Just completed an submitted the logo for Code Camp 14. It also includes some first. For the first time there is not tents in the design an for the first time there are people around the camp fire.  The three people play an important rolls. The first person, left to right, has an idea. The center person has the  idea and developer skills to bring it to life, and the final persons sees the business revenue side of the puzzle – or – is the customer willing to pay for the business product. The bubble to the right of the logo is the developers bubble.  My original idea was to just throw in some random .net code, but Chris Bowen came up with a winner, and old school loop outputting “code camp 14”…perfection.

If you do not know what code camps are check out the event info:

The 14th Boston Code Camp will be held on Saturday October 2nd at the Microsoft Northeast office in Waltham, MA.

Code Camp is a a day of presentations from peer developers in the community in an informal setting. Anyone can present, and this is a great opportunity to share your knowledge or something interesting you have been working on recently. Everyone that submits an abstract gets to present. There is no review process.

In addition, it is a great opportunity to discuss technical issues with your peers in the presentations and informally throughout the day.

Speakers can now submit abstracts and you can register at

www.thedevcommunity.org

We are proud to announce that our new client Decorators Workshop took its fist baby step in the early hours of the morning. The event was marked by the launch of its temp. “coming soon” page. Keep an eye out for updates as soon we will have there amazing new full site launched. Wait until you see the amazing craftsmanship and skilled work from these masters of their craft.

http://www.decoratorsworkroomboston.com/

After a few days of work, we launched our new News section on the GREY WOLF DESIGN web site.  After several issues arose with the last theme we were using in Word Press and jumping over an using an custom Blogger template as an interim solution, we are finally back on Word Press.

The design concept was for a very simple and very clean design for the news section. Featuring an extremely long front page listing all the News articles and a very clean article page. Over the past few month we had been experimenting with some SEO enhancing techniques we had seen around the net and in several articles.  The new section incorporates many of these enhancements.

Again rather than having to go through the Word Press admin panel to post articles, I have set it up to go through Microsoft Live Writer. The first serious test was the complete population of the new section with all the post from various sources.  Live Writer enabled me to complete this task in 1/4th the time it would have taken using just the admin panel.

We are working with the hosting company to address an issue with load time on the Word Press section. I also have an backlog of news & information postings to work through over the next few weeks.  After that all will be back on course again and in good shape.  The only plug-in I added was the Share Anywhere one and I added that script after every article to make it easy for visitors to save and share articles with ease.  I will be replacing the “share” image so that it better fit the visual design theme of the site and News section soon as well.

Just returned from the Microsoft Expression Studio 4 launch in New York City. The event took place as part of the Yahoo.com sponsored week long “Internet Week”. Right out of the gate all the new features found in Expression Studio 4 or impressive.

Bill Buxton delivered his best performance I have seen to date as the keynote speaker, then we jumped right into all the applications with the development teams taking turns on the stage diving into all the new cool features and enhancements.

Expression Studio 4 contains:

• Expression Web 4
• Expression Encoder 4
• Expression Blend 4 w/ Sketch Flow
• Expression Design 4

Expression Web 4
Several enhancement really make this web design & development application a serious choice over Dreamweaver. The new Super Preview feature is stunning, Live browser viewing an layering of your page not only allows you to see how your hard work will render in various browsers but unlike most Safari is live and not just an image. In addition, something others do not have you can work and edit your code while using Super Preview…this alone is an amazing advancement. especial now that Adobe has seen fit to stop making its distant runner-up Browser Lab no longer a free tool.

The second major feature that I love is the addition of a massive detailed SEO page review / checker. This was stunning to have in the application and the Expression team placed an serious amount of time and research into hundreds of SEO elements. All this is backed up by an help feature for those that might not understand SEO elements, that’s more like an knowledge center.

Expression Encoder 4
Some of the new enhancements for Encoder really struck me. They have added several new codec’s including V1 and H.264. More advance features in preparing you video for encoding, including some stunning side-by-side viewing and change detection. This new version also makes it very easy to place trigger tags and advanced elements into your videos. Another new feature is the ability to make screen recording for training and sharing, this is a very cool feature and with all the advancements makes a very powerful video tool.

Expression Blend 4 w/ Sketch Flow
There is a lot of seriously cool additions to Blend, especially the addition of some amazing new actions and behaviors . Several new feature in Sketch-Flow continue to make it the top prototyping tool. The ability to import your design team work files directly from Illustrator and Photoshop, while maintain layers and features perfectly is also a home run. For those of us work on Window 7 Mobile project , however, we still have to hold on to the previous version but an update is already in the works for this feature to be added to version 4.

pro4mods:
http://www.pro4mods.com

 http://kidd-motorsports.com/

 We still have some small touches to add like special things for the fans in the Fan Zone Section, so make sure you come back to the site and check it out.  We will also be flushing-out the remaining sections of the Gallery very soon.  You will want to keep an sharp eye on that section and here in the news section as Matt and the team will have some exciting updates on the cars for the highly anticipated 2010 racing season.

 All of us at GREY WOLF DESIGN are totally excited about working with Matt, Kyle and the rest of the KMS team and are happy to have them join our Motorsports Division wolf pack of racing teams.

 KMS literally was or first client of the new year with us closing the deal as New Year Eve was taking place.  Thought some new server rack errors delayed the site launch a few week, I can think of no better way to cap off a week filled with the first ARCA and NASCAR races, oh yeah an some football than launching KMS live.

 Bob’s project, especially his amazing build You Tube videos has turned him into an online success story. 

Project website:
http://www.b1modelproject.com/

 Bob’s You Tube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/user/hornitpilot

 A quick post to let everyone know that the date is set and the venue reserved:

 New England Code Camp 13: Saturday, March 27th, 2010

The Microsoft offices in Waltham, MA will host this free, full day of knowledge sharing and networking, by the community, for the community.

 News and updates are on Chris Bowen’s blog:  http://blogs.msdn.com/cbowen/archive/2010/01/30/new-england-code-camp-13-save-the-date.aspx

 I was working on an unrelated Insignia project and listing to Bob’s project YouTube videos while waiting for a client to get back to me and the idea for a logo patch for him popped into my head an 20 min and ta-da, they already got it posted up on his project website and even kindly linked it back to the GREY WOLF DESIGN site and I did not even asked them too, that was nice. Its an amazing project the remote Control B1-B he is building is a monstrous 18 ft  and he will be using four mini turbojet engines…its a great learning experience for hobbyist RC guys as well.

 His project website is at:
http://www.b1modelproject.com/

 An you can subscribe to his You Tube video uploads at:
  http://www.youtube.com/user/hornitpilot