I’ve noticed that in recent years, twitter has become the near defacto “engine” for a number of things: Random list data for demos Scott Guthrie’s recent MIX keynote demo is a perfect example of this. He uses twitter to populate a simple listbox using his own feed. I do something similar in the sample project [...]
The 2010 Orlando CodeCamp has now come to an end. It was a great event, and I’m glad I was a part of it. Many congratulations go out to Esteban, Will, and the rest of the board and volunteers that put it together. With almost 600 .NET developers in attendance, it shows that the central [...]
Now that the .NET landscape has a new “screen” to design for in the form of Windows Phone 7 (WM6.x doesn’t count ), we need to start thinking about how to provide users with consistent metaphors and input mechanisms. Microsoft’s patterns and practices group wrote the book on web and desktop application architectures (literally). One [...]
The Windows Phone 7 Phone UI Guidelines calls out that the minimum touch target size should be about 9mm (34px) and I started to think about what it would take to implement this in an XNA game. Of course the first thing that comes to mind is that I can define a simple bounding box [...]
Now that the developer tools for Windows Phone 7 are out in the wild, I wondered how long before we see the ubiquitous “flashlight” app. I decided to grab the bull by the horns and put it out there myself. So find below the steps required to make your own flashlight app Create a new [...]
I’m pretty happy to see the City of Orlando kicking off this effort: http://www.getgoogling.com/ If you are reading this blog and live in the Orlando area, please take a few moments and map yourself and at least fill out the google survey. Then spread the word, it would be pretty awesome to see this come [...]
After receiving some sage advice from Andy “The ZMan” Dunn, I posted up the prototype of a game that I am working on for play test on the XNA Creator’s Club site: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/49219.aspx The game focuses on controlling a small 2d chopper through a maze. There are “fans” which push and pull the chopper into [...]
I settled on the Acer T230H multitouch monitor So far, I’m happy enough with it. When I plugged it into the USB port on my computer, windows 7 already had drivers for it so it was kind of nice that I did not have to install any extra software; Though I haven’t installed the software [...]
Question: What’s the easiest way to let a custom application re-use accounts from a PHPBB installation? Answer: The first thing that occurred to me was that I’d have to look over the PHPBB user tables, connect to mysql, and read the user’s password (which I assume is hashed) to do the authentication. The second idea [...]
Last week, I pondered the state of multitouch with XNA. And I mentioned that I was considering buying a multi-touch enabled monitor from Dell. Well, over the last few days I have been shopping around on line and I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that there are several others on the market. Acer t230h Dell [...]