By Alan Beasley on Sun, 13 Jun 2010 16:55:45 GMT

Here is my first draft of producing the Video Player controls that will feature in Michael’s new article. This design is obviously open to reworks, as I’m not sure about the volume control at present. Looks like a Ventilation grill!!! It is possibly all a bit over the top, but this is excise, so some room to go a bit nuts!!! The colour scheme is all tied to a single colour resource for easy editing, although this does presently restrict me from setting different colours for the framework & infill elements. However, when designing CONTRAST is King! if it works in one colour, it will look even better in multiple colours. But enough chat, here are some (mono-colour) 1st Draft screenshots:

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By Alan Beasley on Thu, 27 May 2010 23:44:00 GMT

Thought I better quickly Blog this, as I struggled with showing & hiding a visual element on the Phone touch interface for quite a while… And couldn’t seem to find the answer anywhere on the Web. And then all of a sudden it came to me & I wished I could have kicked myself! :-) I am so dumb!!!

Basically if you have situation where you need to either show or hide a visual element, you need to know what State you are in. As you can’t attach 2 different Triggers (Behaviours) to the same element, & expect to activate/fire them in an alternating manner with the same action (i.e. a mouse click). Blend will only ever fire one & continue to fire the same one. (The closest in the Z order i presume…) And my first thought was, that i needed some code to determine what state I was in. But you don’t!

All you need to do is set up 2 dummy elements like Rectangles with a Fill set to 0% Alpha (Transparent, but HitTestVisible) & attach your 2 Behaviours to these dummy elements. You set the first behaviour to the front...

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By Alan Beasley on Tue, 11 May 2010 17:54:00 GMT

A growing collection of written Designer based tutorials for all UI designers in Expression Blend.

Starting with buttons! And expanding from there…

Follow this link for the series: http://openlightgroup.net/Articles/tabid/97/Default.aspx