Mijnlieff - hard to say, fun to play

/
Turns out that this is not a winning position if you are playing with the light tiles....

Turns out that this is not a winning position if you are playing with the light tiles....

Last week in Whitby I bought a little two player game (there are some good game shops in Whitby - and a good sweet shop or two..). Anyway, this weekend we got around to playing it. 

The game is called MijnLeiff, a word my spelling checker doesn't know. Players take it in turns to put tiles down on a board with the aim of making rows of three or more of their own colour. What makes it more interesting is that the piece that you put down dictates where on the board your opponent can make their next move. And with a limited number of different pieces for each player it gets very, very, tactical towards the endgame. 

If you like games which are easy to pick up, quick to play and somewhat strategic, you will like this one.

Tricopter Flying

/

What happens when you strap three motors, a battery and some bits of electronics to some lumps of wood? You get something that flies, that's what. After overcoming our initial nerves from a while back we managed to get some quality flying time in on Sunday morning. The amazing thing is that it all worked.

Number one son now has a fully working tri-copter. It seems to be happy to hover on around a third power, which means that it should be up for camera lifting duties quite soon.  

Octodad - eight legs of fun

/
Octodad.PNG

Last night we spent some time playing Octodad- dadliest catch. This is a deeply silly game where you take the role of a man sized octopus taking the role of an ordinary suburban husband. Although your lack of co-ordination and deep seated fear of aquariums is starting to raise suspicions....

We played it on the PlayStation 4, and it at least gave us a reason to get out all that PlayStation Move hardware, which was a surprisingly good fit with the unwieldy tentacles of our hero. Towards the end things got surprisingly poignant, and I never did find out just what happens in the aquarium cafe, when we meet our nemesis, the mad chef who is one of the very few who know the fishy secret.

If you are looking for something fun to play, with a compelling story line, then it is worth seeking out. 

Using a Progress Ring in Windows Phone 8.1

/

I'm slowly getting the hang of unified applications. Most of the time I'm having to forget how the phone does things, and pick up some Windows 8 habits. The busy indicator is a case in point. Using it is very easy, but it is different from the phone and so I thought I'd blog it here in case I forget. You can get a rather nice animated ring display like the one above by simply adding it to the XAML in your page:

<ProgressRing Name="BusyProgressRing" IsActive="False"></ProgressRing>

Then, in your program, you can just turn it on and off when you start something that might take a while to complete.

BusyProgressRing.IsActive = true;

I've written a stupidly simple unified app that lets you start and stop the ring displaying at the touch of a button. You can find it here. 

This form of display is used when your program is doing something that will take a while to complete, and you don't know how long it will be. I use it when I'm setting up Bluetooth connections. 

Improving 3D Printer Quality by Adjusting the Temperature

/

For a while now I've been trying to improve the quality of prints from Una the Ultimaker. I've replaced quite a few bits and bobs here and there and she is now pretty reliable. But I've been having problems with "lumpy layers". Objects with flat sides end up having lots of ridges in them, as if the printer was laying down layers of different thicknesses.

You can see the effect above. The layers at the bottom of the print are nice and smooth, and then they suddenly become thicker and more uneven. This is not a huge problem but, me being me, I've been trying to figure out what causes it, particularly as earlier prints didn't seem to have the same problem. 

Turns out that it is all down to temperature. I used a plugin which is part of the Cura slicer which converts designs into printer instructions. The plugin lets you tweak printer settings at different heights during printing. The layers at the bottom of the print were printed at 210 degrees centigrade, then it switched to 215 and so on upwards in steps of 5 degrees. The effect of the changes is much more significant than I thought it would be. I've noticed that different makes and colours of printing material have quite different temperature profiles. I think I'll have to do a test print like this for each one and then set decide on an optimal temperature.

Oh, and I also managed to include a human hair in the picture so that you can get some idea of scale. It really is astonishing how precisely this technology can be made to work. 

Update: One thought occurred to me after writing this post. The temperatures I'm quoting are as reported by Una, and are probably unique to her (it) as different machines will have different arrangements of print head and temperature sensor. If the temperatures that I mention don't work for you the try different ones, the important point here is that it is worth calibrating your machine for each different material. 

Home to a Bluetooth Printer

/

We spent the night in Whitby at the Dolphin Hotel. We had a lovely large room which overlooks the bridge right in the centre of the town. I took the photo from the room first thing in the morning, just before we headed down for a really nice (and huge) breakfast. If you are looking for somewhere to stay, I strongly recommend the place.

Then we headed home and I found some time to finish off the hardware for the Bluetooth printer I've been working on.  Note how it is a Bluetooth device, and I've put it in a bright yellow enclosure. And why not....

When I designed the box it seemed like a good idea to put the switch in the bottom. Of course it is actually a bit silly, as whenever you put the box down you turn it on or off. Fortunately I have some bit stick-on feet that help with this, but I'm going to have to refine the design anyway as I don't seem to have left much room to allow the actual construction of the device.....

This is the guts of the printer, just a bunch of batteries and a trusty Bluetooth adapter. I'll post full details of construction and the software later this week. 

