Ever look at a project and wonder how they got a epic button instead of the every day average one? There is an extremely easy way to do this in Expression Blend.  I’m also going to show the XAML on how to do it by hand however. Here is a normal button and an ellipse. XAML: <Ellipse Fill="White" Stroke="Black" Margin="139,68,0,0" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="105" Height="105"/> <Button Margin="248,68,238,0" Content="Button" VerticalAlignment="Top" Height="105"/> The button acts like a button but I want the ellipse to act like a button.  In Expression Blend, just...

I’ve tested the software pretty heavily and I think it is feature complete.  I before I’m going to show off the code, I need to clean up my naming scheme on some stuff.  I changed my naming scheme for UI elements half way through so … yeah, oops. Here is the current UI, the graphics came from both Ian Hall and Jeff Couturier from 10volt Media.  Jeff really helped me out and whipped up a sweet magnifying glass while Ian did the glasses for me.  Note the glass effect with the whiskey glass.  I got graphics for both in...

I can thank my upbringing for demanding stuff looks good before anyone even sees it.  Appearance matters so how can one person make their application look good and have those styles and features be reusable?  First is to use Styles.  Styles much like CSS but are different.  With CSS in web pages, you can apply multiple styles to one element.  An example of this is <div class="foo bar awesomer" style="width: 1.2em">Clint is awesomer</div> With XAML, you can’t chain styles together but what you can do is create a hierarchy of styles.  Let me show you what I’m talking about in...

I’ve been doing a decent amount of UI tweaking.  This is what I came up with.  Pour screen is a work in progress but the others I think are pretty near finalized.  The main screen is missing the top two in the video since the test account I’m using lacks an order history. Possible Pour Screen A quick UI run though on Drunktender

There really is nothing really wrong with the current one however there are a lot of aspects I dislike.  I find some of the colors too washed out and the fact I used Win32 instead of WPF makes scalable an issue.  I’m chatting with the same guy who designed the first version, Ian Hill, to help redo the UI with me.  WPF will allow me to have non-rasterized graphics via XAML that can scale and won’t be pre-rendered.  It will also let me have animations and some neat flow control abilities out of the box. I whipped up some...