Once I got it up and running and started playing around, I had just about enough time to set up my accounts and a few other bits and pieces and BAM! Black screen…. Rebooted it, it started up ok but then a few seconds later it went black again, and the next time I booted, nothing at all, just black.

Was kind of annoying.

So anyway, I was guessing it was the drivers, so I tried installing some different drivers and thing, which nothing worked, mostly because it just wouldn’t install on win8. To cut a long story short, it was the Windows Update trying to install a driver for my ATI Radeon HD card. Apparently it’s not quite there yet or something. So i just turned off Windows updates for the time being and everything seems ok… At least now I can play around with it for a bit.

To turn off the Windows update, goto Desktop, right click and select personalise, and then in the search bar at the top, type update, the second item in the list should be turn windows update on or off.

It’s not the best answer but at least I can play around some more!

Hope this helps…

I have been working on a few different projects lately, some for phones, tablets, web and other cools things. It’s rad because it allows me to think back on each project and draw inspiration from them. I also tend to do a bit of research and draw inspiration from what other people are doing, and I have started to notice a problem especially around Metro and Windows Phone 7.

Everything is starting to look the same!

Metro is a the style coined by Microsoft for the phone’s platform and also seems to be filtering through to Windows 8 (what we have seen so far). There is an awesome style guide available to everyone so people can get a good feel for what Metro is and how to design an app that fits in with the style.

The problem is, people are taking it to seriously. App after app is hitting the marketplace with no personality. Sure they look pretty good, but when you start to realise there is no variation from application to application, everything starts to blur together. There is nothing special for users to remember your application, besides functionality of course.

Applications need personality to be memorable and make it exciting for the user to use and want to come back again. I mean, I would choose a twitter application simply on looks, most of them do similar stuff, some have an extra feature or 2, but in the end, what I remember is the look and feel. If it looks a little better or swishes around a bit nicer, then it’s a winner for me.

Most app are no different, it needs that edge over the competition, that special User Experience that people really enjoy and that memorable element in the design that people never forget. These are the applications people come back to, and tell their friends about.

Companies do this with their logos and marketing, they create an iconic piece of media that hopefully you will never forget, and when ever you see it you know exactly what it is and what it stands for and they spend insane amounts of money to achieve it.  There is a massive advantage if everyone knows your name.

I think Metro is great, I love the ideas behind it and a well made Metro application can look and feel incredible. I just hope we don’t get lost in a sea of applications that all look the same.
What do you guys think about Metro?

Cheers

This morning I decided to knuckle down on an idea for an interface that I had been toying around with for a while. After a day of playing around with Expression Blend this is what I came up with.

The idea of the interface was not so much about the visual but more about the interaction of the grid. the way things slide around each other and being able to have a fair whack of info in a small area.

I tried to make it a bit Metro (Windows Phone 7 Style) but spent most of the time on the interaction rather than visuals which I might look into a little more soon if I find some more time for it.

Let me know what you think! http://silverzine.com/MyGrid2/MyGrid2.html

I will hopefully write a little tutorial on how I made it for Silverzine soon.

Here’s a teaser and might even post a quick video or something soon… we still haven’t even decided on a name for it yet…

will keep you posted!

Also if you have any suggestions on a name… I would love to hear it… Thinking something a bit weird…

I’ve never really spent much money on my car stereo, which had always resulted either a serious lack of features or terrible overall user experience. My last head unit was a no name brand straight out of China with a million features but an interface so terrible I wasn’t sure how to access any of them. It was my own fault for thinking that a few hundred dollars could buy you a ‘good’ 7inch touch screen head unit with more feature than a small space station.

Until a few weeks ago, I thought it was high time I invested in a quality head unit for my new car that wouldn’t cause me to swerve off the road every time I changed the track. Shopping around and asking all my petrol head friends, I ended up with a little Alpine unit which does everything I need. It’s a great unit, 7inch touchscreen, iPod connectivity, bluetooth, maps, all that great stuff, but what I really noticed is that for quite a bit more than what you pay for an iPad, you still get a resistive touch screen with a clunky interface to boot. It seems to me that these In-Car Entertainment companies are all about packing new features in, and not to stressed about what its like to actually use them. I mean seriously, do I really need 5.1 surround in my car? Probably not.

All this got me thinking about how in-car audio could be improved to be easier and improve your driving experience and best of all, make it safer. It seems the car companies are starting to get on board with new systems like Ford Sync which is seriously cool, but what about us kids that can’t afford the latest car but still want a nice experience when it comes to their in car entertainment. I think we have the technology available to us to make a really awesome experience without having needing to be integrated throughout the car while its in the factory. The potential for the stand alone head unit is massive and its being held back through its interface.

I have been getting together some sketches and ideas on how we could leverage the technology we have to create better interfaces and I will hopefully post some up here soon so maybe one of those companies can steal my ideas and build me a new head unit

I just deleted all the old posts from this blog because I have another blog that is dedicated to designing Silverlight Stuff. I decided it would be cool to have a personal blog where I can ramble on about stuff that I think about. Even if its not really that relevant to anything.

Will take me a little while to get some posts up here but I am a bit excited about it.

Update: So I restored all the posts because I realised the wasn’t any real point to deleting them and Dave from Silverlight Cream pointed out that there is probably a fair few links pointing here… So sorry about that… and people have probably already deleted some links so sorry about that as well rookie mistake by me….

Well it’s been pretty quite on AGkDesign.blog, but its for good reason! For the last few weeks, in between some crazy projects I have been working on, I have been slaving away to create SilverZine. It’s an on-line resource for Designers that are working with Silverlight. We hope to add heaps of awesome content over time and create a really great resource to help get people started with Silverlight and provide the more experienced Designers with some ideas and new techniques to try out!

And today I’m very proud to announce that SilverZine is finally live!!!!

Thanks to all the help everyone has given me and don’t forget to drop us a line over at SilverZine sometime

Thanks

Alex

I have been thinking about this for a while now and I have finally stepped up to the challenge.

There are plenty of sites out there dedicated to Silverlight, but being a designer myself, I have found there is not a lot of design orientated ones.

Enter SilverZine!

SilverZine is a community resource that will allow designers to find tips, tricks and inspiration for their Silverlight projects or get their name out there with something they have put together themselves. Basically it’s a resource for designers who work with or are interesting in working with Silverlight.

With that said, developers are most welcome as well, although it will not be a code heavy website, you might find some cool inspiration for the look of your next interface/application or grab one of the free resources we plan to have available as time goes by.

Let me know your thoughts and things you might be interested in seeing on the site.

http://www.silverzine.com

and don’t forget to hook up with the SilverZine twitter to keep up to date with its progress

Thanks everyone

Alex

See the Demo! – Hover over the panels to bring them into focus

If you don’t have Silverlight 3 installed, Grab it here (it’s in the right hand side panels).

This demo uses:

Built using

• Expression Blend 3 Mix Beta
• Silverlight 3 engine

Pixel Shaders

• Drop Shadow (added to buttons and spinning animation)
• Blur (added to shadows and canvas

Transform attributes

• Scale
• Project

Out of browser

The project also includes the save to desktop option, to see this in action, right click on the silverlight application and select “Install Projection Demo on this computer” and then to uninstall the application at a later date, simply open it up and right click again selecting Uninstall/Remove.

Hope you enjoy the demo and if you have any questions just drop me a comment.

Oh and B.T.W don’t think this is everything the new Silverlight has to offer, there is sooo much more!!!! These are just a few things I have been playing with.

Thanks

Alex