I’ve put together a little Windows Phone XNA demo application that gives you a piano to play with. Through the magic of multi-touch input you can even play chords.

You can find the Visual Studio 2010 project here.

Orta and title slide. Nice hat.

Orta (or Ben Maslen) is graduate from our department who is into iPhone development and other cool stuff. Our student computing society, Hull Com. Soc.  invited him up to Hull to give a talk about what he has been up to.

Very good presentation. Nice to hear some of the things that we go on about during the course coming back at us from an ex-student. Orta made the point that when you start doing something like this that you must actively engage with the developer community, asking questions and helping others. Just writing a game and putting it out there is one thing, but you also have to work at “being out there” to promote both yourself and the things that you have done. 

From what he showed us, he seems to be doing pretty well at it.

Christophe and Daniel operating under extreme pressure in my office..

Yesterday night two of our first year students just managed to get their Imagine Cup Game Development entries submitted for round 1 of the competition. This process wasn’t helped by me getting the submission date wrong, and telling them they had more time than there actually was….

Anyhoo, the games are in and now we have to wait to find out if we have made it to round two.

Unfortunately it’s not real. Like many other facets of my life, it exists only within the mind of my computer. However, it does work, and I can write programs for it using the latest version of Visual Studio.

If you want your own Windows Phone 7 Series device you can head over to here to perform a one stop download that gives you all the tools you need, including Silverlight, XNA and the emulator.

If you are feeling rich (or are a student on Dreamspark) you can even signed up for the Developer experience here.

One of our ex students (I only know him as @orta!) is giving an iPhone development talk in the department on Wed, March 17, 3:15pm in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building. He has had his iPhone apps published (and even featured in Apple commercials) and so it should be well worth turning up.

Did they test this? What time value did they use?

I had to show this to number one son to make sure that wasn’t going mad…

Some of the audience. Captured with the big camera.

We had a really big Open Day today. Really big. We used the big lecture theatre and I had to do my talking bit twice. Because the Open Day was so big.

Great fun though. Two very good audiences, thanks for coming along folks and I hope you found the day worth the trip. I took the proper camera with the wide angle lens, the tripod and the remote release to guarantee the quality of the pictures. Unfortunately I then left the lens on manual focus and so most of the pictures came out a bit blurred….. Oh well, I’ll know for next time.

There was even a jazz band in Staff House. Good stuff.

The title says it all really. I had got it into my head that we had until the end of the month to get our entries together. Cue some meetings today to take a look at what we have and plan a weekends of frantic coding…

If you want to get your entries in, head over to here to register and get involved.

I like the bar in Cineworld

Alice in Wonderland the movie is a Tim Burton realisation of the story, as paid for by Disney. It doesn’t tell a Lewis Carol version but dials things on a bit to send Alice back down the rabbit hole in search of the Vorpal sword to kill the Jabberwocky or some such rubbish(very impressed with the spell checker here – it seems to know the word Jabberwocky).

The plot is actually a bit thin and you can almost hear them checking things off as we go through the film. Blue caterpillar – check,  Mad Hatter – check, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum – check, Cheshire Cat – check, all though we’ll call him Chess to make it seem a bit more modern.  Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter is a highlight, played as for Willy Wonka with a different hairstyle, no chocolate to speak of. And a hat.

I quite liked the film. It was in 3D, which made a difference to the price but didn’t add much else for me. I wonder if one day they might do an experiment, where they turn the 3D effect off for an audience and see if anyone notices. I doubt they will ever do this though, as they might find out that nobody does.

In fact, I’ll put on my gadget pundit hat at this point and say that I don’t think 3D will ever really catch on.  This is not just because, with my dodgy eyes, I can’t actually see in 3D, but rather because we don’t really need it. Sure there will be set pieces like Avatar where the effect is very well integrated into the production, but if you had said to me last night “Two quid off the price to watch in normal 2D” I would have taken the money like a shot.

3D in the home sounds even more unlikely. Having to put on dorky glasses to get the full benefit of Question Time in 3D seems a pretty fruitless exercise, and I’m not really up to spending a huge wodge of cash on upgrading my TVs again just for that. And apparently in the wrong hands the effect can make you more than a bit seasick. Maybe I’m wrong here, but bearing in mind that we haven’t even got High Definition TV yet (which is worth the money by the way) then I think 3D will be a long time coming.

I’m going to be doing quite a lot of speaking in the next month or so. Good thing I know lots of jokes.……

Anyhoo, in a couple of weeks or so, on March 25th, I’ll be treading the boards at Platform 2010, which is a digital gaming event in Hull. It is at the spiffy new Hull Truck theatre and they have some really good speakers lined up. And me.

It is free to attend, so if you are in the neighbourhood and want to take part you should head over to here and register your interest via the “Contact Us” link.

http://www.platform2010.co.uk/index.html