Toronto Cycling Map at iBikeTO.ca

I can’t quite recall where I read it (probably Joe Friel’s excellent Cyclist’s Training Bible) but apparently during your first year of cycling training, you need to log about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of foundation before getting serious about skill-targeted training regimes.

That’s a lot of miles, and although I have some favourite routes in the city, it’s still nice to mix it up occasionally and discover new trails.

Toronto Cycling Maps

There are great maps of Toronto cycling routes, in pdf form (here on toronto.ca) and as a Google Maps mashup (here on iBikeTO.ca).

Accessing New Routes

At Tommy Thompson Park, in pursuit of Toronto Cycling Routes

New opportunities for discovering routes are appearing all the time.

TCAT pointed me to the Bikes+Transit site, which invites Toronto cyclists to avail of new GO Bus racks for transporting cycles.  In addition to making Toronto a more cycling-commuter friendly city, the bus additions now also allow cyclists to access other routes across (and out of) the city.

You’re even supposed to use Flickr and Twitter to record your explorations. I love Flickr, so I’ll aspire to join in the photo taking. I don’t usually bring my SLR on cycling trips, but that hasn’t stopped me from taking sketchy photos and videos with my phone in the past.

Niagara trails are also more accessible now (see here). You can also take the Greyhound bus between Toronto, St Catherines, and Niagara Falls.

Is there an App for that?

Being a Blackberry user (actually a Blackberry lover), the one thing I can’t find is an app the would turn my blackberry into a GPS-enabled cycling map, for the times when I occasionally lose my way on a new route. (Apparently the iPhone has a bunch of cycling apps available!)

If anyone knows of such a Blackberry app, I’d be very much obliged. Even a generic app that would allow me to overlay a Google Maps mashup like the Toronto cycling one would be great.

Learning the Lingo

Bonus cycling link: Dictionary of Roadie Slang (the Profanisaurus of cycling, useful for a Cat. 7 like me)

This one time, in Dublin, I was cycling along minding my own business, when a car passenger carelessly opened her door into the bike lane.

She’d given me just enough time to slam on my brakes and think “oh noes–” (or localized cussing equivalent) before I received what I now know is called a door prize straight across my helmet-protected face.

It can be a lot less funny and significantly more tragic.

So I am relieved to move swiftly on to report –

2. Proposed Changes to Toronto Cycling Routes will reduce your odds of winning a Door Prize!

The Toronto waterfront along Queens Quay is under review for a major redevelopment that, among other benefits, would make it significantly more cycle- and pedestrian-friendly.

It would “mend” the waterfront cycling trail, which currently suffers from an unpleasant discontinuity downtown.

If only Toronto's Queens Quay looked like this...!

The shortlisted plans in this document (.pdf), found on the WATERFRONToronto site, would improve “active transportation” and go a long way toward revitalizing the waterfront.  The sketch above is from the consultation report.

For more information, there is a summary report here (.pdf) which includes upcoming meetings at which the public can comment (including City of Toronto Executive Committee Meeting June 2nd, and Council Meeting July 6th).  Head to WATERFRONToronto to learn more.

You may be interested in one thoughtful cyclist’s recent concerns regarding the current state of the plan.

The redevelopment, of course, is about much more than cycling.  But for cyclists, it could offer a very welcome change.

(Also, in case you missed it, earlier this week Toronto City Council approved a bike lane on major north-south artery Jarvis as well! Woohoo!)

3. There is a vibrant biking community here in Toronto!

The 2009 Toronto Bike Summit was a packed house

I met some of that community today at the 2009 Bike Summit, which coincided with this week’s launch of Bike Month in Toronto.  The image above is from Ralph Buehler’s session this morning about Freiburg, which is widely considered Germany’s most sustainable city. The ways in which Freiburg’s infrastructure and culture accommodates cyclists provided the case study for Buehler’s very interesting presentation.

Considering I’ve been cycling like crazy of late, I’ve created a “Toronto Cycling” topic on this site, and what better way to kick it off than with a link-list.

Toronto cycling resources, publications and bloggers:

The Toronto Coalition for Active Transportation (TCAT) co-hosted the summit today.

The City of Toronto’s cycling site includes a .pdf of the Toronto-area bike map.

The Toronto Bicycling Network, and BikeToronto, and BikeLane Diary, and IBikeTO.org sites all offer Toronto cycling community news and insight.

Roadrash chronicles the escapades of a Toronto cyclist who’s en route to cycling 1,200km this summer.

