As a first part of planning for development on the project, I decided to find out if I could use free tools to create add-ins for Outlook, and started with Visual C# 2008 Express – a free sibling to the popular but costly Visual Studio 2008 (of course you get much more for the paid version, which also made even the trial version too big a package for me to download on the road with mobile broadband), for which you can use for example Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) and Add-in Express for quick development. Furthermore, considering I was new to development for MS Office, I believed that having fewer advanced tools would give the chance to learn more about this type of development, thereby giving skills I wouldn’t find by going the easiest way, and also leading to fewer coding mistakes down the line…

Whether I’m right or wrong in the choice is for each to decide on his/her own, and either way I found a way to create Outlook add-ins with free tools. I started off by following two different blog posts (see references at end of post) which were both written for older versions of Visual C# Express and Outlook. Since the posts were a bit dated (or perhaps for other reasons), the described development was a incomplete, and further investigation had to be made. To make a long story short, what I needed to do was to create a Class project, add references to

• Microsoft Office 12.0 Object Library (COM, shows up as Microsoft.Office.Core)
• Microsoft Outlook 12.0 Object Library (COM, Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook)
• System.Windows.Forms (.NET, keeps same name)

The code I ended up with for a simple “Hello World” was a as follows:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using Extensibility;
using Microsoft.Office.Core;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;

namespace OutlookAddinSample
{
    public class Connect : Object, IDTExtensibility2
    {
        private Application applicationObject;
        private object addInInstance;
        private CommandBarButton toolbarButton;
        Explorer currentExplorer = null;

        public void OnConnection(object application,
            ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst,
            ref Array custom)
        {
            applicationObject = 
                (Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application)application;
            addInInstance = addInInst;
            if (connectMode != Extensibility.ext_ConnectMode.ext_cm_Startup)
            {
                OnStartupComplete(ref custom);
            }
        }

        public void OnDisconnection(ext_DisconnectMode
            disconnectMode,
            ref Array custom)
        {
            if (disconnectMode != 
                Extensibility.ext_DisconnectMode.ext_dm_HostShutdown)
            {
                OnBeginShutdown(ref custom);
            }
            applicationObject = null;
        }

        public void OnAddInsUpdate(ref Array custom)
        {
        }

        public void OnStartupComplete(ref Array custom)
        {
            CommandBars commandBars = 
                applicationObject.ActiveExplorer().CommandBars;
            try
            {
                this.toolbarButton = 
                    (CommandBarButton)
                    commandBars["Standard"].Controls["Hello"];
            }
            catch (System.Exception)
            {
                this.toolbarButton = 
                    (CommandBarButton)commandBars["Standard"].Controls.Add(1, 
                        System.Reflection.Missing.Value, 
                        System.Reflection.Missing.Value, 
                        System.Reflection.Missing.Value, 
                        System.Reflection.Missing.Value);
                this.toolbarButton.Caption = "Hello";
                this.toolbarButton.Style = MsoButtonStyle.msoButtonCaption;
            }
            this.toolbarButton.Tag = "Hello Button";
            this.toolbarButton.OnAction = "!<MyAddin1.Connect>";
            this.toolbarButton.Visible = true;
            this.toolbarButton.Click += 
                new Microsoft.Office.Core._CommandBarButtonEvents_ClickEventHandler(
                    this.OnToolbarButtonClick);
        }

        public void OnBeginShutdown(ref Array custom)
        {
            this.toolbarButton.Delete(System.Reflection.Missing.Value);
            this.toolbarButton = null;
        }

        private void OnToolbarButtonClick(CommandBarButton cmdBarbutton, ref bool cancel)
        {
            MessageBox.Show("Hello World", "My Addin");
        }
    }
}

Sorry about the code formatting, but hopefully it helps someone on getting started. After creating your project with the code for your Outlook add-in, you need to make it visible for the COM and make it strongly typed by signing. The signing is done simply by going to the project Properties (right-click on your project in the Solution Explorer) and then to Signing, where tick Sign the assembly and make a new key file (assuming you don’t have one already). For COM visibility, you go to the Application tab in the properties, click the Assembly Information button and tick the checkbox “Make assembly COM visible”. To make mine work I also took a couple of steps which were not recommended in the post I found information from, so try without the following first:

Under the Build tab, check “Register for COM interop”

Furthermore, the article I followed recommended adding to the registry (start->run->”regedit” on Windows Vista) at the location HKEYLOCALMACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins which didn’t work for me, and I instead added lines at HKEYCURRENTUSER\Software\Microsoft\Outlook\Addin. The added keys under () OutlookAddin.Connect (in my example with namespace OutlookAddin and class Connect; i.e. namespace.mainClass) were

• (STRING) “Description” = “Mail@rchive for Outlook”
• (STRING) “FriendlyName” = “Mail@rchive for Outlook”
• (DWORD) “LoadBehavior” = 00000003

Finally, to make a readable library of your add-in, and to register the installation folder to be used, copy the regasm.exe file (I found mine under C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727, although .NET 3.5 is used in the project) to your [project path]/bin/release, navigate to that folder in your command prompt (start->run->cmd) and run:

• regasm OutlookAddin.dll/tlb:OutlookAddin.tlb /codebase

(this of course only if your dll is named OutlookAddin.dll and you want the tlb to have the name OutlookAddin.tlb)

Following this procedure should add a button to your toolbar saying “Hello”, and when clicking it should pop up a “Hello World” form. If you have any questions or can’t make it work feel free to post a comment.

