? Download a free 30-day trial which will let you try all of the prototyping goodness.

Download Indigo Studio

Looking to suggest improvements and new ideas for Indigo Studio?

Submit a new idea

If for some reason you are having trouble with Indigo Studio, check out our help topics, forums or contact support.

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SQLSaturday #313 Rheinland, Germany – Event Recap

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Infragistics Inc. was a sponsor of SQLSaturday #313 Rheinland, Germanu. Company provided licenses for the event raffle.  

Infragistics also was presented at SQLSaturday Rheinland by me by me as a speaker.

The event was held on Saturday, June 28th  at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg Campus Sankt Augustin ( an university in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany).

There also was a big data hackathon, organized during the previous day – 27th of June.

Administrators of the conference were Olivel Engels , Tillmann Eitelberg and  Kostja Klein .

They organized an amazing team of volunteers who did an  awesome event.

This was the first Microsoft Data Platform event with Infragistics in Germany. Infragistics Inc. was the only one component vendor with a speaker at the conference. Participants gave a good feedback about the company presentation.  There was also an interest in the  Infragistics solutions, related to Development Tools,  Data Visualization and Business Solutions. Infragistics presentation samples for Node.js and SQL Server  included solutions implemented with the company products like  Ignite UI. Hope in the near feature to have more closer contacts with professionals, community  members and companies from this region.

Summary:

  • There was 31 presentations in 5 tracks.
  • More than 250 attendees
  • 28 Speakers from 10 countries: Austria, Denmark, UK, USA, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Russia, Portugal, France and Germany

 

A Big Data Hackathon before SQLSaturday Rheinland

 

 

SQLSaturday Rheinland sessions…

 

 

 

During the breaks…

 

and more…

 

Infragistics participation in the event:

Follow news from Infragistics for more information about new Infragistics events.

As always, you can follow us on Twitter @mihailmateev and @Infragistics and stay in touch on Facebook, Google+ andLinkedIn!

 

VIDEO: Exploring the WPF Ribbon Control

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In this video, we're going to take a look at the new XAM ribbon and XAM ribbon window features that have been added in Infragistics Ultimate 14.1 to help give your applications a Microsoft Office 2013 look and feel.

[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/e_fhsVAEkM8" [/youtube]

TRANSCRIPT:

Here we have an existing WPF application that uses a ribbon and a XAM ribbon window. As you can see, we have a home tab with a few buttons, as well as, the Office 2010 blue theme applied.

If we run the application, we'll notice that we have our XAM ribbon window, and we also have a Backstage, which mimics the Office 2010 backstage.

In order to give this application a new Office 2013 look and feel, the easiest way to do that is to simply set the theme property of the XAM ribbon to Office 2013. Immediately, you're going to see the designer reflect a clean, modern Office 2013 look and feel.

Now when we run the application, you’ll notice that the application now has the Office 2013 look and feel. It also has the new Office 2013 backstage. (You can see with the back arrows how you would now escape the backstage. ) But pay specific attention to the window chrome. The chrome also has the new Office 2013 window look- that clean, modern, thin border around the window chrome.

But that's not all we can do with this. Let's say that we want to change the accent color of our ribbon and window chrome. We can change the accent color application by setting the “application accent color” property to a value of our choice. For example, let's look at what red looks like. By setting that single property, we've now changed the color of the border of our chrome of the window, as well as the backstage and file/menu options.

Another feature that's been added in 14.1 is what's called a “tap item tool bar”. Due to time constraints, I'm going to go paste in some pre-existing code. As you can see, I've created a new tab item area tool bar object: a “stack panel”, which contains a toggle button that has a control template. Basically what we're doing is mimicking that login functionality that you’ll find in current Microsoft Office products.

So now when I run this application, we’ll see that we now have this tab item area tool bar available to our end users. Notice that when I show the backstage, it stays in view just like the current Office products behave.

You could put any control you want in this area. You're not limited to specific object types here. You’ll also notice that this tab item area tool bar has an overflow. So when you minimize or resize your window, you have an overflow icon that allows you to access those items that you have placed in your tab item area tool bar.

