Voice control for your Windows Phone 8 Music

My super-secret application is now on Windows Phone Marketplace for Windows 8 devices. I call it Voice Music. It lets me do something I’ve always wanted to do. I can ask my phone to play music for me. I can say things like “VoiceMusic artist Steely Dan” and it will play tracks from the Dan. If I hear a track and fancy hearing the album it came from, I can say “VoiceMusic play this album”. I can ask for albums by name by saying things like “VoiceMusic album Dark Side of the Moon” and request random albums, tracks, styles (genres) and artists. And it works over Bluetooth in the car. And if it can’t find the album artwork it shows you a random picture. And there is a picture of a cow in there. And a pig.

It’s free too. Download your copy from here and let me know how you get on.

Turning Yellow

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a black Lumia 920 will instantly want a yellow one. Or at least, it is true in my case.

I’ve had my black Lumia 920 for four days. And I love it. Works a treat, screen is lovely. Apps are great.  It only has one problem. It is not yellow. Today the phone shop called me up and uttered the fateful words “We’ve got a yellow Lumia in stock for you…”. Just the one. For me. So I went up town and bought it. It would have been churlish not to.

The black one is heading for ebay. I feel terrible about this (as well as a bit poorer), but I reason that I needed a production phone this weekend to test my Top-Secret Windows Phone application which is even now heading for certification. And the Lumia is super, shiny, yellowy lovely. It is a very similar colour to a car I once had. The car didn’t start off yellow, I made it so, using a cheap spray gun and some “Daytona Yellow” paint. I also managed to make all my tools, the tyres, some of the windows, and my dad’s garage yellow as well, so I think you can see that getting a yellow phone is just something I had to do.

Gadgets at the Rather Useful Semiar

The Rather Useful Seminar today described how you can use your C# and Visual Studio smarts to create embedded gadgets using the .NET Gadgeteer system.

Most of my demos worked, apart from the ones that didn’t. You can find the slides from the talk here.

I’m really looking forward to the seminar next week. Simon will be telling us all about the Unity framework for game creation.

Water Good Joke

In the middle of the first year programming lecture this afternoon, for no reason that I can think of I said:

“Did you know that every year 2,000 road sweepers drown in Venice?”

Total silence.

I think it was the way I told it.

Smart Glass Fun and Games

I fired up my Windows 8 mobile and used it to talk to my Xbox this evening. I used the new Smart Glass application and was able to find and stream music very handily. I’m on the monthly pass thing which used to be called Zune, but now probably isn’t. This means that I can have “all I can eat” music and store the stuff on 4 devices. I can also stream content onto other devices things too, including the Xbox. The range of music has got nice and wide, I even managed to find all the albums by Brian Protheroe, a particular favourite of mine in the ‘70s. (search out the single “Pinball” if you want to hear some really good stuff).

Virtual Barber Shop for Windows Phone

I had my hair cut yesterday. And not before time I hear you saying. My hair had got so scary that only the chap in charge of the hairdresser wanted to take it on. It is a lot tidier now, and hopefully a bit less frightening.

I found the place to get my haircut using the Local Scout in my new Lumia 925 (have I mentioned I’ve got a new phone?). I also found the above application in the Windows Phone store, which is astonishing. It is just a short audio track really, but it has been recorded in such a way that if you listen using headphones you would swear that there is actually someone walking round your head and cutting your hair. It’s a free download and if you have a Windows Phone you really must check it out. Amazing.

Rob gets a Lumia 920

Well, I managed to get my Lumia 920 today. I had this idea that I might fancy one of the bonkers yellow ones, but they are a bit hard to get hold of, and so I’ve settled for a rather nice matt black one which actually looks very distinguished and doesn’t show fingerprints, which is nice. The man in the shop was very keen to show it off and said there had been quite a lot of interest in the platform (but then he would say that I suppose, he is selling them).

