I’m an avid runner and cyclist, but I can’t stand exercising in silence. Sure, I have tons of nerdy video game music (woohoo, Yuzo Koshiro), but sometimes I also want to learn. I peruse YouTube for different things to learn every day, and generally listen in the background as I work. I find that tech talks from user groups are the best. (Check out this video from David Catuhe, on how to write WebGL games with Babylon.js) ...
My co-worker, and web dev ninja, Stacey Mulcahy (@bitchwhocodes) put together a great series of blog posts on how to use Spacebrew ( a web sockets solution built on Node that enables you to create interactive spaces with several clients ) with Unity3d and Arduino & Processing. This is the beginning / start of next week’s bit where she shows how to build your own DDR mat and hook it into Unity3d, Arduino, and Processing. ...
Before I joined Microsoft, I was an engineer at Comcast, on their COAM (Consumer Owned and Maintained Devices) team, where I worked on their Xbox 360, Xbox One, and SmartGlass apps. Now that I’m at Microsoft, another Fortune 50 company, I’ve kept a close eye on all of the large tech companies, to see how they weigh against one another. Here are some results from the recent Fortune magazine analysis: ...
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. ...
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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. ...