Surface Pro 3 Please

I must admit I really fancy a Surface Pro 3. One thing about the tablets that I've used in the past is that although they have a stylus I hardly ever touch it. The reason is that the pen experience is just not compelling or useful enough. The pen functionality always seems to be tacked on to the user interface and it is never quite good enough to make it worth the effort. The ink doesn't line up with the pen tip, the resolution means that I end up writing text that is too large to fit on the screen and the business of writing is just not fun.

I think that the Surface Pro 3 will change that. The display is close to the surface and the pen is now active so that it can make a much better job of position tracking. This, along with a high resolution screen, means that I should be able to write tiny text if I want to. And the way that OneNote is opened by just pressing the button on the pen means that I should be able to pick up the device and start writing. 

The devices are on sale real soon, but they will not be shipping in the UK for a little while.

Which gives me time to start saving. 

I'm not writing any more Windows Phone applications

It's true. From now on, no more Windows Phone programs for me. Instead I'm creating universal  ones. These work on Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 devices, so now I can target pretty much every platform, Lovely Lumia, Surface RT, Dell Venue Pro, Surface Pro, Dell big tablet etc etc, from one solution. If you get the latest version of Visual Studio (from here) you can do the same

Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1 have different display sizes and behaviours and so you need to create two user interfaces. These are managed as two separate projects in the universal solution.  However, if you are clever with your design you can put all of your business logic in the shared code and then just project the appropriate view onto the target devices. 

On the right you can see how this all fits together. I'm making a QuickPrint application that lets you send things to a little Bluetooth printer that I'm putting together. The two versions of the application each have their own MainPage and then there is a project for the shared code. In this case I'm sharing my Bluetooth manager code. 

I was very surprised (and pleased) to find that the Bluetooth manager worked on both platforms in exactly the same way. It does some fairly low level Bluetoothy things, and they just worked. 

As a Windows Phone developer moving over to the Windows 8 platform there are some differences in the way that the XAML works, but nothing that can't be solved by using Intellisense and a few searches. And at the end of the process I had something that I can think about deploying in both marketplaces. 

And of course this means it is now even easier to become a phone developer if you have already written some Windows 8 stuff, which is lovely. 

Spectra is Fun

Spectra 8 bit racing is produced by a bunch of developers including a sizable number of Hull graduates. I really like it, although I'm not terribly good at it. The idea (fly a hover racer over a series of increasingly complicated tracks which wind their way through space) is arguably not that original, but the implementation is very polished, the sound is amazing (and properly 8 bit) and the circuits are generated programatically, which means that you can race forever if you want to. 

I also rather like the idea that you just have to buy it to get the game. No messing around with in-game purchases or suddenly hitting a nasty paywall to go further. You just fork out a nominal sum and then the game is yours on all your Windows 8.1 devices. 

Well worth a look. Search the store for "Spectra 8bit racing".

Hull Holy Trinity Church

Hull Holy Trinity Church must count as one of Hull's biggest "hidden treasures". It is huge, right near the centre of the town and when I visited it was ringing its bells as loud as it could. And yet there was hardly anyone inside. This is sad. It is a very lovely place. I reckon the stained glass windows rival the best in the country. I took some pictures there yesterday which I think turned out quite well. 

If you are in the middle of town and fancy somewhere nice to just sit (they serve coffee and biscuits too) then it is great place to go.

Hull Tigers. So nearly winners

In the middle of Hull they had an amazing collection of motorcycles today. Use your skill and judgement to work out which make. (and then look in the top right corner)

I don't sit down and watch a football match very often. But then Hull City don't make it to the final of the FA cup very often. So it was get out the beer and the nibbles, close the curtains against the blazing sunshine and then on with the game.

I think it's fair to say that Hull weren't the favourites. That is until they scored two goals in the first eight minutes..... Amazing stuff. The other team, a collection of expensive players that dwarfed our plucky lads in cost if nothing else, then had to try and redress the balance and save their managers' job. Eventually they prevailed and after nail biting session of extra time they managed to snatch a winner. Hull 2, Arsenal 3.

Oh well. The good news is that there are now millions more football fans around the world who have seen the Tigers roar, and with games in Europe next year the outlook for Hull is something spectacular. 

Manchester //publish event

Nice sendoff at Hull Paragon station. What you see here is famous poet (Philip Larkin) and ex-Hull University librarian bedecked in Hull Tigers colours in honour of our appearance in the FA Cup Final tomorrow.

I spent today at //publish in Manchester. The idea is that like minded folks get together and get around to publishing applications and games they've been working on for a while. I have an agenda of sorts. I wanted to get some traction on my Windows 8.1 versions of Cheese Lander and Robs Red Nose Game. But mainly I wanted to talk to Peter about Bluetooth with a view to getting my Wedding Light controller working on Windows 8.1.

