Mozilla

I was part of a session at CHI 2007 on Thursday titled “User Interface Description Languages: XUL & XAML.” The session covered some of the benefits of declarative UIs, especially with respect to the designer/developer iterative process. Scott Stanfield and myself demonstrated building UIs in XAML and XUL, respectively. We tried to show how easy it was to create and modify UI prototypes. Also, how the prototype markup could be used by developers to create the production UI, even while designers tweaked pieces along the way.

ClickOnce is a Microsoft deployment mechanism for WinForms and WPF applications that works great in Internet Explorer. Thanks to an extension, you can also get ClickOnce applications to work from Firefox too. FFClickOnce was created by James Dobson. Check out the homepage where James describes what it does and how it works very nicely.

I was just goofing around, trying to see what spiffy new UI patterns we could make using XUL. I thought I’d try creating an Office 2007 ribbon style toolbar. My current result is shown here:

Microsoft announced Silverlight 1.1 Alpha at MIX07 today. It’s a perfect example of what Microsoft is capable of doing with its formidable set of resources. Justin Van Patten has a post outlining the new features. Its quite a list:

FUEL 0.1 landed on the trunk yesterday. Progress had slowed since the last update mainly due to John and I having so many other balls in the air. For those intrepid enough to play with 0.1, you can use the API on the wiki and the code in the unit tests as examples.

I came across an interesting application of XUL and the new Yahoo email web services via Ryan Kennedy. The application is called Tapestry and its a neat little XUL-based email client. From Ryan’s post:

The Boston Developer Day was a great time. The group was a bit different than the Mountain View Developer Day. There were many individual attendees, whereas Mountain View had more group attendees. Overall, the attendees were more vocal in Boston too. We also tweaked the schedule to make the lightning talks shorter and more focused - Just say your high points, show your demo and get out. We were able to get to the breakout sessions faster.