Welcome to feebdack.com

I am winding down from first "All-Nighter" in years...spent working on a diagram describing the Southern Pine Beetle Infestation Model that I have been working on. Read this entry to see the results

I created a special page to host my Ethical I.Q. Test. It is a quick quasi-Cosmo quiz you can enjoy alone or with friends and family.

Quickly Edit Downloaded Listings

Edits listings files to display more TV program information to Pocket TV Browser users.

TVTweak is a program that exposes information in XMLTV Format program listings previously hidden from users of Pocket TV Browser. It uses an approach similar to the one described here by LewE for making some tweaks to the XML TV Listings. That's all it does, so it is very easy to use!

Meter Gadgets for your Vista Sidebar!

Insanely Stylable Meters for Vista's Windows Sidebar

Here are three highly stylable, even statically skinnable Windows Sidebar Gadgets. You can mix and match from dozens of included skins for hundreds of possible looks. Skinning the gadgets using your own images is as easy as dragging them onto the Settings Panel. The Flyout Panels, shown on click, display additional information. (Blister)RAM monitors your Memory, (Blister)CPU watches your CPU stress, and (Blister)HDD can keep track of any Hard Drive or Partition!

For Users of Windows Vista Aero Theme

Sweep a Small Icon Bar With Mouse to Quickly View Live Thumbnails of All Open Windows.

Here's what I've come up with playing with glass and thumbnails from the Desktop Window Manager APIs. There are a number of excellent samples and helpful demos out there, but I found the GlassLib for WPF by Stanimir Stoyanov to be just the ticket for working with the DWM. His demonstration alone is worth investigation by anyone interested. He's got examples of just about every exposed ability in the Desktop Window Manager.

The Thumbnail Swingbar maintains a condensed bar of icons for the user to easily sweep over with the mouse to animate live thumbnails. Clicking on an icon in the bar switches to the selected window. Like many WPF demos, a screenshot doesn't do it justice, so if you can run the Vista Aero theme, you should really check this out yourself!

Unbreakably Smooth Transitions

Visual elements and animations are created entirely with XAML.

Windows Presentation Foundation's powerful animating capabilities--animate nearly anything, even non-visual dependency properties--make it a cinch to avoid harsh, abrupt roll over effects in user interfaces. Here's a handy tip for seamless transitions.

Use Internet Explorer to View the Seamless Interaction XBAP Demonstration

The idea is to create your animation without an initial state. By providing only a destination, or at least a delayed initial keyframe, you allow the animation time to smoothly gain control of the dependency property.

Sample Desktop Toy and XBAP for Vista

Sketchybar is an exploration of the HyperBar turorial.

Sketchybar is a just what I came up with after playing with the HyperBar Sample. It magnifies the icons (which come with the tutorial) and has layers of graphics and controls. The icons don't do anything but fly around--this is not a working launcher app.

Vista Users! Visit the XBAP demo of Sketchybar with Internet Explorer!

XAML / C# Project Files and Quick Executables

Two very bare-bones desktop clocks.

I dropped two of my old projects into a base similar to the one described in the article D.R.A.T.S. II. I also included a technique that was part of some of my earlier work with dragging and resizing, in which a base window is created which holds a ContentControl. This control can then host nearly any XAML scene you can create with Expression Interactive Designer. Using a ContentControl not only makes it easy to quickly drop any scene into a transparent window, but these ContentControls can themselves be placed nearly anywhere--allowing with minor variation an entire interactive scene to be inserted in any context.