Of course I like it. Windows 8 has a bit of a turn of speed compared with earlier Windows phones. Some of this is down to the fact that it has a hairier, dual core, processor and some of it is down to the way that the applications are now deployed in a faster way. Whatever, all I know is that the apps snap into memory and run real fast. The phone itself is very solid in the hand and has a nice balance to it.  The screen quality is excellent, although for screen contrast I reckon the Lumia 800 just beats it. The Lumia 920 does have an LCD panel with lovely resolution and colour rendition though. And being LCD means that you can display bright whites without flattening the battery.

I’ve not had the chance to try the wireless charging yet. The shop I bought the phone didn’t have any of the chargers in stock yet, I should get a free one soon. However I have played with just about everything else on the phone. The camera is very good, pictures are perhaps a bit flat in normal light (although I’ve got a program that I can use to give them a bit more punch). In darkened conditions the results are really good.  Moving videos are great. The audio output quality is the best I’ve heard from a smartphone (except perhaps the very first iPhone, which was amazing) and they have this funky equaliser which you can use to fiddle with the sound if you want. They also have a Dolby gadget which didn’t do a lot for me when I tried it but you might like the phasey spaced-out feel it seemed to add to the music.

I’ve unlocked the phone for development and slapped a few programs on it which worked fine. Next thing is to fill the phone with music. One difference in Windows 8 phones is that they don’t use the Zune program to talk to the PC. You can just plug the phone into your PC and it will show up as an external drive you can load up with content. There is a ‘Windows Phone’ application you can get for Windows 8 that makes it slightly easier, but you don’t actually need this to get content onto your phone. I’ve moved a few files over. If they are in the MP4 audio format (i.e. they came off a Mac) the transfer process offers to transcode them (which implies they need to be converted for phone use) but I said “no thanks” and the music worked fine. Being a Windows 8 phone I can actually take screenshots now (touch the Windows key and then press the Power button) and you can see what my phone home screen looks like above.

I admit it, I’m a Windows Phone kind of person. I had iPhones for a while and loved them all, but I prefer the user interface of the Windows Phone. And I reckon that the Lumia 920 is an absolutely cracking phone by any standards, including those of the folks from Cupertino.

Angry Birds Star Wars

They seem to be slapping the Star Wars brand onto just about everything these days. We’ve got Yoda selling mobile phones (for YodaPhone – that can’t be a coincidence) and various other droids going round Currys making eyes at washing machines etc.

And now we have the franchise extending to Angry Birds. Getting into the game only cost me 79 pence on my Windows Phone (although you can of course spend more) and I spent the money thinking that worst case it was the kind of outlay that I could walk away from. The good news though is that the game is really rather good. They have the genuine sound effects and you can use the Jedi force and light sabre to good effect in some levels. Well worth the price, and a lot nicer than I expected.

Surface Type Cover

I got my Surface Type Cover earlier this week. It makes the Surface even more useful, in that I can touch type up a storm on the device now. There have been some mutterings on the interwebs about performance and how things slow to a crawl when you are typing into the Word program. I’ve not noticed this. I did notice that the day after I received the Surface it did a dirty great upgrade of the Office 2013 installation, which might be why I’m not seeing problems.

I’ve been using the Surface for presentations and it seems fine. I even got one presentation directly off Skydrive, which was a little bit slow to render, but it worked well apart from that. The presenter view in Powerpoint 2013 is actually quite nice to use.

One Surface tip: I wanted to put a SD card full of music onto the Surface but adding content from removable drives into the Music folder doesn’t work. It seems you are not supposed to do this. Fortunately, with the whole thing being based on Windows you find that someone else has already figured out a way of doing this, which is rather nice.

Update on 2012-11-12 13:17 by Rob

Some folks have asked for more details about the cover. So here goes. The keys actually move, and the distance they move is very impressive bearing in mind the depth of the keyboard itself. I like the feel of the keys. I reckon I could type quite a bit faster using the type cover than I can with the touch cover. The touch cover is nice enough, and way better than an on-screen keyboard,  but I miss the tactile feedback that you get with moving pieces of plastic.

The spacing of the keys is about right too and there is a tiny touchpad, around the size of a business card. This is actually one of the weaker points, in that the click parts are integrated into the pad at the bottom. This is fine for clicking on things but makes dragging things a bit of a, er, drag.