Now, all these features are great for the main window of your application, but what about all the other dialogs and windows that show throughout your application? Luckily, you can easily apply the same window chrome to all the other windows by simply removing the ribbon.

Let's remove all that work we just did - we'll remove the ribbon and now we're going to set the theme property on the ribbon content host of the XAM ribbon. We'll set it to Office 2013 and run the application.

Even though we're not using the ribbon, we can still use the XAM ribbon window without a ribbon in order to give the rest of the windows, dialogs and pop-ups within our application a similar Office 2013 look and feel. This keeps your application consistent, and looks great.

You can also modify the application accent color by setting the application accent color property. But in this case, we have to use an attached property. We're going to say “ribbon window content host dot application accent color” and we'll just choose red again. We'll run the application again, and as you can see, we now have our XAM ribbon with no ribbon, but we're still able to leverage our accent color to keep our application consistent with the main window of our application!

How to Create a Quick Access Toolbar

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In our latest how-to video, we show you how to create an Office-inspired Windows Forms application, complete with a Quick Access Toolbar! Check it out: 

[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/CYQ7dR_gijE" [/youtube]

TRANSCRIPT:

First, we’ll open up Visual Studio, and go to "File," "New," "New Project," and start with the Windows Forms application. First let's make it larger. To start, we’re going to go to the Toolbox to add the UltraToolbarsManager. When we add that to the form, we're going to get prompted: do we want to add a Panel control? Let’s say yes and add a Panel control to the form, which is going to hold our control. We'll pick the middle option which is the lighter-weight Panel control.

So now what we’ll do is click "Show Ribbon" and right here at the top is a Quick Access Toolbar. To add a new tool here, simply click "Insert New Tool" and it's going to be type “button”, and let’s select “Cut”. At this point, let’s go ahead and add a little Cut button, like Cut and Paste. We’ll hit "Add" and "Close," and now you'll see that the button was added here but it has no image. So let's go ahead and add an image! We’ll right click on that, and under Images, I'm going to say "Set Small Image". I’ll navigate to an image - for a small button, you're going to want to use the image of size 24 x 24. So I’ll select the image called Cut. Click "OK," and click "OK" again, and there you have it. Now, you can see we have a Quick Access Tool right here: Cut. We’ll hit F5 to see what it looks like – and great! It looks good to me!

Now, the only thing we need to do is to handle the click event, and there’s a really easy way to do that. Click on the UltraToolbarsManager, open up the properties, and at the bottom right you'll notice “Generate Tool Click Code”. Let’s click that. Right now, I only have one command but just imagine if you had around 10 or 20 commands here. You're going to hit "Select All" and on the right, you'll see that the code is generated to handle that click event. So we’ll say Select All, Copy To Clipboard, close this, and now we need to get inside that click event of the toolbar. So let's double click to get to the UltraToolbarsManager_ToolClick event. Here we'll paste in our code that was generated for us.

Basically, here's what's happening: in this event, you get a ToolClickEventArg and you're basically just interrogating that object and looking at the key property and doing a case statement, so you might have a case for a copy, case for paste, etc. In this example, we're just going to have a cut, so let's just throw up a quick message - that looks good to me! Now let's hit F5, and there we go! I've gotten a Quick Access Tool here. I'll click it, and there we go. You can see that we've successfully invoked our code and that's all there is to it. To add more, you simply click on that new icon right next to it and just continue adding.

How to Create an Office-Inspired Ribbon

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In this video, we walk through the steps you'll need to take to create a Windows Forms application with a Microsoft-Office-inspired ribbon. Check it out below:

[youtube] width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/nu15-C43Fgg" [/youtube]

TRANSCRIPT:

Before we get started, I’m just going to pull up Microsoft Word to point out some of the pieces of the ribbon and talk about the object hierarchy.

At the top here you have the quick access toolbar, which is used to hold tools and commands that are available to your end user regardless of whatever tab they’re on, and regardless of whatever context they’re in.  Below that you have the ribbon itself, which is composed of tabs.  Each tab has one or more groups, such as clipboard, font, paragraph, et cetera, and each group has one or more tools, such as paste, cut and copy.

