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Mindscape Phone Elements released!

I’m really pleased to announce the world’s first comprehensive suite of Windows Phone 7 controls is now available! We’ve got some great controls in the box that will really make delivering Windows Phone 7 applications a lot easier. This post covers some of the controls and what they can do however we will be posting more over the coming weeks about specific controls as there is simply too much to cover in one post. We also have a great offer for the next two weeks on how to get a free license for yourself.

Performance

We have put considerable effort into performance tuning the controls on the phone. There’s been a lot of talk about the performance of WP7 applications not being as good as it could be and we wanted to make sure our users don’t suffer from that. Jason has been buried in his profiler digging around finding places that we could improve performance — you’ll get the benefits of the countless hours of performance tuning that has been done.

Charting

We raised the bar by incorporating a first class charting suite into our WPF Elements and Silverlight Elements suites. Many vendors expect you to buy a charting suite as separate product but we wanted to maximise the value to the end user instead. We’ve done the same with Phone Elements by porting over the full charting suite from the existing control suites. This means our charts don’t just look great but there’s amazing smooth panning, the ability to handle millions of data points and zooming all built in. Pictures don’t do this justice – it’s a great experience just flicking around the charts in your hand.

Here’s one of the 14 different chart types included in the box:

Everything you’d expect

Of course on top of charting we’ve included the foundational controls that are so important when building a great user experience. There’s date pickers, time pickers, a gesture library, color pickers, infinitely scrolling list boxes — the list goes on. We’ve worked hard to make sure they all work the way you would expect with the Windows Phone so that you can deliver a natural experience really quickly.

And, as always with Mindscape products…

• Our software is alive – we’ll be posting nightly builds and you’ll get new features, controls and enhancements every day
• We don’t ship bloat – download the trial and you’ll get just the Phone Elements install. We don’t sucker punch you with a multi-hundred mega byte download of everything we build. You’ll get just what you want.
• Only the controls you need – Why ship a “window” control for a phone when it doesn’t fit with that paradigm? We don’t add controls that only exist to build our control count. We build controls you’ll actually use, even if it means our control count is less than others. We’d rather build great controls you’ll use and love.

Our offer launch offer
As you know, we always offer a special deal when we launch a new product. We love getting the initial feedback from people so here goes.

• Tweet this link using the button below
• Follow @MindscapeHQ on twitter
• Post a comment below telling us what control you’d like to see for Windows Phone 7
• Do all of these and we’ll give you a free license! Valued at $299 USD! We will email you at the email address you use for your comment below.

Also, if you have a blog, post a review of Phone Elements and we’ll happily provide some free licenses for you to give away to your readers. Just email me and I’ll help you out.

We’re really excited to see what you build with this offering and would love to hear back when you deploy and application using Mindscape Phone Elements!

How to get hold of Phone Elements

• Download the trial here
• Buy a license here
• If you’re a Mindscape Mega Pack customer with an active subscription, it’s already applied to your account. Download it now!

Happy coding!

Our offer to those impacted by the Christchurch earthquake

This post is for Christchurch folk who have relocated to Wellington temporarily.

There has been a tremendous outpouring of support for those impacted by the massive Christchurch earthquake that hit Christchurch on Tuesday. A lot of this support has come by the way of accommodation being offered in other parts of New Zealand so that people have somewhere to sleep, eat and bath. There’s a fantastic support site run by our friends at Trade Me for those wanting to offer accommodation.

The Mindscape office in Wellington has 5 desks spare at the moment with comfy chairs. We’re opening our space for you to come and do your work or just get out of the house! While we have five spare desks, we only have a few spare computers so if you do happen to have a laptop that would be great, but not essential. You’re welcome to use our internet, power, table tennis table and anything else we can offer.

This offer is also open to the large IT firms around that may have Christchurch based staff in Wellington but are running out of desks for them – we’re very central and happy to have them in our office.

If you’re interested in coming to the Mindscape office next week please email me so I can manage numbers: jd@mindscape.co.nz

Honestly, I’m not sure what the mindset will be of those who have relocated for the time being or if this offer will appeal to anyone. It just seemed like something we could do to help at this stage of the disaster.

If you’ve read this far and you’re one of our blog subscribers not based in New Zealand the best way that you could help is by donating to the cause.

John-Daniel Trask, on behalf of the Mindscape team.

WPF Elements 4.0 is here!

We’re pleased to announce the availability of WPF Elements 4.0, the latest version of our suite of controls and components for Windows Presentation Foundation.

Beautiful data visualisation with WPF Elements charts

The big news in WPF Elements 4 is a gorgeous set of charting controls. Silverlight users have been enjoying these for a while and now they’re available for its big brother too. Take a look at some of the cool charts you can now create:

And there’s more examples here!

Packed with controlly goodness

Of course, WPF Elements is also stuffed to the brim with other controls for business and media applications, including:

• Scheduler (Outlook-style calendar)
• Property grid
• CoverFlow animated list control
• Dual progress bar and slider controls
• Numeric and currency text boxes
• Date and time pickers
• Colour pickers
• And many more!

WPF Elements 4.0 includes enhancements to many of these controls, such as new recurrence and work hour options in the Scheduler and item-level visibility control in the OutlookBar.

