

Review my App: Illuminator (www.goa41.com) - JacquesMoulin

Illuminator is an application that allows to create Flash banner, menus, tabs and so on.<p>What is interesting about the project is that it is a mix of Silverlight and Flash:  the application allowing to design the Flash "banners" has been made using Silverlight.<p>Initially this project was built as a demo of what could be done using our toolsets (see www.netikatech.com) but at the end it became a real full project.
Therefore, we are a lot less interested by the "technical achievement" and we would like the application to become really useful.
However, two main barriers must be eliminated in order to get people to switch to our product (I encourage you to read Joel Spolsky’s great post about barriers: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html):
   1. The learning curve of the application needs to be shortened. Some concepts that we use are powerful but they are not intuitive to novice users. 
     - A menu button and the elements it contains can have 4 states (Up, Over, Down, DownOver).
     - A menu button can be linked to a Selected Canvas and/or an Over Canvas.  If the mouse is over the button, the linked over canvas is displayed. If the menu button is down, the selected canvas linked to the menu is displayed. Otherwise they are hidden.
     - Elements can be docked inside one another (left, top, right..).<p><pre><code>   2. The average user is not a designer. He does not know exactly what he wants (something beautiful...) and he needs to be guided when building a banner.
</code></pre>
In order to remove these two barriers, we intend to build more templates and to add wizards.<p>We would love to hear your feedback about the way to make Illuminator a real useful application.
======
Jupe
Nice, responsive UI - I like it. After playing with Blend, it's easier to step
into.

A few things/features to think about for the the future: \- Group selecting /
grouping \- Upgrade to silverlight 4 and make use of right-clicks \- The tool
tips are helpful, but a little wordy. \- Saving as XAML would be nice \-
Having more than two colors in a gradient would be nice

I'm anxious to see more. Do you have any sites built with these components?

~~~
JacquesMoulin
Thanks for your reply.

The application has just been released. There is only one site built with the
tool at this time. The customer does not want to be known.

We intend to regularly release new features.