References:

• Frans King: Creating an Outlook Addin with C# Express
• Dan Crevier: Hello World Outlook Add-in using C#

•  It is now possible to integrate Google Earth as a map type of Google Maps – something they didn’t tell us enough about imho. However, it seems like this  is still at an early stage..
• If you’ve never been to a Google Developer day I would certainly recommend it – even if you know the API’s and have talked to many of the Google people who develop the app’s you use, there’s no better chance of finding other people giving fresh views of the world.
• According to one speaker, using ‘usual Google maps’ gives you a 50 kb download, while the Ajax downloader gives you a 4kb download. A significant claim which I hope to get the chance of testing soon enough – at least within the next few months. Too bad it seems to have a limit of 50 markers..

Of course, there were also a few other interesting subjects, including for example OpenSocial and especially Gears – but that’s not for this post…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about improving my Spanish, so when I stumbled upon the site SpanishSense, which contains lessons with voice dialogs, podcasts and help material I became pretty excited. One thing I really like about the site is how they allow you to embed lessons in your own site, to spread the word and build a community where everyone can help eachother in the learning process. According to the site, they also have Chinese lessons, but I’ll wait with looking into that for now – after all, it’s easy getting those new languages confused with the five I already know (six if you count beginner spanish that I didn’t practice for 2-3 years). You can try one of the SpanishSense lessons (introductions) by using the player I put in this post…

Another thing I did to find ways of improving my Spanish was to add a tab called Spanish to my iGoogle page – which of course gave quite a few widgets to use, including a dictionary, Babelfish and news in Spanish.

In other news, I’m looking around at a lot of Web 2.0 sites lately, getting some invites here and there (often found through Mashable), getting updated on new web API:s through ProgrammableWeb while in the process of starting one new site and one new blog. Meanwhile I’ve learned more about Google maps API (including the AJAX version), tiny mce (there must be ways of doing it better, but since it’s popular I guess they’re on to something), Community Server (I’m not very impressed), Dapper, Yahoo! pipes, Google trends and some add-ons for Firefox and Thunderbird. Next is to learn some more about the Google Mashup Editor and perhaps OpenKapow for the site I’m creating. Together with Dapper and Yahoo! Pipes I believe those tools can make wonders…

1. Augmented reality/Virtual Reality: Track a person with cameras and place him in a different context on the screen. This is used for creating movies, helping the animation by tracking a persons movements.
2. Eye-tracking: This can be used for people who can’t move their fingers, to write with their eyes instead of with the hands. Another common use for eye-tracking is Usability testing of websites, where users are left alone with the screen and a camera to track the eye movements, where after a heatmap is created depending on those movements.
3. Tracking and movement sensing: People, vehicles, animals etc – anything can be tracked. This can be used in shops for the owner to see which parts are most popular, or to find movement where there should be none – i.e. from an intruder or similar. This can also be used to track point in a video and insert objects such as 3D models on top.
4. Creating panoramas: Instead of a user having to define a number of points you can let the system suggest correspondences between images.
5. 3D Reconstruction: Reconstructing buildings in 3D can be useful to a historian who wants to show how an environment once looked, or to an architect who wants to create a building. The artist can change current landscapes, the gamer can see a real landscape and the traveler can be helped to decide where to go.
6. Commercial: Show ads in stadiums on TV depending on the audience – we can easily show an ad for Carlsberg on Danish TV on Old Trafford Stadium where in reality the ad is for Guinness.
7. Sports: Balls, pucks, players and everything else in the modern games can be tracked with cameras, giving statistic to help for example managers with the coaching or golf players improve their game. This type of tracking was first used in rocket science, now it’s explored at universities with normal off-the-shelf webcams and cheap digital cameras.

There are of course many more applications to Computer Vision, but as you can see there is everyday use of it which seamlessly integrate with our everyday passtime. I could also touch on for example robotics, but will wait with that for another time…

After activating both plugins (instead of writing in the theme or creating your own plugin), you simply create a block element which you want to apply the effect to, and then add a trigger for the effect. In my case, I created a div for this content looking like <p id="scrcontent" style="display:none">Text</p>
and a trigger anchor to show this div: <a href="javascript:void(0)" onclick="new Effect.BlindDown('scrcontent');">Click</a> – it’s a simple thing to do, but be careful to not use too many effects, or it could scare away your visitors.