If you have a Surface I think you can make it much more useful by adding this cover. If you are thinking of getting a Surface as a replacement for a laptop then I reckon the keyboard would not hold you back much. I've used laptops which worse keyboards than the type keyboard. The thing that would hold you back a bit is the paucity of applications for the device. If your horizons only reach as far as Microsoft Office, email and web browsing, along with media playback and popular games like Angry Birds then you'll be fine. If you need a specific Windows application that only runs on "full fat" Windows 8 (the Surface that you can buy now only runs the "RT" version which supports the latest Windows 8 apps and nothing else) then you'd be best waiting for the Surface Pro which should be out in the new year.

Very Useful Seminar

We did our Rather Useful Seminar today about presentation skills. You can find out more here. Then I went over to a student presented seminar about game development. This was run by the Video Game Society. It was excellent. I had to leave early as I had to go off to a meeting, but what I saw set out very well what we had been talking about earlier. There were some nerves, but one of my rules is that the day I don’t get a bit nervous before I go out before an audience is the day that I retire from this job. If you don’t worry about doing it right, then you might not do it right.

Great work guys, looking forward to the next one. You can find the slides and sample code here.

IPS Monitors and the Pi Arcade Tables

Yesterday I ordered up an LG IPS224V 22 inch LED Backlit IPS Monitor from Amazon. Today, thanks to another free trial of Amazon Prime that I’ve signed up for (and set a reminder to cancel before I have to pay anything), it arrived. I joked to James (who is also building a PiArcade table and has ordered an IPS monitor) that I was worried that it might be a really good picture, and I’d have the problem that my arcade table monitor was better than my computer one.

Well, I’ve got that problem. This monitor is simply stunning, and has instantly replaced my trusty HP computer monitor of several years standing. The contrast is amazing, the angle of view very impressive (see the picture above) and the extra pixels really serve to make things easier on the eye. Since I spend a lot of my time staring at a screen I figure that this is a good investment and I’d advise anyone thinking about changing their screens to take a good long look at this one.

So now I have two monitors to get rid of, and another order out there on Amazon Prime……

Presentation Skills and Rather Useful Seminars

There will be a seminar on Presentation Skills on Wednesday 7th November at 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre D (LTD) in the Robert Blackburn Building. Myself and David Grey will try to tell you how you can hone your presentation skills to win over an audience, or interview. I just hope we get the presentation right, otherwise we’ll look very silly.

The Most Complicated Game I’ve Ever Played

Tonight we had a go at “The Most Complicated Game I’ve Ever Played”. It’s called “High Frontier” and boy is there a lot going on. The aim of the game is to colonise space, build up your fleet, explore planets and asteroids and boldly….. Well, you know the rest.

The board is full of incredibly detailed descriptions of places to try and reach using rockets which you need to carefully provision and fuel if you are going to get anywhere. I think it would take a day to play it properly, we only really managed to scratch the surface of the gameplay. But I did manage to colonise Mars, which I’m rather pleased about. The game is packed with proper science about space exploration, and much of the gameplay is really a simulation of the things you’d need to do if you really wanted to explore space. Great fun.

Pi Arcade Table Complete but Flawed

This isn’t a great picture, in more ways than one.

Today we put the finishing touches to the Pi Arcade table that I’ve been building. It was just a matter of fitting the wiring for the switches, fitting the Pi and then dropping the monitor into the slot. And finding out that it doesn’t work quite as well as I would like. The problem is not with the Pi, or the software, or the controls, or even the cardboard table top. The problem is with the monitor. Although the picture is good and the device runs cool thanks to its LED backlight, it doesn’t have the angle of view that you need to have if you want to sit and use the table as it is supposed to be used. You can see it in the photograph above. The bands at the top and bottom of the screen are supposed to be black and yet, from the angle of view that we have they look grey. The fact that most of the games that I want to play are on black backgrounds doesn’t help either so, while this is not a glorious failure, it is not quite the glorious success that I was after.

But it is of course not the end. Since I bought my monitor the price of IPS monitors (which use a better pixel switching technology) has dropped quite a bit. I’m going to put my LED monitor out there for sale (any takers?) and see what difference I get with one of those.

