[IxDA Discuss] Expression Blend a "review"

[David Malouf]

Håkan, the thought of paired programming crossed my mind as well.
Problem for me ... I'm in New York and my developer is in Colombo (That's
Sri Lanka). Kinda difficult.

I do think there are some new and interesting roles and processes that can
come out of this tool, but to the thread earlier in the week about what is
IxD and the whole piece about changing behavior ... That's a HUGE change in
behavior.

There is also the question about how much a designer should know their
materials. There was a big back and forth on this as well. Designers who
know their material toooo much tend to not be as innovative, however
designers who know their materials at only a surface level tend to create
designs that lead to problems down stream. (That is one thought).

Håkan, during our work last week we were struggling to figure out what is
the expectation of this "new" process in terms of where the designer's role
ends and the engineer's role begins. We came up with "data binding". While
databinding can be really easy to use in Blend, often creating what you bind
to can be really difficult, and then programming what happens to the bound
information can be a real engineering challenge. So we chose that moment.
But this still left me with a big chunk of stuff I don't know how to do that
is in my domain, namely interactivity. I can create amazing animations with
Blend, and I can even have them start and stop on events, so long as what
I'm animating is where the event is like a mouseover and a such, but most
interactivity is click A and affect B and this seems really difficult in the
tool.

How have you been able to work through this simple scenario using blend? Or
b/c of the paired environment, do you just let the engineer do that part?


-- dave

-- 
David Malouf
http://synapticburn.com/
http://ixda.org/
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