Today Microsoft went public with Project Rosetta, a web site with a focus on helping developers and designers get up to speed developing Silverlight and WPF applications by taking advantages of the skills they already own.
Right now there are 2 articles available on line, one from Cinergy's genius Rick Barraza with a 10 lesson series for designers to make things work in Silverlight; and, Jaime Rodriguez and Karsten Januszewski's The New Iteration booklet, which focus on the Devigner role within the new wave of development.
Coming forward the team, lead by Adam Kinney, will be looking for real histories on how early adopters have made the leap forward to these new grounds, so expect it to grow constantly.
What's in your Agenda?
I've talk to you about my concerns before, about the lack of resources widely available to guide developers and designers in the art of building Rich Interactive Applications collaboratively, and I think I still am.
Whether you are a hardcore designer, an experienced Flash guy or a kick ass developer, when it comes to facing some of the new technologies out there on the Rich space for the first time, everyone comes to a halt; and efforts like this makes me think of hope in the near future and expect to keep growing.
In my mind both Microsoft and Adobe should had come with a stronger agenda in the terms to uniting the designer/developer process and exposing a workflow that could set people into a pleasant experience and hence improving the overall quality of the applications been developed.
Put your money where your skills are
As my friend Jonathan Ramirez wrote on the topic in June's edition of the Microsoft Expression Newsletter:
There's a group of creatives very comfortable with the tools and technologies they have used for the past 5 or 10 years and it's hard for them to incorporate new tools into their work, and some of these guys have great talent that could be used for Silverlight projects.
So, instead of changing the tools they use on a daily basis, we should put more effort into translating what they do into XAML. A good Devigner should be able to convert any design into optimized markup, no matter what program the designer used. I like to take screen shots of my XAML and put them next to the comps to review every small detail until I see the exact same picture-Expression can give me all the tools to make that happen.
Creatives talk about feelings, developers talk about logic. There should be always be somebody in between translating those languages using the right tools.
... this might not be the case to everyone out there, and probably is a model that cannot be supported in all shops, but the middle man will always got to exist, either been played by the designer or the developer; and getting the right resources to empower them and take them there is key for its success.
New lights are born
New winds approach now and with tools like Adobe Thermo and an improved Expression Blend experience in Beta now, we see more and more breaking grounds been trenched for a collaboration of approaches to live in harmony.
I am sure we will be seeing more and more efforts like this light up in the weeks to come, and with both MAX and PDC around the corner my expectations are going nowhere but high.
Congrats to Adam et team and keep up the good word ;-)
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