Dandyhorse is a new print publication – elegantly designed, clearly a labour of love, and filled with insightful and well-written articles about everything “Toronto on Two Wheels.” More love for Dandyhorse here at Eyeweekly.

I’d be very happy to hear of any other Toronto cycling resources you know of out there.

See you on the roads and trails!

Silverlight Beyond Mix09 By Active Application

Thanks to everyone who came out to Toronto CodeCamp on Saturday to talk about Silverlight Beyond Mix09.

As per the chart, my presentation was Powerpoint-free, but code+markup heavy. Actually markup heavy, really.

There wasn’t a lot of Blend coming that afternoon, and MIX09 for me was about embracing design and seeking “return on experience,” which are the reasons you probably care about Silverlight in the first place.

So I thought I would tee up the day’s Silverlight tracks by spending more time in Blend, with its “split” mode activated, so you could see both its visual surface and the XAML markup (now with AutoComplete!).

Links and Resource Hubs

Getting started: Please see the silverlight.net site. Silverlight 2 and 3 dev can be made to co-exist on the same VS2008 box via Amy’s very useful batch file trick. Designers see these getting started resources.

Follow the new stuff: Save yourself the trouble and just subscribe to WynApse’s Silverlight Cream – Dave aggregates all the Silverlight news of the day and adds his thoughtful, passionate commentary.

Hubs for Links: Please see Tim Heuer for an all-up look at what’s new in Silverlight 3, and BradA for .NET RIA Services (many link roundups).

Good summaries of individual features: What’s new in Blend 3, Pixel Shaders, Style Enhancements, Out-of-Browser, GPU Acceleration, Local Connections, Dialog Windows, Writeable Bitmaps.

This list is far from exhaustive – there are excellent Silverlight 3 link hubs like Tim’s out there and I hope this gets you started. Please drop me a note if I’ve missed a subtopic.

Sample Code

Here it is. Where I started from someone else’s sample, I include a .URL link back to the source.

Grease-What?

Sorry, the Legend of the Greasepole code (which I used to demo hardware acceleration and Silverlight Offline) isn’t in there. For more wacky inexplicable greasepole-climbing hilarity, you can play the Silverlight 2 version here, and learn more here and more about its move from XNA to Silverlight here. Yes, us Queens Applied Science types are a strange bunch.

Thank You

Thanks again to the organizers of CodeCamp, and particularly Chris Dufour and the many volunteers, for all your efforts. And thank you to the attendees: It was an early morning in late April, with a Toronto afternoon approaching that ended up flirting with 30 degrees Celsius. CodeCamp is a fun and energetic day, and I look forward to next year’s gig already.

The "Earth" movie - focus on families

Earth is the ultimate in professional “Mash-Ups.” Re-Mixes. Whatever.

Disney’s Formula:

Take BBC’s Planet Earth.

Remove David Attenborough. Replace with James Earl Jones (include “Circle of Life” Mufasa reference for good measure).

Condense to 90 minutes. Remove blood (but retain some graphic predator/prey interaction).

Focus on extending the “animal family” narratives.

Release to North American theatres on Earth Day.

The Result:

A “mash-up” of Planet Earth that’s less meditative, but appeals to an audience that otherwise may not have the patience to see some of the best-shot and best-produced footage ever (period).

We’re already on notice that a sequel about the oceans is slated for next year’s Earth Day.

Genius.

You’re doing it right, Disney. I’ll be there. Quite possibly because my Planet Earth blu-rays will be worn out by the next time Earth makes it ’round the sun.

Capilano Suspension: Bridging worlds, simple elegance

I spoke with a headhunter last week who is looking for designers who have experience using Expression Blend to enhance the usability of line-of-business applications.

The demand for designers who have worked on Silverlight or WPF projects currently exceeds supply.

The adoption of those two “XAML-based” technologies has been accompanied by a growing community of developers that have adopted the new frameworks, often “wearing the designer hat” to get the job done.

But a designer who understands how to craft solid XAML markup using Blend’s visual toolset thinks differently from either a developer, or from a designer whose thinking is not informed by the basics of Silverlight and WPF.

Designers needn’t give up their existing tools, but to optimally contribute to a Silverlight or WPF project, their thought process should be informed by these technology frameworks, both when working with their existing tools and with Blend.

Yes, we’ve all heard of these highly coveted “dev-igners,” who bridge the dev and design worlds with the simple elegance of the Capilano Suspension Bridge, but these are unicorn-esque in rarity.

So the good news is – if you’re a designer who does know Expression Blend, I know people who are looking for your skills!

