The CTP includes a Silverlight Chart and Silverlight Gauge both of which you can see in the online demo. So download the bits, take them for a test drive, then send us feedback and help shape the final shipping product!

Take the panel for a spin and send me your feedback. It’s still a bit buggy at this point, so use at your own risk!

The video below is encoded at 1280 x 720, so be sure and watch in HD on the Vimeo site!

Fireworks Panel: Gradient Direction Editor from Grant Hinkson on Vimeo.

Download Preview Panel: Fireworks Gradient Direction Editor Panel

For those of you who’ve been thinking about creating your own custom skin, now you finally have some incentive to do it! Josh and I put in a lot of late nights to release Podder v2 in time for Mix ‘08. That was almost two months ago, so I’m sure you’ve already had ideas for new skins that you just haven’t made time for. Well, you have until July to realize your vision - so get to it and impress us all!

Josh just posted an update to his WPF-based podcasting app Podder. I have been working with him in my spare time over the past month  (or more) to provide a shiny new skin and test out his “structural skinning” concept. Just like my experience styling custom controls or other WPF applications, this experience required quite a bit of back-and-forth between myself and Josh. There were additional properties and events that I needed to fully deliver the look I was going for with my skin. After this interaction, I suspect that other designers wanting to skin his app will have an easier time now that we’ve been through this process.

Josh and I both wanted to get this release posted while I was at Mix so we pushed out my skin prior to me having time to clean up the resource structure. I’ll analyze the project structure with Pistachio next week, remove unused resources, and consolidate my resource structure into something more manageable. So, stay tuned for an update in the next week or two! While I was at first apprehensive about releasing prior to doing this, I now think it might actually be beneficial — designers new to WPF can see what a project looks like before and after resource cleanup and organization.

So, check out Josh’s post, and track me down this week at Mix if you want to see a demo of the app or talk to me about some of the techniques I used. I’ll post more thoughts on some of my design decisions in the coming days.

I only have the “Open” function working, which lets you browse for a ResourceDictionary. I’m planning on adding Save capability and a Sync feature, which will synchronize objects on the stage with brushes assigned to them should the resource change. Watch for that over the next 3 months

Known Issues: I’ve found that I have to open the same ResourceDictionary twice sometimes in order for the file to be recognized. So if your brushes don’t appear at first, try again. If your brushes never appear, or if you run into bugs, please send me a note along with your ResourceDictionary and I’ll add it to my list of test RDs.

(7: The number of times I typed “Panel” in this post, 8 after that last reference)

Download ResourceDictionaryPanel Preview
(Double-click MXP to install, swf included if you have problems, copy directly to the Command Panels folder: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Fireworks CS3\Configuration\Command Panels)

The second video demonstrates a feature that I’m really excited about: ResourceWashing. Using ResourceWashing, you can “wash” the brushes defined in ResourceDictionaries with a new color. Since the brushes can be washed at runtime, you can create an application that can be infinitely customized by the end user — really exciting! This is the same washing technology used by AppStylist for Windows Forms in the “New from Template” feature. The xamRibbon is the first control whose brushes have been grouped into “WashGroups” to really take advantage of this technology. Moving forward, we’ll be applying the same techniques to the other controls. I can’t wait to see what the WPF community ends up creating with this technology!

Videos

• xamRibbon QuickStart Video
• ResourceWashing Video

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably also reading Josh Smith’s blog, and you’re probably aware that I’m working on a new skin for Podder, his WPF podcast reader. Throughout the design process, I’ve had lots of different ideas running through my head - I really have a clean slate to play with here, and any of you who have designed an app or web site from scratch know how challenging that initial blank page can be. There are so many possibilities, so many directions you can take the layout; ultimately, you just have to go with something then tweak until you go crazy. It’s definitely a different process than designing something that works (visually) with an existing product line. There, you have an established aesthetic that drives the design.

So, as I go into the polish stage and really have a feel for the direction the layout is going, I’m looking at ways to make the application feel responsive, alive. One way I’m doing this is through my “McGuffin”-Enabling Image Converter. This converter is bound to an Image’s Source property and then returns an “averaged” Color - I take a random sampling of pixels then average their color values. The resulting color represents the generalized color of the image. In Podder, I’m using this converter to set the background image of the application to a color that works well with the image of the selected podcast, so as the selection changes, the color of the application changes to match, and the plot advances (my McGuffin).

I’ve added this converter to the Infragistic ToyBox assembly that I started a while back (and haven’t actively added to in a while). Download the sample project to see the converter in action. (Note: it currently only works with local images, not images whose source points to a web address).

With the release of NetAdvantage for .NET 2008.1, we’ve also rolled out an update to the infragistics.com home page. Front and center on the home page you will see our updated product icons. These icons served as a starting point for artwork updates throughout the site and product, from updated box shots to control landing pages. We actually introduced site-wide artwork updates with the WPF 2007.2 release in January, I just didn’t get a chance to call out the changes. The icons were very much a team effort within the Visual Design Group, with everyone contributing in some way. I feel like we’ve done a good job of abstracting the target platforms into representative icons. We actually spent more time fine-tuning the final colors than we had to spend creating the illustrations. You hit the limit on the hue spectrum pretty quickly when you’re trying to create unique colors for a large number of products.

The updates on the sub-pages are subtle, a face-lift really. If you’re a frequent visitor to the site, you probably won’t be able to identify the changes, you’ll just feel the difference. The control pages, like the xamRibbon page, have all been updated with new background and menu treatments. We had received a few comments from site visitors saying they couldn’t find certain pages, even though they were available directly on the side nav. So, we updated the treatment of the menu items on the side nav, left aligning each item and adding separators. With the changes, the left nav should look more like a menu and not fade away into the periphery.

The updated icons and background treatments can also be seen throughout the product, from installation screens to about dialogs. I think it’s a nice, fresh start for the 2008 releases.

The panel is still in an unpolished state, but I’m just getting the pieces working together at the moment. I’m hoping to get a fully functional version released in a few weeks, but free time is hard to come by, so we’ll see. Still, I wanted to get the word out on what I think is going to be a great panel for both the Fireworks and WPF design communities. Stay tuned!