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A couple of months ago, I downloaded a trial version of ArtRage to play with it on my tablet pc. I liked the program so much that after less than an hour of using the trial version, I purchased the full copy. This has been the best $20 I have ever paid for a piece of software. IMHO, ArtRage beats Alias Sketchbook 2.0 hands down. There is a great entry on Cartoon monkey comparing them, hence I will not get into much detail about the comparison.

What’s really fascinating about ArtRage is the simplicity and integrity of the design. The application is elegant and takes full advantage of tablet pc capabilities (although not to the extent of full use of gestures for marking menus as in SketchBook). My favorite feature is the ability to press the tablet enter key (present as a hardware key on almost all tablet pcs in tablet mode) to go full screen after the tool has been set. The program, through its simplicity, does not provide much of the fancy tools you find in Photoshop or Painter, yet it provides an excellent substitute for my expensive set of art supplies, especially the dozens of pencils and sketchbooks that I have lying around in my studio.

Few weeks ago, I started watching the Vilppu Studio Lectures on Figure drawing, which is very well explained by the way. To my pleasent surprise, I found another feature in ArtRage that allows pinning (and manipulating) a reference image to the canvas to copy from. Honestly, this feature made my day.

If you are looking for a cheap program to replace your fancy photoshop or painter when you want to just sit and draw, I highly recommend ArtRage! (By the way, this application won the Microsoft “Does your app think in ink” contest a couple of years ago).

Here are some of my early experimentation with figure drawing on ArtRage as well as some weird abstracts

Enjoy,

Amir

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Microsoft Expression has a special holiday treat for designers: The new beta of Microsoft Expression Blend is now available for download.

The Expression team has been working very hard over the past year to give Sparkle an extreme makeover. New UI, new property inspection system, better workflow for UI design tasks, and a great looking product!

From the Expression Team blog:

“What’s new in the beta?

Enhanced Properties panel UX

• Context-sensitive UX makes finding associated properties a snap
  
• Improved UX for event & property triggers
  
• Support for editing almost all WPF properties such as bitmap effects
  
• Built-in search to help you find properties without the need for scrolling
  
• Ability to bind data such as a brush resource to any property using a rich UX
  
• Unique value editors make it easier to set values without leaving the mouse
  
• New editors for collections
  
• A new plug-in model that 3rd-parties can use to add their own custom editors
  

Redesigned shell

• Improved docking and panel management
  
• New icons enhance usability
  
• Darker theme brings focus to the design workspace
  

Improved artboard

• Drag & drop to create elements via a rich asset gallery
  
• Snap to grid and snap to alignment makes it easier to layout your controls
  
• Enhanced context menu allows you to group into layout containers and set common layout properties
  
• Right-click > View XAML allows you to quickly find the associated XAML for an element
  

Improved resource management & control template capabilities

• Resources panel allows you to edit resource values used by your project
  
• Support for dragging & dropping resources between dictionaries to re-factor your project
  
• Built-in set of controls which are designed to be easy to edit and reconfigure
  

Support for Microsoft Visual Studio editing

• Shared project format with Visual Studio allows easier development-designer workflow
  
• Create event handlers in Expression Blend and edit your code in Visual Studio”
  

Give it a test drive, and send your comments.

Amir

Links

• Download Microsoft Expression Blend Beta
• Expression Blend team blog

Thanksgiving weekend has been pretty cold in Washington, so I took advantage of my lazy holiday and grabbed a copy of “Getting Real”, 37Signal’s book on agile web development. The book actually blew me away with its simplistic, yet effective approach to summarize many of the lessons I learned the hard way. I didn’t put the book down until I was done with it, and it was a true holiday treat!

37Signales is a small group of web wizards producing the best set of simple, yet effective, project management tools I have ever worked with. The beauty of these products emerges from their ability to be perfectly minimalistic and task centered. Every product is a self contained set of basic functionalities that solves one problem. Whether it’s business chat, to-do list or collaborative writing, the creators of these power applets are strong believers in empowering users to do more by giving them less features. And they are right! Despite the availability of hundreds of note taking applications and PIMs, my favorite application is notepad, because it provides a free-form canvas for me to define my own layout, keywords, etc… and worry only about the contents of the file and where I am saving it. What enabled notepad to be this powerful to me is the freedom that it gives me to dump my thoughts without worrying about fonts, bullets, colors… My second favorite note taking application is OneNote, and it comes second to notepad since it’s got too many features that I don’t usually use. You can think of 37Signals products as one giant product with a pay-per-feature option.

The book strongly advocates the concept of “less is more”, by working it through both the development process (less rules, less routine, less meetings, and less specs), as well as the final product (less options and less features). While I strongly believe that this approach works perfectly in small teams and startups, it would have been interesting for Jason Fried to talk more about what large companies should do to “Get Real”.

Cheers,

Amir

Links:

• Getting Real, the book (They have a free online version!)
• 37Signals
• Signal vs. Noise, 37Signal’s blog
• Video of Jason Fried’s talk at CTC’06

Digital media universe has an interesting tutorial on how to build 3D multiplayer web games using WPF. Another useful article is developing WPF using C#. Very useful for beginners!

