On July 2nd last year Tanagram turned 18 years old. It was a time to reflect and celebrate our “childhood” and look to a future of unlimited possibilities.
One of our many ruminations were on the topic of our brand and our legacy as an interactive design firm. While we’ve been recognized as the first at many great things, we couldn’t help but wonder how we remained relatively invisible in the marketplace today. As a result of our pondering we have realized that the presentation of our brand, as intentional as it is, is too complex. We are too complex. Don’t worry, we’re not going to become less complex, we’re not even sure we could do that if we tried. Instead we are spending some time to help all of you understand what makes Tanagram unique in the interactive development space and there is no better way to get started than to shout it out. So here goes:
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Tanagram is unique in that we design and build software for the digital frontier. Thirty percent of our project portfolio is made up of government funded “advanced” research. We do this specifically so that we can apply our learning to our commercial client projects and our ability to make ideas real to our government projects. We focus on three specific areas:
Complex workflow applications (e.g. a hyper-local enterprise media management tool for Geomentum.com)
In addition we’ve really turned on the PR machine. Above you’ve seen links from the New York Times, Gizmodo, and ABC featuring our work. Here are a couple of other great stories that you might not have seen:
Tanagram is proud to announce the launch of Touch.Codeplex.com. Our exploration into the state of the Natural User Interface (NUI) connected us with folks at Microsoft and together we identified an adoption issue. While the technology to build Touch applications exists, it is currently cumbersome to implement. Marc Schweigert and James Chittenden had an idea to use Expression Behaviors (literally drag-and-drop onto any object) to act as a bridge. Together we launch this humble beginning with a bold vision. We hope you join us as we expand this library in the months to come.
Writeboard Panorama of calculation debugging.
Project Overview
The APIs in WPF4 plus the Surface Toolkit for Windows Touch make building common touch scenarios easy. However, implementing many of the same touch scenarios using WPF3.5SP1 or Silverlight 3/4 involves writing a fair bit more code. Furthermore, the touch APIs across WPF4, WPF3.5SP1, and Silverlight are different.
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to simplify building common touch scenarios when using WPF 3.5 SP1 or Silverlight 3/4 by using Expression Blend Behaviors to provide a consistent way to implement these scenarios across WPF & Silverlight. Expression Blend Behaviors can be used within Visual Studio without a dependency on Expression Blend by downloading the Expression Blend 3 SDK. You can also find more Expression Blend Behaviors at http://expressionblend.codeplex.com/ and http://tinyurl.com/ExpressionGalleryBehaviors.
Project Roadmap
Beta Release of core Scroll and TranslateRotateScale behaviors to developer community. <– You are here
Revised Scroll and TranslateRotateScale behaviors
Gesture Behavior (repurpose awesome code from here)
Erase (Back and Forth Gesture)
Create (Single Finger Draw ‘+’)
Delete (Single Finger ‘X’ Drawn Over Target)
Select Lasso (Single Finger Draw Lasso)
Split (Single Finger Diagonal Line)
Hold Menu (Single Finger Touch & Hold Context Menu)
Draw (Three Finger Pen Grasp)
Clone (Two Finger Double Tap)
Open / Edit (Single Finger Double Tap)
Select (Single Finger Tap)
Global Rotate (Five Finger Grab and Rotate of Application)
Global Perspective Rotate (Five Finger Pressure to Rotate Application Perspective)
It was only a matter of time before someone miniaturized eInk technology to become the digital paper all of us Sci-Fi fans (read nerds) have been dreaming of.
Plastic Logic has just announced the release of a new eReader technology that looks very exciting. Not to seem skeptical but we are hoping that their “environmentally friendly” marketing campaign also includes the retraining of the millions of workers currently employed by the paper industry. We love trees more than the next guy but bored, unemployed, angry loggers scare us to death.
Today the edges between digital and real were blurred a little further (thanks Brad) as man and data interact in real time and real space. This slight-of-hand was created using a compelling combination of Musion Eyeliner and some clever motion cameras. We want to see it from the point-of-view of the guy on stage!
The folks at Microsoft Surface have begun to play further with their advanced multi-touch display. We are THIS CLOSE to getting one of these coolies to play with but now our desire has been captured by this new globe version. I think we were all amused by some of the “creative” demonstration apps they built for it, but the virtual tour demo left us wanting it purely because it looks like a crystal ball and who doesn’t want one of those???
I’m not sure if it was the Zoomii Books (thank you Stephanie) hyper-real representation of a bookstore browsing experience mashup created by Chris Thiessen, or the stylish video explorations of Robert Hodgin, but digital is beginning to fuzz the edges of reality for me. We can now create “natural” (beyond multi-touch) interaction metaphors that leverage all of the history and nostalgia of an analog object and then extend the value of that object significantly with digital technology. We create objects that look like they exist but only exist as bits on the digital plane. As we explore this digital reality or rather as it augments ours what happens to traditional constraints. Time? Space?
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