Benoit Mandelbrot: Fractals and the art of roughness

At TED2010, mathematics legend Benoit Mandelbrot develops a theme he first discussed at TED in 1984 -- the extreme complexity of roughness, and the way that fractal math can find order within patterns that seem unknowably complicated.

Silverlight for Symbian

Silverlight includes a runtime that is optimized to display content on memory-constrained devices. Silverlight support for Nokia S60 5th Edition devices includes:

• The ability to view Silverlight applications in the mobile browser.
• Tools to build Silverlight applications that target devices

Tips and Tricks for INotifyPropertyChanged

As a WPF or Silverlight developer, you know that your models must implement INotifyPropertyChanged and it can be a pain. To do it safely, you really need to check to see if there are any registered handlers, then raise the event. To add insult to injury, the event arguments take a string, so if you mistype the property name you're out of luck. Some clever individuals have created nice code snippets to generate the needed plumbing, but it doesn't help with refactoring.

One common solution is to create a base class that provides the plumbing for a raise property notification.

Import Art from Photoshop and Make into Silverlight Controls

In this tutorial, we’ll take graphics created in Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, import them into Expression Blend and then quickly turn the visual assets into interactive Silverlight controls.

Create a Custom Control - Inheriting from TextBox

When a control almost does what you want it to – if only it had another button or behaved slightly differently – you may be able to extend it by writing a custom control. Custom controls let you change an existing control or write a completely new control.

In his last article on his blog (sad... it's the end of an era), Joel talks about the different perspectives on version control between classic, Subversion-like systems and the "trendy new distributed version control systems".

From his post:

"With distributed version control, the distributed part is actually not the most interesting part.

The interesting part is that these systems think in terms of changes, not in terms of versions.

That’s a very zen-like thing to say, I know. Traditional version control thinks: OK, I have version 1. And now I have version 2. And now I have version 3.

And distributed version control thinks, I had nothing. And then I got these changes. And then I got these other changes."

He also put together a Mercurial tutorial, written in his easy and fun to read style, that can be found here: hginit.com.

Developing for true multi-touch UIs is going to be fun... all the usability problems we have for mouse and keyboard will look so simple then. My guess is that until some common standards will appear it will be like playing video games in the early days - each one had its controls that you had to get used to.

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Link: 10/GUIvia Eric de C#.