Meet Peter Blois, one of my teammates at the Microsoft Expression team and a math whiz. Peter is the guy who wrote the original version of the Flickr Browsr that I used in my Channel 9 presentation. His blog, house of mirrors, is filled with fun WPF samples. Make sure you don’t miss it.

Microsoft released today a CTP of Expression Interactive Designer: A new tool for designing interactive user interface for Windows Presentation Foundation.

Here are some useful links:

Channel 9 Video

Try Interactive Designer for free

Expression team blog

Also, here is the source code and executable (107 KB) for the Flickr Browser sample I built in the channel 9 video.

Great thanks to Peter Blois for his wonderful help providing great components that made this sample rock! 

Comments and critiques are always welcome!

A friend of mine pointed me out today to the Modo 201 event video for SIGGRAPH’05. While I am still less than a couple of minutes through the video, I was very interested by the way Luxology presented their goals for Modo. I believe it’s the simplest and most efficient set of goals I have seen for a piece of software. Quoted from their slide decks:

“– Cutting edge toolset.

– Advanced software ergonomics.

– Painless pipeline integration.

– Streamline learning path.

“

I believe Software ergonomics in this context is a synonym to usability.

The point that attracts my attention the most is the third one: “Painless pipeline integration”. Great software products should not ask us to change the way we do things; it should observe what we do, decides where its role will fit in our pipeline (hopefully at the bottleneck of our struggles) and how it will make our transition to this new software almost transparent.

In Fall of 2002, I took a very interesting class on creativity support tools with one of my favorite professors: Ben Shneiderman.  The course introduced us to several tools that empowers people to be more creative by presenting them with the right medium to find resources (Idea Processors, Thesauri, Brainstorming) , creating maps and collaboration.

I remember Ben’s opening statement was: “I believe with the right tools, we can make more people more creative most of the time!”.  I also remember raising my hand, and immediately objecting Ben’s statement stating that I know few people who can never be creative even if they were given the best tools in the world. Ben accepted my objection with his pleasant smile, and told me that it’s my right not to agree. A year later, I went to Ben’s office and told him that I believe his statement was true.  I have been using some tools myself that exploited more of my creativity than I ever imagined! FreeMind is one of the tools that I use every day in almost every task, and I am surprised that Microsoft does not include it in their product pipeline yet. Mind Mapping exists in a very modest way in Visio, but it does not come close to other commercial and freeware tools out there (it requires lots of shifting between the mouse and the keyboard, and this is too expensive interaction overhead for me to handle).

Anyways, you may be asking: “What’s the moral of this blog entry?”.. Well, pretty much the bunch of links below to those interested in trying a more creative touch in their daily lives!

User interfaces for creativity support tools (ACM paper)

Workshop on Creativity Support Tools (Free proceedings)

Creativity resources (From the class’ webpage)

• Creativity Web: Resources for Creativity and Innovation
• Software for Creativity & Idea Generation
• Creax home page
• Creax Creativity Links
• Creativity Based Information Resources: Online Bibliography
• Encyclopedia of Creativity (Runco & Pritzker)
• CREATIVITY RESEARCH JOURNAL

Idea Processors, Thesauri, Brainstorming

• dramatica Pro: software products for writers of stories
• Imagination Engineering Software (Clegg & Birch)
• ParaMind: generative brainstorming program
• Basic ParaMind Theory
• Ideas and Knowledge Processing Technologies to Speed Innovation
• IdeaFisher: Creative Brainstorming Software
• TreePad: Award-winning PIM, Database and Word Processor
• Creator Studio: Quickly Create New Ideas and Solve Problems
• Visual Concept: Software to improve your capacity to think

Making Maps

• FreeMind: A freeware Java tool for mind mapping
• Heterarchical Mapping of Information Spaces
• webbrain 2.0
• Topic Maps
  • Topicmaps.net: An informative web site about Topic Maps
  • InfoLoom, Inc
  • InfoLoom, Inc. Topic Maps’ Page
• VisiMap - State-of-the-art visual mapping for Microsoft Windows
• Axon Idea Processor: A Visualization Tool for Thinkers

Theories, books, software, webtools

• Innovation Works: Promoting creativity, innovation and invention
• Brainstorming Toolbox
• Innovation Toolbox
• MaxThink
• Inspiration strengthens critical thinking
• CreaTRIZ: Theory of Inventive Problem Solving
  • TRIZ journal
  • TRIZ journal FAQ
• Advanced Practical Thinking Training-DeBono
• Dr Edward de Bono’s Lateral Thinking Training & Software
• Horn’s Visual Language Book

Groupware

• GroupSystems & GroupIntelligence

General HCI Links

• University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab

I found a portrait that my best friend Hassan Fedawy drew me before I left Egypt in 2001. While his website is under construction, it’s worth taking a look at his old artwork. Hassan used to be #1 portraist in Egypt and he has a very unique style!