There were a bunch of folks there when I arrived at MadLab. They were all working away and I settled down, exchanged a few remarks about cheese (as you do) and then got cracking too. Peter took a look at my Bluetooth code and made some suggestions which resulted in it all suddenly working. So I can now control my wedding lights from my Lovely Lumia 1520 and also my Lovely Surface Pro 2.

Next step is to make a "unified" app (one that runs on both Windows Phone and Windows 8.1) and make it available to anyone who want to control their lights (or anything else) from these devices. I've got until the 1st of June to finish it off and get it in the store if I want to stand a chance of winning a prize. Hint: You can claim a prize too if you get your application submitted before this date.  There's still time to register here. 

At the end of the day we had presentations of the applications that had been published during the day and winners were picked. Apologies for not noting any names, but you know who you are and a picture is worth a thousand words. Right?

And a butterfly collector (is that lapidopteral?) app earned the writer a Lumia 1520 (it's almost as if It is being pulled from Peter's hands....)

A really impressive 3D Tetris game won the a Dell tablet

Thanks so much to Microsoft for organising //publish, Peter and Pete (they are different people) for setting up the Manchester event and the folks at MadLab for making us so welcome (and putting on such delicious food at half time). 

And I even managed to sneak out at lunchtime and buy a pair of trousers..... Great stuff. 

C4DI and Bald Secret Agents. And wedding lights.

We had our third hardware group meetup at C4DI this week. A bunch of plucky souls turned up to develop some software to help secret agents who have no hair. No, really. You can find the notes here if you want to have a go yourself. 

I took along a few of my wedding lights to show folk how they work. You can see them under construction above. The next meetup will be in a month or so.  I'm presently writing up a document that covers exactly how they work, which you might find useful if you ever want to create remote controlled stuff.

Pass Student BBQ

I told these folks they'd be in the blog, and here they are.

For the last couple of years the department has been working with students from later years who provide support for the first years. The Peer Assisted Student Support sessions are run by PASS leaders who give up their time to help. Their sessions have proved very popular and a lot of students owe quite a few percent of their grades to the patient support of these folks.

Today, by way of a thank-you, the university organised a barbecue, knowing that one thing that students prize above all others is free food. There were also certificates to be had. From the left we have David Arrowsmith-Cooper, Gareth Andrews, Antony Nunn and Phininder Balaghan. 

In the middle, wearing the suit, we have Dr Richard Heseltine who is the Director of Library and Learning Innovation and University Librarian. Well done folks.

We are presently recruiting PASS leaders for next year. If you fancy having a go, feel free to get in touch.

C4DI Accelerator Program Launched

I got this slide from Jon's deck today. I hope he won't mind...

Today Robert and I went down to C4DI in Hull to see the start of something big, the launch of the C4DI accelerator program. An accelerator program is a way of making ideas real. Take a good idea, a bunch of folks that want to run with it, add in some mentoring and a ton of hard work and you should end up with a strong pitch that will get you on the road to great things. 

C4DI have partnered with PwC who will be supporting the enterprise, along with Handlesbanken, Campaign Monitor, FreeAgent and Ebuyer. 

The principle is that you get funding, a place to work and support and mentoring in exchange for a chunk of your action, on the basis that any percentage of something is better than 100% of nothing.

Selection starts in October this year, with the first teams in place by February 2015. Then, later in the year they will hold the final pitches and demo day. There's space for 8 teams, each of which will get up to 16K of  seed investment and 16K of match funding to keep them going over the 90 day incubation period. (I stole all these facts from Jon's presentation - go there if you want more details and a picture of a dog dressed as a horse). 

This is such wonderful stuff. I would so love it if some of our graduating students took that amazing idea they don't know what to do with, and ran it through the C4DI accelerator.

Autographer Fun

The Autographer is a strange device. It is a little camera with no shutter button. The idea is that you clip it onto yourself and then head off and have interesting experiences. The Autographer will take a picture every now and then when it thinks something interesting is going on. It uses its compass, PIR sensor, accelerometer and GPS to keep track of what you are doing, and it has three levels of "alertness".

From a photography buff's point of view the pictures are nothing much to write home about. There is a 5 megapixel sensor, but the lens has a very wide angle of view, which means that you can often find lots of stuff in the frame. The thing that makes the Autographer interesting is that it lets you get pictures that you could not obtain any other way. And you just don't care that lots of them are rubbish. The 8G internal memory can store literally thousands of shots that might be taken during the day and there are smartphone, PC and Mac applications that let you pull out all the best shots and make them into animated gifs and videos. 

I wore the device during some of the "Wedding of the Year" and I'm very glad that I did. Some of the shots are lovely.

