Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Showcase Silverlight Apps for Talks and Demos

by Adam Kinney via Adam Kinney on 8/26/2009 10:52:00 PM

Talking amongst a few of my cohorts, Erik Mork asked “What are your favorite apps to show?”

After some collaboration, we’ve come up with a good list of showcase applications that can be useful when giving presentations. I’ve pared the list down to my top three picks from each category.

Applications

This can be a tricky because the majority of these are not publicly available or accessible without a login. But these three can be useful when demonstrating Silverlight-based applications.

Colaab A web-based collaboration and communication tool. Impressive use of Deep Zoom for large images and documents.		SnapFlow ”A workflow-making platform that helps you coordinate your work with anyone so that you can get things done. And with our super-simple tool, you can build a flow that reflects your unique process.”		Patient Journey Demonstrator ”…conceptualizes an end-to-end journey using a specific clinical scenario to illustrate how an integrated, patient-centric care record can transition seamlessly between care settings. It demonstrates how data can be accessed and entered from many of the care sources experienced along the patient journey.”

Deep Zoom

One of the unique features of Silverlight and something that always makes an impact.

Stargate MGM Photosynths of the amazing set for the SG-1 series.		Yosemite National Park A massively organized set of photos taken at the same time in Yosemite National Park.		CMA Music Festival A game and photo collection from the Country Music Awards Festival.

Media

There has been strong support for Media since version 1, and continues to improve, version 3 brings custom codecs and Smooth Streaming.

IIS Smooth Streaming Experience A media player demonstrating how smooth streaming works with interactive diagnostics.		Project Tuva Physics Lessons from Richard Feynman himself in an enhanced player.		Home Shopping Network 24 hours a day, 7 days a week shopping goodness where you can flip between Live and recorded media.

Beyond the three listed, there is normally some major sporting event broadcast online via Silverlight. Past examples include Olympics, NFL, Wimbledon, College Basketball.

The Watch Instantly feature on Netflix is also a great demo. Login and 2 or 3 clicks later you’re streaming a high-quality video.

Gaming

Version 3 of Silverlight has added some of the essential features for game creation – WritableBitmap, PlaneProjection, Custom Audio and Pixel Shaders.

SilverArcade “We're a community dedicated to free online games built on the Silverlight platform. The money we make by displaying ads is shared with the people who created the games.”		Silverlight Shock A Silverlight game in a very advanced stage including music tracks, leaderboards, achievements and more.		SilverSprite A framework that makes running 2D-based XNA games run within Silverlight without code changes.

Visualization and Information Display

Graphs can be very useful when presenting data, especially interactive graphs.

Descry 4 different projects demonstrating the power of data and information visualization as a communication tool.		WorldWide Telescope ”WorldWide Telescope (WWT) enables your computer to function as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world. Experience narrated guided tours from astronomers and educators featuring interesting places in the sky.”		Quince ”Quince (pronounced kwinse) is a rich, interactive user experience (UX) design patterns library produced for the software community by Infragistics at no charge.”

Experimental

Here’s where people are beginning to do some creative play with Silverlight. There are many more great examples found across different blogs.  For a list of related blogs and people check out my Expression Studio Resources page.

PaperOX Download cut-out. Print. Fold. Tape. PaperOX in your hand.		Silverlight Audio Synthesizer A synthesizer taking advantage of the new custom MediaStreamSource functionality in Silverlight 3.		Windows4All An online virtual operating system written in Silverlight.

Blend Samples

Expression Blend 3 includes a few demo applications that are useful to learn from as well as demonstrate concepts. Once Blend is installed you can easily access these applications by clicking the Samples tab on the Welcome screen.

PC Gaming Demo Includes a SketchFlow project, so you can show a syndicated workflow from prototype to working application. Also demonstrates importing assets from Photoshop.		Zune Product Demonstrator A real clean design that demonstrates the new PlaneProjection Transform.		BeeHive A game build with Behaviors.