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Apple Patents Use Of Fingertips as Interaction Devices

In a development certain to inspire renewed confidence in the company that has shown us technological marvel after marvel, Apple has filed a patent elucidating the innovative use of fingertips to drive interaction between people and electronic devices.

“It’s something we feel that Apple is uniquely positioned to bring to the table, given our overwhelming superiority with all technology… at least as percieved by our more rabid devotees” said Apple CEO Steve Jobs. “This patent will help us corner the market on interactive innovation or, as I like to call it, Appleactive iMacopodovation. TM.”

Under the patent filing, Apple has been granted the exclusive right to develop applications responding to input stemming from the distal phalanges. The company has not been forthcoming with specifics of any application development this may open for them, but the excitement seemed barely containable.

SteveJobsHands

Steve Jobs shows the latest innovation from Apple… fingertips

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ListView (and ListBox) Performance Issues

I was working on one of my projects today and I noticed that one of our popups displaying search results in a ListBox was having really serious performance problems.  After determining that the problem was, in fact, on the WPF side of things, I was somewhat baffled. I wasn’t doing anything that I could think of that should be pushing the limit of what WPF could do.

 Finally, I went looking online for an answer and discovered a list of possible performance killers for the ListView (and ListBox) on Mark Shurmer’s blog. Chief among his no-no’s:

Embedding the ListView inside a StackPanel

Which is exactly what I was doing.

Why is this a problem? To answer that question, let’s take a look at the ItemsPanel at runtime using Snoop. When I place my ListBox into a Grid, here is what my ItemsPanel looks like:

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WPF Drop-Shadows on The Cheap

One of the questions I get most often from designers and almost never from developers is:

How can I get drop shadows into my application without killing my performance?

 It is, of course, easy as punch and pie to get drop shadows into your application. You can just use the Bitmaps Effects panel in the Appearance section:

 OrdinaryDropShadowing

For the love of God, please do not use the Bitmap Effects in the Appearance section!

If any developers found out that I told you to use BitmapEffects, they would hunt me down and cut off my fingers. This is because, while the Bitmap Effects in WPF are all sorts of cool, they make your computer break down into uncontrollable sobbing. Bitmap Effects hog system resources by requiring software rendering for render-heavy effects. There is no better way to slow down a perfectly good application than to give every other element a drop shadow.

But, what if you really really want to?

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How Do I Style The ComboBox Items?

This is actually a continuation of my post on getting the ComboBox items to accept text wrapping, so I’ll be working from that point forward. If you’re coming fresh into this, you won’t be missing anything… but that is my explaination for the pictures containing wrapping text.

When last we left our heroes, we has a couple problems. The first was that our items were either black text on a white background and ran together in a very un-designer-y way.

BeginningViewComboStyling

The second was that the selected item background makes your eyes bleed such a horrid blue color you’ll feel like Paul Atreides staring at a stone burner.

Was that a little too geek? My apologies.

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