[p.s. shameless plug - Empowering designers to wield Blend like a paintbrush (in ways that I can't) has become one of the greatest joys of my work. If you're a designer (or know a designer) interested in mastering Blend, and learning the basics of Silverlight/WPF in the process, send me mail through the blog.  Maybe you'd be interested in a crash course.]

1. Bill Buxton at MIX09 Third Place

1. Bill Buxton’s visit to “The Third Place.” He cited Henry Dreyfuss’s “Designing for People” as the next must-read book after his (preferably 1st Ed.). He reminds us: Render in the correct fidelity. Don’t rely on a “muse.” Consider minimally five alternatives. Think Persona and “Place-ona.” “Design is Choice.”

2. Johnny Lee and HCI wonders

2. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk. @shanselman a fanboi too. Know Johnny? Watch his MIX talk. Don’t know him yet? Check his TED talk first, which earned its standing ovation. Johnny on the future of HCI: Dive off today’s local maxima. Want more HCI? Follow UIST, SigGraph, SigCHI, UBICOMP.

3. Joe Fletcher Surface Session - online!

3. Joseph Fletcher delivered a mightily polished Touch Computing presentation yesterday, and the session video is already online! Surface UX is “Hyper-real,” and Surface is Social, Seamless, Spatial.

4. MmmmmUrl

4. Purdy & Sells presented an energetic talk on their RESTful DSL MUrl. Interested in languages, human and machine? “Oslo” and “M” are sexy. Probably this is a good place to start. Their MIX09 Session is here.

Back to the Drawing Board – Literally

Bill Buxton during the second MIX09 keynote

To sum it up, there are four things I carried away from MIX09:

1. Bill Buxton urges us to focus on people, and craft our technology with informed design.
2. Johnny Lee says we’ll need to descend from today’s local maxima and be uncomfortable before we can progress.
3. Joseph Fletcher and his team want to invent a totally new paradigm.
4. Purdy and Sells were among speakers and teams too numerous to mention who introduced potentially game-changing technologies with which we can innovate.

This reaction in our community is consistent with the global sense of a need for something new.  Put simply, the status quo isn’t good enough any more.

This message was embodied by Deborah Adler.  There’s a reason why Microsoft so boldly chose to focus half a keynote on Ms. Adler’s contribution — it’s time for us to stop thinking like techies, and start thinking about the people using our creations, and the contexts in which they’ll be using them.

To get there, we were all encouraged to use unconventional tools, and reminded that big ideas can come from going back to basics: a sheet of paper and a decent pen.

I’m sure I’ll see more techies at the local cafe, rubbing elbows with thinkers who have always used these basic methods to achieve greatness.

Until Next Year…

As I type, the sessions are coming online at the VisitMIX site. Through a fog of tweets and jetlag this morning in Toronto, I was struck hard that MIX has made me want to return to doing the stuff that brought me here in the first place, whatever that means for me in 2009.

I want to extend my thanks to the organizers of MIX for so much inspiration, and to the Microsoft Canada team for letting me share MIX09 with you.

MIX09 boldly declared that “The Next Web” is a place where design matters.  We were taught to seek returns on user experiences, and think first about how our creations influence lives.  This is a future I want to help invent.

Looking forward to continuing the discussion. You can always find me at robburke.net.

Deborah Adler at MIX09 Keynote

Bill Buxton, the Spirit of MIX09 (who, so I understand, now has a typeface named after him), returned for this morning’s keynote to welcome Deborah Adler, whose work as principal designer for Target’s ClearRx medicine bottles provided the focus for our discussion about design and its impact on user experience.

ClearRx Case Study

Deborah’s research identified and addressed many serious problems with traditional medicine bottles. Her prototype was refined by Target into the ClearRx products, and the resulting “return on experience” included brand awareness for Target — and, much more importantly, the potential to change behavior and save human lives.

Her advice to us was twofold – (1) to have a love affair with our customers, and (2) to bring our design skills to bear both humanly and humanely.

There is more about Deborah’s work at the Target:Health site.

[Update: I just saw Robby Ingebretsen's post and agree with him - these two MIX09 keynotes together (and particularly, Deborah and Bill's contributions) were the best and most inspiring MIX keynotes yet.]

Clear Rx (link goes to Target ClearRx site)

IE8: In other keynote news, Dean Hachamovitch announced that Internet Explorer 8 was released today.

For more info: You can now watch streaming video of the keynotes (for both days) here, and Tim Sneath’s thorough Play-by-Play is here and here.

The Cloud?