I guess you’d call this “integration testing”…

Hull Platform Expo Meeting

I was invited to a Platform Expo meeting in Hull today. One way to make an entrance is to arrive late and then sit right at the front. So I did. Chairing the meeting was Alan Johnson, Labour MP for Hull West and Hessle. The meeting was all about Platform Expo, an on-going effort to put Hull on the digital map. Now, I’m on record as not liking meetings much. But this one was different. Everyone was pointed in the direction. And every one added value to the effort.

We’ve got some great plans for the future, I’m looking forward to getting involved with them. If you are Hull student, all I can say at the moment is that there are some interesting things coming down the tracks….

On the way out I saw quite a nice sunset over the quayside.

Windows Phone 8 SDK Now Out

Along with the release of Windows Phone 8, the Windows Phone 8 SDK is now available for free download. You can get it from here. With this you can create applications for the new Windows 8 devices and use lots of yummy new features. And they are yummy. I’m using a couple of them in a “groundbreaking new application” that I’m working on in top secret. It’s so secret that I’m only allowing myself to see every other character of the code. And no, the groundbreaking part is not that you can use it as a shovel.

Mild health warning.

You will need Windows 8 64 bit version to run the Windows Phone 8 SDK. Since the phone actually runs bits of Windows 8 this is quite understandable. The emulator also requires a processor that provides Second Level Address Translation or SLAT. No, I’ve no idea what that really means either, but I’m happy to nod and smile whenever it is mentioned. The bottom line is that if you have a processor with an i in the name, for example i3, i5 or i7 then you will be fine. If you have an older processor this might mean that you can’t run the emulator. You’ll also need to enable Hyper-V on your system, which sounds like something Captain Kirk would ask for, but actually is to do with the processor virtualisation that is now used for proper emulation. Of course, if all this fails you should be able to deploy and debug inside that Lumia 920 you are going to rush out and buy (but not before I’ve got mine). There is help on the download site about all this. There are also versions for Windows 7.1 development. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got some downloading to do…

Microsoft Surface First Impressions

I call this composition “Surface and Space Cheese Battle”.

When the doorbell rings at 8:30 pm on the 30th of October you feel a certain trepidation about answering it. Particularly as we haven’t got any sweets in the house for Halloween yet. Sending kids away with a bread roll and a few length’s of spaghetti is probably not going to end well. Anyhoo, it wasn’t trick or treat, it was a harassed looking delivery chap with my Microsoft Surface. They promised delivery by the 30th of October and they just made it. By three and a half hours. I’m not that bothered about the delay to be honest, they did give me fifty quid to spend in the Surface hardware store to say sorry for not having the machine to me on Friday. I put it towards a “type Cover”, although I think I may have slightly wasted my money, as we shall see later.  I’ve been playing with the Surface now for a couple of hours and so of course I feel totally qualified to write a complete, in-depth, review of the device. So here goes.

It works. It’s different from the iPad. I think I get what it is for, and I really like it. I love my iPad like I love my TV. It lets me consume stuff that other people have made. But try and produce something other than finger paintings or music and the iPad falls apart. I remember my bitter disappointment when I tried to use the iPad Pages word processor, with its much touted “Office Capability”, to make a document. I suppose I should have realised something was up when I discovered the price of Pages was much, much less than the equivalent component in Microsoft office. I didn’t actually want much, just a table in the middle of some text, but the way it went wrong was just horrible. And as for printing from the iPad, just don’t go there. Really.

The Surface has proper Microsoft Office built in. Proper. And it integrates with Skydrive directly. All the documents that I’ve put into the cloud are ready and waiting to be worked with. As for printing, it just saw the printers in my Homegroup right out of the box. The only slight bugbear is the lack of the Outlook component. I spent a futile thirty minutes trying to get the Surface Mail client to connect to the university email server before I discovered that the university email was down at the time. Now it is working OK the built in email application looks OK, but I do like Outlook.

