Because Ian doesn’t have blog comments and because the Avalon Animation team doesn’t yet have a blog, Elizabeth Nelson (PM) and Matt Calkins (SDE) have asked that I post the following response to Ian’s recent Animating Custom Types in Avalon post:

“I’m happy to report that building custom animations to animate font size is not necessary. (Nevertheless, Ian Griffiths’s sample is a spiffy example of how to build custom animations!) For the time being, TextEffects provides just the font size animation tools he seeks. There’s even a TextEffects sample in the Avalon CTP Announcement that Arik, Karsten and Tim put together. The properties of interest for font size animations are ScaleX and ScaleY.

“This isn’t the end of the story on Font animations — we’re still working on hooking a few things up internally to make it easier to use animations. Regardless of what else we cook up for built-in Font animations, TextEffects will come in handy for animating individual characters in a string in a coordinated manner.

“As for the concern about rendering artifacts when enlarging text, the issue is definitely on our radar!

“Thanks for your enthusiasm for custom animations.”

Most of the worst experiences of my childhood involve the dentist. I have an active gag reflex and a general aversion to sitting still for long periods with nothing to do but let somebody poke my soft innards with a metal stick, so the dentist chair has never been a good fit for me. Today, I got another reason to hate the dentist.

Because Beaverton does not fluoridate their water and because he’s a nine-year old boy, my youngest son Tom had 4 cavities to deal with today. He was nonchalant about the whole thing for the first hour alone in the chair while I waiting in the sitting room, never expressing concern or doubt about the experience to come, which made me believe that everything was going to be just fine. Even when he started crying a bit, I was able to maintain my seat, knowing that he leaned toward the dramatic. However, when he started screaming, that’s when all 6′5″ and 280 pounds of me barged through the door between the waiting area and the rending rooms, not stopping to ask the women milling around reception if that was OK and conscious but uncaring that the expression on my face stilled them to silence.

When I got back to the room where Tom was being impaled, the dentist was busy telling him that little girls cried less than he did. She further went on to tell him that he wasn’t feeling “pain” at all but only “pressure,” a sentiment she had to repeat several times while she asked the nurse to give her the extra gauze to staunch the profuse bleeding. I have to say that it was difficult to simultaneously comfort my son while expressing my displeasure at the dentist for both the potential physical and verified mental torture she was using on him. Probably it wasn’t easy for her to concentrate on her dentistry in a completely focused manner while I loomed over her, but that’s what you get for making my son cry for 30 minutes.

Anyway, at the end, as she informed me that she worked with children all the time and had two of her own (implying that the pain was somehow my son’s fault, I’m guessing), she also reached for the referral pad for another dentist to fill the other two cavities, saving me the trouble of asking.

I hate the dentist.

P.S. After a McDonald’s toy and chicken sandwich (eaten carefully from the un-decimated side of his mouth), Tom seems unaffected. However, I’m sure that the whole sordid experience will come roaring back to him in the future unless they’ve replaced the dentist with nanites and computer programs (or sledge hammers and chisels, which would be equally humane)…

I don’t know what Amazon is doing — except possibly trying to stimulate blog entries — because I could detect no advertising in there most recent home page movie short, “Tooth Fairy,” but I did enjoy it.

Here.

Sir Black Xero (?!?) has a review of Microsoft’s increasing openness in 2004, summarizing it this way:

“Granted, there are plenty of Microsoft teams that are still opaque when it comes to their roadmaps. (Office team, are you listening?) But Microsoft has taken some in 2004 in the right direction, customers, analysts and other company watchers seem to agree.”

Frankly, I’m pleasantly surprised at how far Microsoft has come opening up to the world. I hope we’re at a critical mass where it just can’t be stopped, but as an engineer, that’s hardly surprising. : )

but it wasn’t until Woodward and Bernstein shared it with the world that he did anything about it. Now that we’ve got an Avalon that works with Windows XP and Visual Studio, if there’s something about it that you don’t like, blog about it or post to the Avalon newsgroup. Cry out loud! Don’t keep it inside. Don’t learn how to hide your feelings…

P.S. I *know* that there are some folks that want the Avalon CTP bits that don’t have MSDN subscriptions. You have my most sincere apologies.

P.P.S. I don’t mean to call the Avalon guys crooks. Those guys work super hard to build the right thing and they’re dying for the feedback. That makes them *very* different than Nixon, who really didn’t want the feedback he got. : )

Ian Griffiths illustrates the core concepts in Avalon animation by implementing a custom font size animation class. Basically, “animation” in Avalon means “changing an object’s value over a range in a given time,” e.g. changing a font size from 10 to 72 in 4 seconds or an X coordinate from 10 to 100 in 2 seconds. Animation seemed so fancy to me until I broke it down in my head in this way.

Since our credit scores have become such a big part of our lives, it has become federal law that everyone be able to get a free credit report annually. As of December 1^st, 2004, the western states are eligible and the web site lists when other groups of states will have access. For a blow-by-blow, check out the write-up on the Personal Finance Blog.

Mathew Nolton has posted a GUI front-end to my XmlSerializerPreCompiler that you might find useful. Thanks, Matt!