Manchester //publish event

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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.