Harjeet’s Blog

Some great videos on India on this 60^th Independence Day! It sure does feel proud to be Indian

Part1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

There is also a good debate at:
http://www.moneycontrol.com/india/video/stockmarket/03/53/newsvideo/297602

I have just returned from a landmark conference. Microsoft’s first ever Designertopia in London. The conference had over 250 delegates from about 20 countries and there was a mix of both developers and designers. Microsoft showcased their expression group of products and the agenda was a mix of technical as well as creative tracks

During the sessions, I saw some more of the really cool WPF demos and also learnt how the design element of Vista was done and attention paid to every little detail.

Here are the list of some of the top demos that are available on the internet and some others that were shown but not publicly available just yet:

• British Library Turning pages: This is a really cool WPF implementation of turning pages. What’s good about this is that it allows us to read books which were previously inaccessible, such as Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codex, Mozart’s Musical Diary or Jane Austen’s History of England. All this done with a lot of style and interactive design. See the page turn effects etc.

   

  

   

• NY Times Reader: This is an application that NY Times has developed and can be downloaded for free. This is again made in WPF and is really cool as it gives you the look and feel of reading an actual newspaper rather than browsing through a webpage. The key aspect here is that people spend 10 times more time reading content on an application than on a website. The layout as you can see is neat and looks pretty slick! Daily mail should be coming out with a similar reader pretty soon.

   

  What I also like about this app is that it allows you to change text size easily, which can be pretty good especially for those people who wear reading glasses and keep forgetting where they kept them!

   

  

   

• London Underground: This app is designed for monitoring the many trains that run across the London Underground. It gives a 3d view of all routes, including their depth underground! It also allows you to see archived information of each station by accidents, theft and fraud, engineering works etc. It can also pull out a live feed of all trains moving at real time and tell you exactly what time the train is going to reach even if there is a delay. I’ll try and get some screenshots of this as it is really much cooler than it sounds.
• Fashion, Golf and Student portfolios in 3D: These are some other demos that are really cool to watch and as and when I find them online, I’ll post them here!

So as you can see we have a lot of cool applications to look forward to!