So I expected today’s keynote was going to be about the Cloud. I was totally wrong.  Clear skies.

My Keynote Mind Map, with Day 2 on the bottom, now makes more sense: the “Return on Experience” discussion provides the roots for everything we’ve discussed at MIX09 this week.

MIX09 Keynote Mind Map - Days 1 and 2 - with Return on Experience at the root

p.s. More Misc MIX notes on the rest of Day 2 in a future post — I am shattered tonight. Johnny Lee’s HCI talk was particularly memorable (link goes to his killer TED talk).

MIX09 Keynote: Bill Buxton

Today’s MIX09 Day 1 Keynote and Sessions put the ‘Software’ into Microsoft’s ‘Software plus Services’ vision.

It was the “feet on [presentation layer] ground” bit, made memorable by the energetic call to action delivered by Bill Buxton to get things started. His job was to deliver the “what”, and the Blend team is helping provide the “how.”

Hotlinked Play-By-Play

Tim Sneath has a thorough and thoughtfully hotlinked play-by-play of the keynote in two parts – here and here.  And fellow Canadian Jean-Luc David took over 500 keynote photos which I am sure he will filter before he uploads them here on Flickr, because apparently the man does not need sleep!

In the spirit of Bill’s Sketching User Experiences, I drew a mindmap, even though I have all the artistic ability of a slug (see below).

Blend 3 and SketchFlow

The most important words on my entire mind map the morning were “THEY HAVE CHANNELLED BUXTON”.

SketchFlow in Blend 3 looks superb. SketchFlow and its player will, unquestionably, change the way I flesh out user experiences to clients and get their feedback.  It will be very interesting to see how this tool actually gets used in practice, and evolves as designers and developers embrace it.  It’s not SketchFlow’s intent to replace all other forms of sketching, but rather to augment them with something innovative and useful.  I hope it will also improve developer/designer communication, by providing a tool and talking point that both can use.

MIX09 Keynote: ScottGu sporting red

Silverlight 3

Although nothing surprised me per se during the Silverlight 3 announcements, that was a good thing. There are significant improvement in v3, and answers to some (but not all) hopes.

The very promising: Out-of-browser and offline capabilities, server data push (caching on client), VisualStateManager invalid states and validation, Merged ResourceDictionaries, etc., that will address important shortcomings and challenges for people building Silverlight line-of-business apps.  Things like SaveFileDialog.

The important: Better text (desperately needed), library caching (for reducing download time – how many of my SL2 apps bundle whittled-down bits of the SL Toolkit?), sample data.

The cool: GPU support (opt-in @ plug-in and control levels). Multitouch support. Perspective 3D, which will be much more approachable than the 3D support in WPF, and address most of the scenarios where 3D adds UX value.  Pixel Shader effects – which aren’t hardware accelerated, but look good. Pixel and Bitmap APIs which open up new scenarios.

The awesome postscript.: Siverlight 3.0 runtime is actually 30k smaller than Silverlight 2! Madness!

The things I hoped for but didn’t find in v3: Commanding, Printing (unless you count Nikhil’s “make an ASP.NET page and print that” solution), FlowDocument.

The change in messaging that I didn’t expect: I attended BradA and NikhilK’s Silverlight presentations in the afternoon for more information about building business apps in Silverlight 3, and feel like I need a little more time for all of it to settle in.  The core message seems to have shifted a bit: from “you can run Silverlight on any web server”" to “you can run Silverlight anywhere, but it’s better together with ASP.NET, and you can use ASP.NET to obtain some things you’re looking for in Silverlight, like SEO and Printing.”  I’m also a little foggy on how some of the this ‘prescriptive framework’ all fits into where my mind was going with Prism and MVVM for Silverlight, as proposed by the Patterns and Practices group.

IIS Media Services: As someone who’s more Dev than IT Pro, I’m not best qualified to comment on this… but adaptive, on-demand and live streaming sounds and looks pretty amazing.

The New Microsoft-ism: It’s the verb “to party,” which I heard in contexts such as these:

“now we can party over this data we got back”, and

“you can go ahead and party on this MatrixTransform now” or in summary

“I’m super-jazzed that we can go ahead and party over this data we’ve got back from the DataSource.”

I expect tomorrow we will party over the cloud.  (The cloud and Azure, although mentioned, were not today’s focus by any stretch).

And that’s why this MIX09 Keynote half-sketch is really upside down, isn’t it? I should have left the top side of the page to deal with the part that’s “in the clouds!”

