Natural User Interfaces in .NET is a hands-on guide that prepares you to create natural user interfaces (NUI) and great multi-touch experiences using the WPF and Silverlight multi-touch APIs. This book starts by introducing natural user interface (NUI) design concepts that everyone needs to know. It then quickly moves to the WPF Touch API and Surface Toolkit guiding the reader through a multitouch NUI application from concept to completion. Along the way, you'll see where these concepts can be extended to Silverlight via its touch interface.
Whether it's tapping, flicking, pinching, or stretching, the vocabulary and gestures of user interfaces have changed a lot in the past year. Multitouch surfaces are now common across almost all platforms and device types. The new Windows Touch API, along with innovations from the Surface project, make it easier than ever to build rich, natural, multitouch interfaces for Windows applications. Built on WPF, these new APIs leverage what you already know about .NET development and blend in new components to support touch interfaces.
This book offers the most complete coverage of the .NET multi-touch development story. Through its a unique combination of NUI concepts and practical implementation guidance that cannot be found in any other book or web resource, readers will come away with a complete knowledge of how to create engaging multi-touch applications with great NUI experiences.
Natural User Interfaces in .NET assumes a basic familiarity with WPF and Silverlight and focuses completely on teaching essential NUI design concepts and technical expertise in developing multi-touch applications with these technologies. Many of the NUI concepts and design guidelines will be of interest to both designers and developers, but this book was written with developers in mind.
Joshua Blake is an "integrator"-a developer-designer hybrid. He has extensive experience developing NUIs for Microsoft Surface and Windows 7. A leader in the Microsoft Surface and NUI communities, he is well known for creating and maintaining InfoStrat.VE, an open source multi-touch Bing Maps 3D control for WPF, Microsoft Surface, and Window 7 Touch. Joshua maintains a blog "Deconstructing the NUI" at http://nui.joshland.org.
geekle is based on a wordle clone.