Judging from the date of my last blog post, it’s obvious that we’ve been pretty heads-down over here for the past few months. However, it has all paid off, and I’m ecstatic to announce that Look or Feel has been realigned, retooled and reborn as Stimulant. I’m joined in partnership by long-time collaborator and confidant Nathan Moody, who will serve as Design Director. Stimulant is a digital experience design & development firm specializing in crafting memorable interactions for uncommon devices and contexts. Our new url is http://stimulant.io.

Now, if you’re reading this message, then we most likely *just* finished presenting MIXr — our realtime, mobile-based social networking application — at Scott Guthrie’s MIX08 keynote. MIXr’s sole purpose in life is to help users to figure out where the party is at *right this instant.*

It’s a fully data-driven, touchscreen-based application, running on Silverlight for Windows Mobile 6. It aggregates user ratings, such as a venue’s mood, line length, and music, and uses interactive data visualization to make it easy to figure out what’s hot and what’s not. Notable is that it’s the first gesture-based Silverlight UI on a mobile device.

We’re clearly excited about not only Silverlight 2.0 (WPF goodness is finally here!), but that Microsoft’s deal with Nokia really cements Silverlight’s future as a serious contender. Big props to everyone on the Silverlight team.

If you’re at MIX08, feel free to give us a shout at mix08@stimulant.io. And expect more frequent posts in this (or a new) space soon!

Bea Costa has a fantastic post this morning on using XLinq in XAML to facilitate databinding. I have to say, I’m still partial to generating CLR objects from XML, especially when I have full control over the schema and data source, but it’s nice to see another elegantly designed tool that follows existing syntax conventions.

Oh, and nice new blog skin, Bea!

Mike Swanson ( of Illustrator-to-XAML exporter-plugin fame, my most-used AI plugin to date) just released some bits implementing seam carving in .NET. Very impressive. I’m anxious to see if and how this can be segued in with live code, especially in a multitouch scenario.

Alon from CarbonFive has posted a nice list of reference material with regard to Agile development. The team at C5 has an innate grasp of the practice, having woven it into their day-to-day internal and client-facing processes to a level of success I’ve seen nowhere else. Worth a look.

When I upgraded to Orcas B2, all of my .js code showed up in a lovely shade of black. For me, fixing this was as simple as doing a full “Repair” on my Visual Studio install, but I did find a note to another, more detailed method that solved the same problem. If the repair doesn’t work, perhaps try the second method. Intellisense is back — now how about some rudimentary code folding, please? Back to UltraEdit for JavaScript hacking, I guess.