Robs Red Nose Game now in Windows Store

/

Robs Red Nose Game, long available for Windows Phone, has now made it into the Windows Store.  As you can see above, it is massively popular. Or something. 

It's a free download, and mostly harmless. It only works on tablets and it seems stupidly easy right up to the point where it becomes impossible. For some reason I'm embarrassed to relate it has 001 in front of the name. This is not a clever marketing wheeze to put it at the top of the Windows Store listings, but something silly I must have done a while back. I might keep doing it though, which means that the seventh game will probably involve secret agents. 

And get me sued. 

Anyhoo, feel free to have a go, and let me know what you think. 

Three Thing Game Summer 2014 Registration is Open

/

Three Thing Game is happening again. Of course. We are doing things a little differently from last November, but a little similarly to May last year (if you see what I mean). The competition will run from Thursday 12th of June to Friday 13th of June, during the final week of the semester. 

We'll have all the usual shenanigans, with a Thing Auction at 1:00 on Thursday 12th of June, a Summer Bash on Thursday night and a star studded presentation event on Friday evening. As long as we can find some stars. And some studs. 

You can get a registration form here.

You can find out about the glorious history of this most splendid of competitions here. 

Knife Throwing at the C4DI Developer Meetup

/

OK, so we didn't actually throw any knives. Because if we had I think that people would have died. Those knives were sharp, really, really, sharp. Jon was running his finger over the blades and saying how sharp they felt. I reckoned I'd make that judgement just by watching him....

Some people regard cooking is an art form (as opposed to something you do when you feel a bit peckish). The company CuttingEdgeKnives sell knives to such people. If you want the best tools for the job, these are the business. They are hand crafted in Japan and really look and feel the part. 

You might be wondering what they have to do with software development.  Well, tonight at C4DI James Young, Creative Director from Offroadcode was explaining how diversifying into luxury knives had paid dividends for the website development business. It's all very well making Content Management System (CMS) based sites for companies that sell stuff, it's quite another thing to be putting stuff in boxes and selling it via a CMS powered site of your own.

James made some very valid points as he described the trajectory from an initial investment in a box full of knives to successful niche business. Some points from his talk that I think make a lot of sense if you're selling things:

  • If you want to use Google and Facebook to promote your products this is really, really tricky to get right. Get in some appropriate expertise if you are going to do this. 
  • Competitions and paid advertising don't work as well as you might expect, but giving samples to influencers and reviewers does. 
  • Writing good editorial copy (and regularly updating it) will help sell your product.
  • If your customers need to think a while about a purchase give them time to do this by ensuring your shopping carts take a very long time to expire.
  • Address customer concerns about a purchase directly and at the point where they are making the transaction. 
  • Ask your customers "Did we nearly lose your business?" to find out what might be stopping others from parting with their cash.

The talk left me thinking that setting up a niche business like this is not a bad idea, and it gives you a lot of credibility. If someone is about to hire you to build them a site that helps sell stuff, it is useful to be able to show that you have built a site that works for you. 

All in all a great talk, followed by Pete Duncanson, Founder and MD of Offroadcode, who talked about the fun you can have when using Content Management Systems (CMS) to build web sites for clients.  A CMS system provides a friendly interface that lets a company edit their product range, prices, special offers etc and generates a web site that their customers can interact with.  All the product details are held in a database and the CMS is customised for the business needs of the particular client company. Offroadcode use Umbraco, which is a system I've heard good things about and seems to work very well. 

Pete gave a very good exploration of the psychology of dealing with clients who take your lovely web design and then subvert it to the point where you aren't proud of having made it any more. He explained how and why this happens and offered a lot of human and technical tips to make sure that the integrity of your design is preserved as long as possible. Some points he made include:

  • Plan for expansion. If the client swears that there will never be more than three of something, plan for an infinite number. If they promise that the number of items on a page will always be small, add paging anyway. This is not because clients tell fibs, or are silly, it is just that business needs change over the lifetime of the site, and the operators of the system might not be the people that gave you these design assurances.
  • Add pickers. Letting the operator enter an item directly is nice enough, but if they can pick one from a list, and then go back and fetch that item again, then they will thank you when they have to add the "Christmas Special Offer" again next year.
  • Constrain as much as possible, but in a constructive way. You don't want huge images on sites that the client creates, but just refusing to upload them will cause offence and lead to support calls. Much better to resize and then cache the image so that you can send out appropriately sized pictures when your system serves out the web pages. 
  • Use sensible names and be consistent about them. If you have a field called "Page Header" which is the header for one of your pages, use the same name throughout. 

This is all good, solid advice which is not a million miles away from what we tell our students on the Software Development modules. And it was all presented in a very entertaining way. Great stuff and a most enjoyable evening.

If you are not coming along to C4DI events, you are missing out. All the events are free and open to anyone, including Hull students who really, really should come along. 

The next C4DI event is the June hardware meetup. You can sign up here. 

The next C4DI develoepr meetup is also in June. Sign up here. 

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)

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.

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....)

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

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.