I’ve put together a little Windows Phone XNA demo application that gives you a piano to play with. Through the magic of multi-touch input you can even play chords.
You can find the Visual Studio 2010 project here.
Orta and title slide. Nice hat.
Orta (or Ben Maslen) is graduate from our department who is into iPhone development and other cool stuff. Our student computing society, Hull Com. Soc. invited him up to Hull to give a talk about what he has been up to.
Very good presentation. Nice to hear some of the things that we go on about during the course coming back at us from an ex-student. Orta made the point that when you start doing something like this that you must actively engage with the developer community, asking questions and helping others. Just writing a game and putting it out there is one thing, but you also have to work at “being out there” to promote both yourself and the things that you have done.
From what he showed us, he seems to be doing pretty well at it.
Christophe and Daniel operating under extreme pressure in my office..
Yesterday night two of our first year students just managed to get their Imagine Cup Game Development entries submitted for round 1 of the competition. This process wasn’t helped by me getting the submission date wrong, and telling them they had more time than there actually was….
Anyhoo, the games are in and now we have to wait to find out if we have made it to round two.
Unfortunately it’s not real. Like many other facets of my life, it exists only within the mind of my computer. However, it does work, and I can write programs for it using the latest version of Visual Studio.
If you want your own Windows Phone 7 Series device you can head over to here to perform a one stop download that gives you all the tools you need, including Silverlight, XNA and the emulator.
If you are feeling rich (or are a student on Dreamspark) you can even signed up for the Developer experience here.
One of our ex students (I only know him as @orta!) is giving an iPhone development talk in the department on Wed, March 17, 3:15pm in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building. He has had his iPhone apps published (and even featured in Apple commercials) and so it should be well worth turning up.
..and I'll be doing a talk on Windows Phone game development in Week 8 after easter...
Some time ago I bought a book about Actionscript development. Paid full price too. I wanted to find out more about the language that powers my Chumby device. In the section on working with date and time values I found the following gem.
Did they test this? What time value did they use?
I had to show this to number one son to make sure that wasn’t going mad…
Some of the audience. Captured with the big camera.
We had a really big Open Day today. Really big. We used the big lecture theatre and I had to do my talking bit twice. Because the Open Day was so big.
Great fun though. Two very good audiences, thanks for coming along folks and I hope you found the day worth the trip. I took the proper camera with the wide angle lens, the tripod and the remote release to guarantee the quality of the pictures. Unfortunately I then left the lens on manual focus and so most of the pictures came out a bit blurred….. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.
There was even a jazz band in Staff House. Good stuff.
It seems like at least two people who attended on Saturday have bought a copy of my book! Well done folks, let me know how you get on.
The title says it all really. I had got it into my head that we had until the end of the month to get our entries together. Cue some meetings today to take a look at what we have and plan a weekends of frantic coding…
If you want to get your entries in, head over to here to register and get involved.
I like the bar in Cineworld
Alice in Wonderland the movie is a Tim Burton realisation of the story, as paid for by Disney. It doesn’t tell a Lewis Carol version but dials things on a bit to send Alice back down the rabbit hole in search of the Vorpal sword to kill the Jabberwocky or some such rubbish(very impressed with the spell checker here – it seems to know the word Jabberwocky).
The plot is actually a bit thin and you can almost hear them checking things off as we go through the film. Blue caterpillar – check, Mad Hatter – check, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – check, Cheshire Cat – check, all though we’ll call him Chess to make it seem a bit more modern. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter is a highlight, played as for Willy Wonka with a different hairstyle, no chocolate to speak of. And a hat.
I quite liked the film. It was in 3D, which made a difference to the price but didn’t add much else for me. I wonder if one day they might do an experiment, where they turn the 3D effect off for an audience and see if anyone notices. I doubt they will ever do this though, as they might find out that nobody does.
In fact, I’ll put on my gadget pundit hat at this point and say that I don’t think 3D will ever really catch on. This is not just because, with my dodgy eyes, I can’t actually see in 3D, but rather because we don’t really need it. Sure there will be set pieces like Avatar where the effect is very well integrated into the production, but if you had said to me last night “Two quid off the price to watch in normal 2D” I would have taken the money like a shot.
3D in the home sounds even more unlikely. Having to put on dorky glasses to get the full benefit of Question Time in 3D seems a pretty fruitless exercise, and I’m not really up to spending a huge wodge of cash on upgrading my TVs again just for that. And apparently in the wrong hands the effect can make you more than a bit seasick. Maybe I’m wrong here, but bearing in mind that we haven’t even got High Definition TV yet (which is worth the money by the way) then I think 3D will be a long time coming.
I’m going to be doing quite a lot of speaking in the next month or so. Good thing I know lots of jokes.……
Anyhoo, in a couple of weeks or so, on March 25th, I’ll be treading the boards at Platform 2010, which is a digital gaming event in Hull. It is at the spiffy new Hull Truck theatre and they have some really good speakers lined up. And me.
