Windows Phone 7 game development tutorials

Wow, updates to the blog have been few and far between lately!

Recently I have been exploring the creation of video as an extension to my photography work – you can see some of the fruits of my labour on my YouTube channel. These have given me the taste for basic video production, and I decided to combine coding and videography, to put together an open-ended series of screencasts about how to create an XNA game for Windows Phone.

If you have any interest in this topic, I would love for the readers of my blog to go and check it out and let me know what you think!

Here’s the first episode:

You can find all of the episodes I have produced to date in a playlist. I am aiming to put a new video together roughly once a week – so be sure to subscribe if you like what you see!

November 15th, 2011 | Posted in Code | No Comments »

Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” Update – Hidden features

So Mango has finally shipped, and I’ve been able to install it on my phone. I’m loving a bunch of the new features, especially:

• Unified messaging interface. Lets you seamlessly switch between Facebook chat, text, etc – in a single conversation.
• Linked inboxes, and conversation aggregation. You can view multiple email accounts from a single tile, and emails belonging to a conversation are grouped together. Very, very useful.
• Enhanced voice recognition. I just wrote a text to my girlfriend without touching the screen. Not to mention the fact that it nailed my (albeit simple) message body perfectly, first time.
• Local Scout. While apps like Yelp were already useful for this sort of thing, having a “guide” to local eateries and attractions built right into the Maps is great.
• Multi-tasking! Enough said.

All of these (and many more features) are great, but what I’m especially loving is how many of my little “niggles” have been dealt to, without me even asking! Here’s a list of some of the smaller changes that I’ve noticed so far, but that probably wouldn’t make it into a press release:

• Snoozing an alarm now snoozes for 10 minutes instead of 5. This is a lifesaver… Can’t see any way to configure the timeout myself, though.
• You can now switch off the camera shutter sound from the audio settings. That pervasive fake shutter noise is one of the most annoying things in the world – glad to be rid of it on my phone.
• Music + Videos hub now opens right up to the “zune” section, ready for you to select music, videos, radio, etc – instead of the “history” section that it used to default to.
• I use a PIN on my lock screen. You can now configure a “timeout”, whereby if you have already entered your PIN recently (say in the last 5 minutes), it won’t prompt you for the PIN for a second unlock within that period. Another great little feature – and one that I don’t see reproduced on other devices.

This is a fantastic update that tackles a variety of problems with the original platform – both large and small.

However, even after all these great updates, I am still left with just one question; Why, oh why aren’t there bus directions in Maps?! I can get walking and car directions, but no bus. The ONE TIME I typically want to catch a bus is when I’m out and about, and only have my phone available. This is a HUGE oversight, and I was disappointed to not see it fixed in Mango.

October 7th, 2011 | Posted in Boredom | No Comments »

Ridiculousness

Today I was rudely reminded of how ridiculous telco pricing is. I’ve ranted on txt messaging before on my Twitter, but today I’m going to talk a little about data.

I was recently on holiday up in Vancouver, BC. Unfortunately my GPS unit had not been preloaded with Canada maps, so in the interest of not getting lost, I elected to open a map once or twice on my smartphone. I knew that this would be charged as “roaming” data, and as a smart person I had done my research, and established that AT&T would be charging me the exorbitant price of… $0.015 per kB. Didn’t seem soooo terrible – I figured that opening a map would use a handful of kB tops. If I was unlucky I was looking at a few dollars worth of usage. How wrong I was.

Total usage: 4.6MB. Total charge: $69. FML.

Let’s put that in perspective. I pay $33 per month for internet at home. I can use up to 250GB on my plan without repercussion, although let’s say I average around 100GB. That means I pay around $0.000000315 per kB.

The upshot of this, is that the data I used in Canada cost me more than 47,000 times as much per byte than my home internet plan. Forty. Seven. Thousand. For those keeping score, that means that if the roaming charge was the standard rate, I would be getting a 99.9979% discount on my internet bill every month. You can’t make these numbers up, we’re talking mind-bogglingly disparate numbers here.

Now don’t get me wrong, I understand the implications of roaming. AT&T has to negotiate with third-party providers to use their networks and their bandwidth when I’m out of the country. I understand that there is a significant difference between the cost of transferring data over a cable connection and a 3G connection. But if you think that all of those issues justify a 4.7 million percent markup, you have got to be pulling my leg. Canada is a first-world country, with (presumably) first-world cell networks and internet access. AT&T can give me an unlimited smartphone data plan for $20/mth, but can’t negotiate a better rate than $60 for 4MB of data?!

Give me a fucking break.

April 28th, 2011 | Posted in Intarwebs | No Comments »

Purpose

When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me - it still sometimes happens - and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don’t ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous - not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance… That pure chance could be so generous and so kind… That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time… That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful…

The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.

Ann Druyan, talking about her late husband, Carl Sagan.

April 7th, 2011 | Posted in Life | 1 Comment »

Without further ado…

I present: Scenic Squirrel!

A new photo taken by me is uploaded every day! Subscribe and stuff. I’m intending to use this as my main photography site now, so soon you’ll start seeing pics that don’t appear on my Flickr. Enjoy!

March 19th, 2011 | Posted in Photographics | 1 Comment »