Now, let’s go ahead and open up Visual Studio and start building this app. We’re going to start by creating a new Windows Forms project.  I’m just going to go ahead and use the defaults, so I’ll hit okay.  The first thing that we’re going to do is make the form a little bit bigger to hold our toolbar.  To achieve that ribbon, the first thing that you should do is go to the toolbox and search for the UltraToolbarsManager and double click it.

Now that that’s added to the project, the first thing that happens is that you’re going to be prompted to add a panel. We’ll choose the middle option, which adds a lightweight panel control.

To start building the ribbon, let’s click show ribbon, and to create a new tab, click this button right here. Right away, you have your first tab. Again, in this video, we’re trying to build something very similar to Word, so let’s go ahead and just start building it out.

Here you have our first tab.  I’m going to hit F4 to bring the properties up, then I’ll choose select object, and we’ll see that the caption is “ribbon one” – let’s change that to “home”. Under home, you’ll see one group called ribbon group one.  Again, we’re just going to click this, hit F4, and change the caption.  We’ll call this clipboard.

Next we’re going to add the tools “paste, cut and copy” to this clipboard group of the tab called home.  We’re going to click insert new tool, and create three buttons. The first one will be called paste.  The next one will be called cut.  Finally we’ll do copy.  Now that we have our tools established, which are going to be “button”, let’s go ahead and configure that.

For the paste button, we want that to be large, and we want cut and copy to be small.  To do that, we right click on paste, choose preferred size, select large, and then we’re going to set its image by right clicking on it and clicking set large image.  We can import an image for a large tool button, so we’re going to want to use an image that’s 32 by 32.  Once we find that, we’ll use that as “paste” and it’s large, just like we wanted.

Now, let’s quickly do the same thing for cut and copy, but in this case we’re going to leave them at default size, a small image. We’ll do the same thing and import, look for “cut”, and again we’re going to use 24 by 24 because it’s going to be the smaller version.  Now we have cut. Let’s just quickly do the same for copy.  Set small image, import, and let’s find copy.  And there we go! Now we have paste, cut and copy. 

Let’s just hit F5 and run this to see what it looks like so far.  Here we have our ribbon and we have paste, cut and copy.  It looks perfect.  Now all we have to do is figure out how to get to the click event to actually wire up our logic.  There’s a very easy way to do this.  I’m going to click on UltraToolbarsManager, hit F4 to bring up properties, and right over here, at the bottom, you’ll see generate tool click code.  I’m going to click that. Here you can see I’ve got a list of all of my commands.  I’m going to click select all, and you’ll see that there’s going to be some code generated for me.

I’ll select all, copy to clipboard, hit close, and now just simply do a quick double click on the ribbon, and you’ll see the click event, with the UltraToolbarsManager.  We’ll go ahead and paste in the code, and do a quick test here. That looks good to me!

Basically, what’s passed in is this ToolClickEventArgs, and you’re just interrogating the key.  Based on the key, you’re going to write some code to handle it.  In this case we’re just handling paste.  Let’s hit F5, and there we go.  That’s all there is to it!

Infragistics Windows Forms Release Notes – July 2014: 13.2, 14.1 Service Releases

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With every release comes a set of release notes that reflects the state of resolved bugs and new additions from the previous release. You’ll find these notes useful to help determine the resolution of existing issues from a past release and as a means of determining where to test your applications when upgrading from one version to the next.

Release notes are available in both PDF and Excel formats. The PDF summarizes the changes to this release along with a listing of each item. The Excel sheet includes each change item and makes it easy for you to sort, filter and otherwise manipulate the data to your liking.

In order to download release notes, use the following links:

WinForms 2014 Volume 1 Service Release (Build 14.1.20141.2059)

PDF - Infragistics WinForms 2014 Volume 1
Excel - Infragistics WinForms 2014 Volume 1

WinForms 2013 Volume 2 Service Release (Build 13.2.20132.2075)

PDF - Infragistics WinForms 2013 Volume 2
Excel - Infragistics WinForms 2013 Volume 2

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