Get it now

WPF Elements 4.0 is available for download now. You can get the free trial edition from the Downloads page or purchase it from the store. And if you’re a current user of WPF Elements, it’s a free upgrade — grab it from the store now!

LightSpeed 4 Beta now available!

That’s right! Kicking off 2011 in style, we’re excited to announce that we have started shipping nightly builds of LightSpeed 4 Beta! LightSpeed 4 Beta is available to current LightSpeed 3 customers now.

What’s new with LightSpeed 4?

The primary focus of LightSpeed 4 has been on distributed enhancements – helping get your data get where it needs to be with LightSpeed taking care of all the hard work. We posted about some of the highlight features for distributed solutions in an earlier blog post, but the highlights: Distributed Entities, DistributedUnitOfWork, RIA Services, DTO mapping improvements and much more!

There’s plenty of other great things coming with LightSpeed 4 and we will be sure to be posting about them in the coming weeks.

We’d love to hear from you!

To help make this the best release of LightSpeed ever we would love to hear your feedback on LightSpeed 4 Beta. Fire us an email, post in the forum, poke us on twitter – whatever way you want, we want to hear your feedback. Bug reports, feature suggestions – anything.

Download it now!

Current LightSpeed customers can download immediately from their account page. Look for “LightSpeed 4 Beta Program”. The nightly builds will be available under the files for this product. If you’re not yet a customer, go and check out the free version of LightSpeed 3.11 and see what you’re missing out on! :-)

Notes for the beta

If you’re using the beta, please remember:

• Uninstall any existing installations of LightSpeed before installing the Beta.
• LightSpeed 4 does not install side by side with LightSpeed 3.
• There have been changes to DTO generation so if you’re testing a solution that uses DTO’s please get in touch if you have any issues.

Have fun!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is here!

The worst kept secret in Mindscape history is out — we’re proud to announce the release of Silverlight Elements 2.0, a major new version of our suite of controls for Microsoft’s Silverlight application and media platform!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is packed with components that support common business functionality, make for more convenient user interaction or just make your application look cool.

SPECIAL: Read about our limited time special offer!

Silverlight Elements – for the line of business

The big new feature in Silverlight Elements 2.0 is charting. Create great-looking charts in minutes, and pimp them out from the extensive gallery of sample styles.

Silverlight Elements includes bar, line, spline, area, spline area, pie, doughnut, scatter and bubble charts, plus stacked variants of the bar, line, area, spline and spline area charts. These choices make it easy for you to create visualisations that help business users rapidly absorb, assess and compare information.

Click to see full size

Silverlight Elements charting is fully idiomatic Silverlight, supporting data binding, styling and templating. You can use styles and templates to customise the appearance of chart elements such as bars, symbols, lines, axes, data labels and legends. You can even use data-dependent styling, for example to highlight values that fall above or below the expected range. Full data binding support means you can use Silverlight charts against existing business objects. What’s more, if you bind a chart to an observable data source, it will update in real time — a painless way to ensure your users are always working with the most current data!

There’s not room here to talk about all the other cool features, like multiple Y axes, axis scaling, stripey backgrounds and support for massive data sets, but we’ll be posting lots of examples over the coming days. Watch this space!

While charting is the big new feature, Silverlight Elements also includes a bunch of other controls that are useful in business scenarios, such as the popular Scheduler control, list and tree-list views, and many more.

Silverlight Elements – for your users

Although Silverlight is a great platform for building rich user experiences, the set of controls it comes with is fairly basic. Silverlight Elements includes a bunch of components that you can use to improve the navigability and usability of your application. Users are familiar with idioms like menus, expanders and split buttons, and with Silverlight Elements they can have them!

Click to see full size

In addition, Silverlight Elements provides a number of familiar controls from the Windows and Office environments, such as color pickers, time pickers, a numeric up-down spinner, an Outlook-style navigation bar and many more, to help your users get up and running with your application as quickly as possible!

Silverlight Elements – for looking good

If there’s one thing better than an application which does the job and makes it easy, it’s an application which does the job, makes it easy and looks great doing it. With Silverlight Elements, you can use controls such as CoverFlow and Book to create engaging, tactile user interfaces which users love to interact with.

Better still, Silverlight Elements ships with five themes, allowing you to easily achieve an attractive, modern Office- or Expression-style look in your application.

Silverlight Elements – for free goodies!

As part of Silverlight Elements 2.0, we’re making three controls — CoverFlow, Book and Expander — available for FREE! Just download the free edition of Silverlight Elements and you can use these controls to your heart’s content without paying one red cent.

The free edition also includes evaluation versions of all the other controls so you can try them out and see how they can help you to build great applications.

We’re also offering a special bonus to customers who purchase the full version in the next two weeks: a $100 discount and a free copy of Laurent’s Bugnion’s book Silverlight 4 Unleashed (the proper dead tree edition you can keep on your desk, not a PDF!).

Silverlight Elements – get it now!

Silverlight Elements 2.0 is available now — grab the free edition and take it for a spin, or head for the store to take advantage of the limited time discount and free book offer. Happy coding!