A few months back, I wrote a piece on a high level overview of Microsoft’s Web App Template. I’ve recently learned that it not only works on Windows 8, but is also applicable to Win Phone 8, with Universal support coming soon. So why would anyone ever wrap their site and turn it into an app? Well for one thing, it can quickly and easily net you 300+ 4+ star reviews on the store, and takes no more than an hour to create. ...
Today I made the switch from the iPhone 5 on Verizon, to a Lumia 1520 on AT&T. I’ve been in the Apple ecosystem for the last 3 years, so making the change was nerve-wracking, to say the least. Calculating the cost I have a number of AT&T devices through work, but I could never use them outside of locations where I had Wifi, because I was locked to Verizon. To weigh out the cost of switching over, I looked at what my early termination fee through Verizon would be, as well as what I could fetch if I sold my 64GB Verizon iPhone 5 in the wild. ...
[iframe src=”http://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/embed_code/34969684″ width=”676″ height=”600″ frameborder=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ marginheight=”0″ scrolling=”no”]
You can download the app from the Windows 8 Store, for free. In my last post, I mentioned that I began using Microsoft’s new Web App Template, to quickly and easily create an app out of my website, while using very little code. Now that my app is finished, I wanted to walk you through the steps, so that you can do the same. In total, it only took me about 2 hours to have my app created from scratch, and in the store! ...
I’ve been pushing HTML5 cross platform applications for some time now. I frequently give talks on how to use tools like Telerik’s App Builder, Adobe’s PhoneGap Cloud, and my personal favorite, Intel’s XDK. You can find my open sourced Cordova app here. Previously, Cordova was a cumbersome command line tool for building cross platform HTML5 mobile apps. it was not fun, and was incredibly painful to use, due to the constantly outdated documentation. Even worse, even if you did get an HTML5 app running on Windows Phone, you didn’t have a debugger! ...
You can find Part 2 of this tutorial, here. I’ve also compiled a list of great apps published with the WAT. On Venture Capitalist Chris Dixon’s blog, he recently highlighted the decline of the mobile web. “People are spending more time on mobile vs desktop, and more of their mobile time using apps, not the web This is a worrisome trend for the web. Mobile is the future. What wins mobile, wins the Internet. Right now, apps are winning and the web is losing. ...
This post is part of 3 week series giving current and aspiring game devs the tools, resources, and advice they need to get started building for Windows. We also have a great video course on [game production basics](http://Game Production Basics) at Microsoft Virtual Academy. Visual Studio Community Edition visual-studio-logo You need an IDE, or Integrated Development Environment, to write code for your games. Visual Studio Community edition is FREE from Microsoft, and allows you to use a multitude of languages. ...
I’ve been a huge fan of shmups for as long as I can remember. If it’s good, I’ve played it (and it’s probably Japanese). I wrote my last one in JavaScript using the Impact.js framework, but this time around I wanted to do it in Unity and really test the performance of the engine. When looking for Unity shmup templates, I came across this great set of posts on the Shmup-dev website. One post includes an excellent talk on unity shmup development, with slides and source code to go along with it. It really touches on some of the basics and key points for creating a shmup, including performance considerations. Object pooling is absolutely necessary when creating a high performance game, and the author monoRAIL explains it very neatly for readers. ...
Play Super Rawr-Type for FREE in the Windows 8 Store Super Rawr-Type, my 2D sidescrolling JavaScript shooter, is finally available for Windows 8. I actually finished working on it in August, but needed to change a few lines of code to have it pass certification, and completely forgot to resubmit. On Friday I made the final necessary changes, submitted, and it’s up in the store today. The project is open source, and you can find my GitHub here. ...
Update 3/29/16 With today’s announcements at //BUILD, some of this information will be out of date. I will make changes in the very near future. Updated, 9/24/15 TLDR: Middleware engines work great and support for Xbox one is continuing to grow within new tools each day. I have a more recent post with more information following Microsoft’s presence at GDC 2015. Here is the latest. For developers to focus on building for the UWP. Building UWP apps today is the best way to make sure apps will work on the Xbox when UWP is available on the Xbox. Similarly how different device families have specific APIs (GPIO, Hardware buttons, etc), Xbox will have a set of APIs that developer can use to extend experience to match the Xbox One, and those APIs will be used on top of the core UWP functionality that developers are building today. ...