You can clip it to your shirt or hang it from a lanyard, but what I really wanted to do was stand it somewhere. Sadly it doesn't have any kind of stand, so I've designed and printed one, as you do.

This will screw onto one of those tiny tripods that you can get, which means you can use it for time lapse photography, something it does rather well. 

I've put the design on Thingiverse if you are lucky enough to have one of these neat little devices and want to stand it somewhere.

I'll post some pictures I've taken in some later blog posts.

Veronica Mars now Available in UK

For anyone that thinks that TV with smart, sassy dialogue and well drawn characters starts and end with shows written by Joss Whedon I'd like to draw your attention to Veronica Mars. It first came out a while back with an astonishing first season which sagged a bit into seasons 2 and 3 (although they were always watchable). 

Such was the dedication of the fans that earlier this year a Kickstarter funded movie was released which apparently holds together quite well. If you are new to Veronica, or want to re-live the whole thing from proper region 2 DVDs you can now get all three seasons, plus the movie from Amazon for a reasonable price. 

If you liked Buffy, you will love Veronica...

Rob on Channel 9

You might (or might not) be interested to know that you can view videos of my sessions, (including the recent ones at TechDays 2014 when I was moaning about my suitcase being stolen) on Channel 9. Take a look here.

There are sessions on Windows Phone and Bluetooth/NFC and MonoGame, among other other gems. 

Wedding of the Year

Number one daughter got married today. And it was lovely. Everything and everyone involved worked, ran on time, played their part to perfection and made it a properly grand occasion. If you were there (I gave the blog a plug during my "Father of the bride" speech, as you do) then thank you so much for coming. There might have been a few people on the day who were happier than me (I can certainly name two) but there can't have been very many. And so now, along with "number one daughter" and "number one son", I now have "number one son-in-law". Welcome sir.

During my speech I mentioned that on these occasions, along with quite a few others, it is best to make sure that the man makes all the truly important decisions. Number one wife and daughter dealt with all the low level details such as the groom, the venue, the date and the time, the food, the colour scheme etc etc. I was left to wrestle with the really difficult stuff, such as the type and configuration of micro-controller to put in the table decorations and how to make them all remote controlled from my phone.  Number one daughter had asked for "some coloured lights in vases". I reckoned I could do a bit better than that. 

Above you can see the system in action. The application in my phone is talking to a Bluetooth adapter in one of the lights which is then relaying commands over a 2.4 GHz connection to all the other lights, each of which can be addressed with commands to make it flicker, change colour and do a few other tricks. All the lights and the vases were 3D printed and assembled specially for the occasion. And it all worked splendidly on the day.

I'm going to write up everything and make the code available which essentially gives you two way communication between a phone application and any number of remote network sensors/controls. Making it all work was great fun and a perfect distraction from the proper aspects of the occasion. At least until the enormity of what was going on hit me as they were going through their vows.... 

Cortana tells it like you don't want to hear...

Number one daughter is getting married tomorrow. I must admit the weather forecast doesn't seem too great according to Cortana.

Oh well. 

Pictures by Month on Windows Phone 8.1

Windows Phone 8.1 lets you view your pictures by month, which is nice. Today I found out that if you tap on a month you get a nifty little set of short cuts to other months, that can save a bit of scrolling up and down. Which is nice.

The Restart Page

If you want to come over all nostalgic, head over to The Restart Page and take a look at all the ways we've reset our computers over the ages....

Student Led Teaching Awards Dinner

Well, I didn't win a prize this time. But it didn't really matter. Really. We had a lovely time at the dinner, there were some great speeches and we left the event really happy.

I love the way that the university is driving the recognition of good teaching. And from the look of tonight there is a lot of it going on at Hull.

Cottingham Church Looking Great

Cottingham Church was holding a flower festival today so I took along the big camera with the fat lens. And some of the pictures came out quite well.

Sunday Printing

Having spent some of yesterday printing out the wrong sized switch supports, I thought I'd spend some time today printing the right sized ones.....

Coffee Machine Guru

For the most part our coffee machine works really well. But it does have a foible which is that every now and then when you hit the power button it refuses to light up, and we have to turn it on and off at the mains. Then it wakes up fine. I'm wondering if it is something marginal to do with one of the internal sensors, or whatnot. To be honest I've no idea what the problem is and, since it has been doing it for ages with no observable ill effects I'm OK with this. Also, I'm mainly a tea drinker.

But such is human nature that I'm now using whether the coffee machine starts first time as a harbinger of doom or non-doom. If it lights up first time the day feels somehow lighter, as if things are going to go well. If it doesn't I seem to regard this as the first of a succession of things that are bound to go wrong over the day.

I've not really managed to determine if it really can see into the future. The truth is, I've usually completely forgotten about it by the time I leave the house in the morning. But I am wondering if I should start keeping score....