New Meeting Place Time for Michigan Interactive Designers

by Don Burnett

We have an exciting meeting coming up for October, we will be doing a group project, with Electric Rain's StandOut.

MID October 2007 Meeting

Thursday October 25, 2007, from 7:00PM to 9:00PM at the Grand Traverse Pie Company Ann Arbor Location

Our next meeting will be held October 25, 2007. Time 7:00pm to 9:00pm at the Grand Traverse Pie Company. There is free parking in the front of the building. We will be discussing the following Topics. They have reserved the entire back room for our meeting space.

• Electric Rain StandOut Presentation Solution- Creating design kits using Microsoft Expression Blend.
• WPF in Action with Visual Studio 2008 beta 2 review
• Usability Testing with TechSmith.com's Morae
• LINQ and Silverlight, XML
• ASP.NET, AJAX, & Silverlight
• Creating a Video Player in WPF and Silverlight

Monthly Happenings

We are at a new location with great WIFI, easy to reach by I-94 Expressway...

Group Project for the Meeting:

Making your own animated presentation template for StandOut, using Expression Blend/WPF..

Requirements:
Bring your Laptop with .NET 3.0 or 3.5 installed
Electric Rain Standout beta 2 (a free download)
Expression Design Trial or Full copy
Expression Blend Trial or Full Copy
PowerPoint 2007 OPTIONAL

There will be a tutorial, followed by an opportunity to create your own template. At the end of the night we will vote as a group on the best three and they will be given a prize. So here's your chance to show everyone your design goodness and learn Standout.

Meeting Location:

Grand Traverse Pie Company

Thursday October 25th, 2007

Meeting Time: 7pm - 9pm

291 N. Zeeb Road

Ann Arbor, MI 48103

734-997-9702

annarbor@gtpie.com

• 2007 October Meeting
• Please arrive after 6:00 pm to assure good seating. We have the backroom seating area reserved..
• Bring your laptop computer to use the free Wi-Fi.
• Presentations will be available on Windows Vista's Meeting Space
• Meet and caucus with other Designers and Developers

SEE YOU THERE!

Technorati tags: StandOut, Michigan Interactive Designers, GTPIE

Electric Rain StandOut Steps Up

by Don Burnett

Today Electric Rain introduced a public beta of their StandOut Presentation solution. StandOut lets you create very compelling and visually exciting presentations. Why am I talking about it here? Well it's a very new professional WPF application and it integrates with the Expression Studio line including Expression Blend. You can actually use Blend with it to produce presentation templates (Design Kits).

StandOut Presentation Solution consists of two software applications: StandOut Designer Edition. For business, StandOut Presenter Edition enables placement of messaging and content into design kits. The results you can achieve with this software is very cool. It allows you to mix design with content to deliver extremely high quality presentations. The user interface is first rate with a drag and drop design surface.

One of the most impressive features of the Designer is that it imports PowerPoint designs, so if you have a presentation in PowerPoint that you want to enhance it will import slides. You get the full power of WPF with this application and the quality of the output will put your presentations ahead of the game of anyone *JUST* using PowerPoint alone.

I will have a more in-depth walk through upcoming. The big advantage of this program is the change in the presentation design workflow, you can have a designer setup the presentation for you with the designer program. The presenter version doesn't even need to go back to design, to edit and change the presentation, if you have fluid changing information in your presentation this program can help you to make changes on the fly if necessary while keeping the integrity of the presentation.

Technorati tags: Electric Rain, StandOut, PowerPoint, Improve your Presentations, Windows Vista