Datasheet

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ZUIs (Zooming User Interfaces) — described by Jef Raskin in his book, The Humane
Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems (Addison-Wesley, 2000)
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User interfaces based on layers of movable filters, such as the Magic Lenses proposed at
Xerox Parc in the 1990s
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Collaborative, online 3D user interfaces, similar to the Croquet Project, being developed
by Alan Kay (one of the designers of the SmallTalk programming language) and others
For more information about the Magic Lenses project at Xerox Parc, point your Web
browser to
www2.parc.com/istl/projects/MagicLenses/.
To learn about the Croquet Project, see www.opencroquete.org.
For online demo movies of next generation Web interface and interaction designs, visit Max Kiesler’s
DesignDemo blog at
www.maxkiesler.com/index.php/designdemo/.
For late-breaking news on innovative user interfaces of the future, check out the Nooface blog at
www.nooface.com.
Summary
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You can use Blend to quickly and deeply integrate high quality and highly interactive dig-
ital media into your user interfaces — within Blend you can add video, animation, and
audio, use 3D tools, import bitmap images, create vector graphics, bind to live data
sources, and manipulate text in sophisticated ways to create next-generation Windows
applications and Web applications.
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Blend provides you with ready-made WPF controls, and also allows you to radically cus-
tomize the look of a control while retaining its functions. For example, with Blend you
can embed animation, video, and 3D graphics inside your controls.
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The grid, canvas, stack panel, wrap panel, dock panel, and border are the most important
panels provided by Blend. Within these panels you can nest objects, controls and other
panels, to create a hierarchy of objects that can help you to organize the complex struc-
ture of a user interface.
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You can use Blend’s styles and templates to maintain consistency in your design as well as
to make global changes easily. You can also create and use resource dictionaries to make
your styles and templates available to other projects, and to import styles and templates.
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Blend is designed to facilitate collaboration between the artist and the developer — for
example, Blend imports a variety of digital media formats, including XAML from
Expression Design, Zam 3D and other WPF design applications, and it seamlessly com-
municates with Visual Studio.
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Blend’s extensive support for automatic generation of XAML user interface code and for
the advanced capabilities of accelerated 3D graphics and audio-video playback in con-
temporary computer hardware makes its easy and practical for you to make new break-
throughs in the user experiences provided by applications that you design for Windows
and for the Web.
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Exploring New User Interface Techniques
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