After installing the plugins (don’t forget that the prototype plugin is needed for the script.aculo.us plugin to work, if you want to try it yourself) it was a simple thing to add the functionality to the site – you can Click to see a description of how to do it.

In the near future I’ll explore other nice plugins and effects and show results here. Until then, have a happy playtime!

Let’s start with the simple explanation – the ‘opposite of 3D Computer Graphics’ – which tells us that since 3D CG maps locations in 3D space to a 2D screen, Computer Vision should do the opposite, meaning we have one or more images of a location and want to find the scene from these images. This translation from 2D back to three dimensions can be done in a number of ways, most of them needing more complex explanations than the simple version can offer.

Moving on to the medium difficulty explanation, we see that Computer Vision has close relatives in fields such as Photogrammetry, Signal Processing and Image Analysis, that it can be used in for example robotics or for creating 3D scenes to walk around in, and that it is one of the most advanced fields in Computer Science at the moment, with very few systems which are both simple/fast to use and completely robust. Much of the focus is on cameras, and the external and internal parameters of these cameras as photos were taken.

The internal camera parameters include the zoom/focal length, the aspect ratio and the pixel size, while the external parameters are the position and rotation of the camera in three dimensions. Since the taken photos are always in two dimensions this leads to major mathematical computational difficulties. These difficulties have for some applications lead to combining the area with preparatory methods. An example is to create an estimated ‘pre-model’ with constraints for the final result, when trying to recreate a scene using Computer Vision methods, or putting constraints by trying to predict the next step of a tracked object.

Since this post is getting a bit long I’ll continue with the advanced explanation and some tips for books and online resources in another post…

In my first University course in the subject, we were first introduced to this way of thinking by looking at the Usability of real objects, such as kitchen appliances and parking meters. The books we used for a start were Designing visual interfaces by Mullet and Sano and The Design of Everyday Things by Norman – two books I can highly recommend both for a novice in the area and for someone who wants to know more about Usability in general. If you look at everyday things such as stereos, cellphone, laundry machines or even toasters, you can easily notice some part of the object which is more difficult, which is true especially the more advanced objects.

So what can designers, programmers, developers, managers, users and others do to help making for example web applications more user friendly? What can the ordinary man or woman do to help the designer, and what can the annoyed user with no patience do to help the programmer get it right? What can the programmer do to help both designers and users and what can the graphical designer do to help himself and everyone else?

What the users can do is pretty simple to answer – give feedback, comment and tell both what is good and what is not good enough. For this, the designer should give space for simple ways of contact – after all, the users is what should make the site live. However, the designer should still allow some security precautions to avoid spam, which can distract both programmers and designers…

One of the so called gurus of Usability is Jakob Nielsen, creator of the useit website and author of multiple books. If you want something simple and fast to read I recommend his book ‘50 websites deconstructed‘ – but when you look at his own site it’s easy to wonder if he cares at all about the design, and then the thought can be extended

The last course I had in Usability included one of the simplest books on the subject (besides many articles and essays of course) – ‘Don’t make me think‘ by Steve Krug – a well thought out book with simple illustrations and explanations of how the designers and programmers should think, to let the users keep their mind on the intended goal.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll write more about Usability and Accessibility, with simple rules to follow and methods to use – and also include simple analysis of a few websites. You are welcome to make comments here (or send a mail) to ask for an analysis of a specific site, or I’ll find one or a few myself which catches the eye – and maybe I’ll even use my own site as a starting point (yes, I am aware that it has flaws)…

Happy reading

Some say that Web 2.0 is about mashing it up, creating sites like del.icio.us and digg, or maybe collecting the most popular sites to one, and showing feeds from the mentioned sites and others, also including media sites such as Flickr and ifilm…

Before uploading your photo to Flickr, you can edit online with tools such as picnik, and the videos can be fixed at sites like eyespot before putting them on for example youtube or Revver….

If you feel like being passive for the day, you can instead use services such as Songbird for streaming from a multitude of online radio channels, or go to Travelistic to see travel videos…

When you look at all the sites and what they have in common it can be difficult at a first glance, but then you start to think of words and terms like ‘user experience’, ‘creativity’ and ’simplicity’ – which are very important parts of the new web taking shape for the future. For example, you don’t always need AJAX or other new technologies to make it ‘Web 2.0′ – but you need to make it worth the time spent to visit the site…

By the way, is anyone else tired of hearing terms such as ‘Web 2.0′, ‘AJAX’ and similar? The technology and thoughts have been around for ages…

Googling for the term ‘Web 2.0′ gives results showing people aren’t tired of it, and actually it’s one of the most hyped terms our there at the moment. Sites like All Things Web 2.0, WebWare and Web 2.0 Magazine try to list as many as possible in categories, while some show the contenct from multiple sites, for example the before mentioned popurls or the iGoogle portal.