MIX09 Day 1 Keynote Mindmap (would make a nice deep zoom)

MIX09 Swag Bag

This year’s Swag Bag Contents:

1 Sketching User Experiences book (highly cool – I already gave my previous copy to a friend)

1 MIX09 Notebook (also cool -this image does not do justice to the pages of the notebook, which alternate graph and plain. Session eval forms attached to back.)

1 MIX09 T-Shirt with “<3 Your Web” slogan

1 “Live at Kexp” Music CD (KEXP is a non-profit Seattle-based Radio Station)

MIX09 Mystery Sticker

1 Sticker Thingamayoke which I have yet to grok (at first I thought it was maybe something that Lego Mindstorms sensors could do image recognition with or something, now it looks to me like an abstract representation of web content)

1 Clip-On Flashlight

1 Pen

1 Water Bottle - handy for us winter-pasty Canoodians, as it is 22 degrees Celsius here and sunny!

1 Coffee Mug

Misc Advertisements (not pictured)

MIX07 Welcome Swag

For reference, here’s what was in the MIX07 Swag.

I’m most grateful for another copy of Buxton’s insightful book!

I wonder if we’ll have any software to play with tomorrow, or if we’ll be downloading lab content ourselves.  I always come armed with extra storage to events like these in case I need to truck home some VPCs.

Before a week for looking forward, let’s take a quick peek back for context.

Bill Gates at MIX06

MIX06: “The Next Web Now.”

3 years ago, Microsoft launched this hip series of conferences, inviting a cross-platform audience of business decision makers, developers and designers (…wait… designers?!).

The inaugural keynote explored the opportunities that would emerge as the internet “evolves… and ‘web’ and ‘application’ concepts merge.”

It was the only MIX keynote to star Bill Gates as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, and featured a fireside chat between Bill and Tim O’Reilly, and Bill’s mea culpa about the state of IE6.

It was a simpler time back then. My Mom wasn’t even on Facebook yet.

MIX07: “A 72-Hour Conversation”

Ray Ozzie and ScottGu at MIX07

The conference’s sophomore year was billed as a “72-hour conversation” at a time when the rampant success of social networking was all the buzz.

Ray Ozzie took the helm, WPF/E got its new look and name, and so we saw .NET boldly go cross-browser, cross-platform – at least, in CTP form.

MIX08

Loosely, the following year’s theme was (loosely) connected things: their impact on the individual, their impact on the organization.  “Small pieces, loosely joined” was I believe how Ray put it.

And there were Rich Internet Applications. Silverlight 2.0, the highly anticipated enabler, went Beta.  Designers (I thought) were finally somewhat understood, even if their Microsoft toolset was still fermenting.

SteveB and GuyK at MIX08

There was an explicit expectation set by Ray, Steve and Company that MIX08 represented but one of several steps on the road to something big at the PDC coming in the autumn.

PDC2008

Then, months later, Silverlight 2.0 was unleashed on the wild, with 3.0 already on the radar. But wait… were we even talking about the presentation layer any more, or, with Silverlight’s eventual impact firmly impressed upon us, had we moved on to discuss awesome sky-plumbing instead?

We’re talkin’ Azure, Live Services too numerous to mention, data and enterprise service buses and meshes in the sky, a bookstore that got there first, Models and Domain-Specific Languages (see Don Box’s characterization of this dreadfully wond’rous craic), and so much more, all available streamed online now for your viewing pleasure.

MIX09

So we begin MIX09 with feet tentatively on the presentation layer, but eyes on this intriguing Cloud on the horizon.

The MIX09 Session List alone would suggest an emphasis (by session number) on:

• Silverlight (31) and UI/UX (16),
• Azure (11) and Live Services (8),
  and
• ASP.NET (14)

I mentioned previously that I visit MIX for the buzz.  This week I’m there again to meet, to chat, and to think — and especially, to ask what awesome things should we do with all this  stuff? What could I do for my clients? For their organizations? For my own projects?

Even if you’re not able to attend, the keynote will be streamed live, and you’ll have a chance to ask ScottGu some questions online 30 minutes after it’s over.

We’re three years into this MIX journey to The Next Web.  This week, we expect to gain insight into Microsoft’s perspective on the road ahead.  I’m going to try to write here daily, and figure out how to use this Twitter thing as well.  Inspired by keynote speaker Bill Buxton, I may even try my hand at a little sketching, and change up my technology choices as an audience member for the keynote and sessions. (hint: I’m thinking of leaving the laptop behind).

Right – that’s enough context – I’m off to Vegas to Mix things up a little!