It is free to attend, so if you are in the neighbourhood and want to take part you should head over to here and register your interest via the “Contact Us” link.
This post and video is amazing. I don’t think many people would build a centrifuge in their living room just to find out if a lava lamp would work on Jupiter.
I’m bored with winter. Particularly if I’m still scraping ice off the car each morning.
I’ve started using Twitter a lot more. Some might even say properly. The thing that has got me into the swing of things is the ongoing buzz surrounding Windows Phone. I’m using the #wp7dev tag to find out what is happening, and following Michael Klucher (@mklucher) and Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) to keep up to speed. It really does feel like being part of a breaking news story, which is great.
DSi and DSi XL showing the difference in size
It seems that the fashion is for making bigger versions of existing things. Apple come out with their iPad, which is very big version of the iPod touch and now Nintendo come out with the DSi XL, which is a very big version of the DSi. (Actually, you could probably accuse Apple of copying Nintendo here, since the DSi XL has been out in Japan for a while and I think it has been something of a success there).
You get pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, in that the new DSi is just bigger than the old one. But the screen is also a lot brighter (the photo above doesn’t really do this justice) and the extra size does make a difference to gameplay. I found I was suddenly better at Ridge Racer, in that I could spot corners from further away, and Zoo Keeper looks really, really good.
Along with a dictionary you also get a free “taster” version of Brain Training built in. This told me my brain was 80 years old. Perhaps I should take the console back to the shop. In fact a potentially large market for this device is folks like me who are a bit more advanced in years and appreciate the larger screen, although I’m surprised they didn’t make the buttons bigger as well.
If you have already got a DSi then the new one doesn’t really move things forward much, unless you are a bit short sighted like me. But if you have yet to buy one, I reckon you should get this one, along with a jacket with slightly larger pockets….
For those of you thinking about the fantastic toys, I’m afraid I must disappoint you (although the toys are great). I’m talking about the digital presenter tools which you use during talks to show things to the audience. I’ve used them in the past when doing talks about mobile phone development or to show small devices like the Micro Framework ones.
I did a talk today about the .NET Micro Framework and instead of using an Elmo I used a webcam. I tried using them ages ago but the quality of the pictures was so bad that I ended up using a camcorder instead. But this time I had one of the new Microsoft webcams, the LifeCam Cinema. This boasts a proper 720P resolution and an auto focus lens made of real glass. And it works a treat. The quality of the pictures was excellent and it comes with a neat program that just shows you the camera view that you can use on screen. It also has some nice adjustments that you can use to pull down the brightness so that display screens look good.
This is a completely un-retouched picture of the Zune HD homescreen. There are some more shots on Flickr.
All I need now is little portable tripod and I have my own Elmo, which is much easier to use than switching video signals over.
A good audience. (If you want to see a larger version of this picture, or to see the other one I took, click on the images to get to my Flickr pages.)
I did a talk at a college today. Not done one for a while so I was a little rusty. Fortunately I had a great audience and ended up really enjoying the visit. Thanks to the college for inviting us and to Dr Keith Porteous for giving such a good talk before mine. I’ve put all the resources on the blog if you want to take a look:
You can find more links to XNA resources, along with my XNA ScreenCasts here: http://verysillygames.com/
The Girl Geek Dinners at Hull are going from strength to strength. We started them a while back and their next event is scheduled for next week on Thursday 11th March at Hive in our department. Girl Geek students from the university can even register at a discount. For the event details and a programme for the evening you can go here:
Microsoft are doing this deal at the moment for where for every 10 searches you make using Bing they will donate 5 pence to Sport Relief. This means that you are doing good and raising money for charity just by searching the web. Which you would do anyway. Works for me, even though I had to download and install a little app to count the searches.
Drove home into an amazing sunset tonight. Of course this isn’t a picture of it..
An engineer friend of mine has this theory that electric things are really powered by smoke. He bases this on the simple observation that if you let the smoke out of anything electrical it promptly stops working. I did this today with our shredder.
I have a deep seated fear of Identity theft (along with a puzzlement that anyone would really want to pretend to be me).
Anyhoo, to deal with this I have a policy of never throwing anything away that might divulge identity type information. This is kind of futile I suppose, in that pretty much anything you want to know about me is out there on the interweb, but it keeps me amused. And shredding.
To keep things shredded we used to use this little shredder and I was happily shredding bank statements and the like when it suddenly stopped. And the smoke came out. And now it doesn’t work.
I was wondering if I could just use a two bins technique instead. Rather than shred things I could just have two bins. Anything secret is torn into small pieces, some of which go into one bin, and the rest into the other. Then I empty one of the bins every other week. This means that to steal my identity you would have to go through two lots of rubbish. Or perhaps I should just stop worrying…
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
Begin to Code with JavaScript is now available for purchase and download. You can find it here