I ordered the Surface without any great plans for it. My main aim was to have a test platform for any Metro style things that I might fancy writing. But it turns out to be much better than that. The tight integration with my documents means that it will now be my weapon of choice whenever I go away. And the micro-SD slot means that I can load it up with 64G of movies and anything I fancy when I go.

I got the touch keyboard cover with the device. This provides a cover and a keyboard at the same time. The magnetic attachment is extremely strong and positive and it wraps around the device very nicely.The word on the street about the touch keyboard was that it was OK, but took a while to get used to. I think this is wrong. It works very well right away. I’ve ordered the type cover too, as I do like having keys that move when you hit them, but I’d be quite happy to use the touch keyboard to knock out large documents. It is in a different league to typing on the screen, which is something I’ve never enjoyed doing.

Hardware wise the Surface is very nice. The black metal finish is very swish, although it does seem to be a bit of a fingerprint magnet. I can never understand why hardware makers don’t think about this a bit harder when they make these devices. Nothing makes a device look old and worn like a covering of smeary fingerprints. The standard of construction, and of the presentation in the box is very impressive. The power supply is larger than you might expect and even has a fuse in the plug. It puts out a fairly meaty amount of current and seems to be able to charge the machine pretty quickly. The effect is spoiled a bit by the label on the Power Supply itself, which looks like it was stuck on as an afterthought, and the magnetic coupling for the power connector is nowhere near as positive or strong as the one for the keyboard, which is sad.

The weirdest thing about the Surface is that if you put it alongside my Samsung Slate and asked folks to spot the Windows RT device, they’d have a hard time telling them apart at first. I wasn’t expecting a full desktop, much less a command prompt. And I can plug in memory cards and stuff using the USB adapter and they seem to just appear and work as usual. Of course the illusion breaks whenever you start looking for programs to run. The Surface will only run programs that have been created for Windows 8 RT, which is the version specially crafted for the ARM chip inside it. At the moment this is restricted to applications from the marketplace, of which there is not a huge number. Hopefully the future will bring a few more programs, I’m looking for a good image editor which supports raw camera files and a Metablogger poster (Live Writer would be perfect) and I’ll be a very happy bunny.

I said to myself when I ordered the Surface that I’d be selling the iPad once it arrived. Then I said “Yeah, right…”. But now I’m thinking I might be filling out forms on ebay after all. The way I work, I seem to spend much more time making stuff than I do consuming it. I actually enjoy writing things. Perhaps my favourite game program is Microsoft Word. If that’s true of you too, then you will love the Surface.

Samsung Series 7 Slate Upgrade

Malteser powered programming at Three Thing Game..

I’m still liking my Samsung Series 7 Slate a lot. I’ve had Windows 8 on it for a while now and most of the time it works great. The only problems that I’ve had have been related to the discovery of devices when docking and undocking. The operating system really doesn’t like surprises, particularly when it wakes up from being asleep. I've discovered that if I make sure the operating system is awake before putting it in and out of the docking station it seems to detect and load the new devices quite successfully. If I do this with the machine powered down results are less satisfactory, with USB drivers falling over and needing to be disabled and enabled before I can use the keyboard and mouse.

Me being me, and paranoid about damaging the machine through powering it wrongly, I make sure that the dock is powered off when I plug the machine in and out of it. There have been some reports of people damaging their machines if the dock is live when the slate is plugged into it. I’ve no idea if this is a common problem, but I’m playing safe out of cowardice.

The good news, at least I hope it is good news, is that Samsung have released a whole slew of driver updates for the Slate. These include new drivers for the graphics and the motherboard, along with a whole new BIOS. You can find them here, just get hold of the Download SW Update link on this page, extract the upgrade application and run it.

The upgrade application worked fine for me, although the BIOS update didn’t end well because after it my machine failed to boot, ending up stuck at the BIOS configuration screen. If you get this, find your way to the setting involving Boot options and disable the legacy boot option so that the UEFI Boot Support is enabled again. This seems to have been set back to a default during the upgrade process.

You can move around the BIOS screen using the buttons on the slate, but this will drive you completely nuts, so plug a USB keyboard into the machine and use that to set it up. Once I’d done the change my machine rebooted fine. I’ve not really had a chance to test out the docking behaviour, but at least I’ve not gone backwards by upgrading. I’ll post an update if I find out more.

