I am very excited to announce that Imagewind has been released today for iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. You can download Imagewind from the iTunes App Store, or check out Imagewind.net for more details. Imagewind in the iTunes App Store is rated for ages 17+.

This is essentially the re-birth of Imagewind. After Imagewind was banned from Windows Phone I became quite disheartened that it would never again see the light of day in today's marketplace-based distribution networks. You see, Imagewind is a bit risque - it displays unfiltered images from Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr - and some people post some crazy things to those social networks. What's neat about this sort of re-birth of Imagewind is that it largely shares a similar code base to the original Silverlight and Windows Phone versions - thanks to Xamarin MonoTouch. Given how intense this app is in it's processing and image displaying, I think it is quite a testament to that platform.

What I like about Imagewind isn't the bad things you may see, but the real-ness of what you see. There is nothing closer to reality-TV in an app than Imagewind. You can see what people are eating for lunch, while at the same time see photos from sporting events or war-torn countries. I actually found out about the earthquake in Japan in 2011 while watching Imagewind at 1am. That's also how I found out about Brittany Murphy's death in 2009. It becomes obvious when world events are happening, because that's what people are sharing photos of on social networks. Good recent examples to watch have been Obama's inauguration and the Super Bowl a few weeks ago.

There's something special about being able to visually watch world events unfold through photos people share. Some people when they see Imagewind for the first time say "hrm, that's cool", and then move on. While others watch it, and can see how engaging visualizing social exchanges around the world can be. I hope you'll try it out! Find download links and more at Imagewind.net.

While sitting on the couch last weekend, I had the idea for putting up a Twitter panel on my site - you should see it off to the right. I figured since this is a Silverlight site, that it might be nice to actually have some Silverlight on it. I got the Twitter panel mostly done in 2-3 hours, and ended up using a few Silverlight features I haven't blogged about yet on the site - hence this blog post.

This post contains:

• Binaries for the Twitter panel so you can use it on your own site
• Passing in startup parameters from the object embed code
• A simple reusable Twitter assembly for Silverlight
• Source code for the Twitter panel
• Using Fluid UI to animate items added to the ListBox

(click 'read more' to keep reading..)