I did all this just before my 9:15 lecture. It is a matter of personal pride (although I’m not really that proud of it in some ways) that i had the machine back working before I had to go and talk. Oh, and I have a spare machine too. Just in case….

Rather Useful Seminar this Wednesday

We will be doing our next Rather Useful Seminar on the 31st of October on the subject of publishing and legality. Rob Singhe from the University Knowledge Exchange and Rob Penrose from Andrew Jacksons Solicitors will be joining me, Rob Miles in the Robert Blackburn Building. (Can you see a pattern forming here?)

More Robs than you can shake a stick at will be talking about the nature of copyright, steps you can take to help make sure that what you thought of stays yours, and Rather Useful things to consider when you get together, form a little group (which is probably really a company) and start selling your wares via App Store or Marketplace.

The session will be at the usual time and place, 1:15 pm Wednesday 31st October in Lecture Theatre D in the Robert Blackburn Building. Teams from Three Thing Game who are thinking about selling what they have made are strongly advised to come along and take part.

Three Thing Game Judging

I got back into the university around 7:15 this morning. I always feel terribly guilty about not staying the night but I did try it once and it really did not end well. All of the teams still there (we had lost a few by now) had stuff that worked and things to play. All the teams had made massive amounts of progress overnight, particularly some of the ones from the first year who only started with XNA this week. I’m just so impressed by what you have done from that starting point. Kudos.

I formed the judges into four teams who went around scoring. We also had four camera operators who captured the presentations on video. I’ll be cutting these presentations into a show reel later. I’m going to use some of the game music from the competition as a soundtrack. There was some ace stuff.

Each team of judges then picked their top two entries, who went forward into the final rounds. These lucky folks got to present their solutions to the audience.

Lee shows one of the T shirts, in front you can seen the prizes that we have this year. All good stuff, although I'm not sure about that shade of green to be honest...

The survivors….

This is ‘Three Game’O’Holics’, the first presenters, preparing to show off their game inspired by “Fighting, Desk, in a Dress”. This was an impressive take on the bouncy platform style game with a killer two player mode.

This is ‘No Method, No Class’. I got emails from these guys a week ago asking if I could hook them up with a team. They picked a name much better than the one I suggested and then went on to make a top eight game from “Caffeine, Monkey, under attack”. The gameplay and sound-effects were top notch, as waves of monkeys came in for the kill. The Caffeine High mode was just excellent.

If you want to get ahead, get a hat. Seemed to work for “Did you mean ‘Uncle Mikes Recursive Prolog Party?’” who had built a frantic space shooter game from “Fighting Toast Party”.  They had random levels, fantastic zooming viewpoints, swarms of enemies and a real “just one one more try” style of gameplay.

Next up was ‘Sheerware Games’ showing off their Hyper Morph Windows Phone game, made from "Flying, Bombs, Tank". This had lashings of retro style, frantic shooting action and swarms of baddies to be despatched.

The Honeybadger crew took Ninja, mountains, defence and crafted an atmospheric game with invaders storming your castle and you letting loose with ninja inspired weaponry to see them off. With sunset powered game progression and lovely artwork this was a smashing phone game.

I reckon ‘Michael Jacksons Indian Takeaway’ is the best team name, although I have no idea what it really means. Their pun heavy title, “Spray of Duty Modern Warbear” was built on “Poptart, deodorant, teddy bear” and had a lone Teddy soldier using his deodorant to save off increasing numbers of invading poptarts of various flavours. With lovely shader powered plasma effects this looked superb.

Its rare to see all of the Battle Brothers looking happy at the same time, but they certainly were pleased to make top eight. They had created an astonishing looking space warfare game from the starting point of “Pirate, ship, spoon”. This had great 3D graphics and a space opera plot involving spoon based pirate contraband . Of course.

I could think of around twenty reasons why the game from ‘The Infamous Two Sirs’ would just not work. This had the most ambitious setup I've ever seen in a Three Thing Game. From the words “Goldfish, Plughole and Invasion” the team crafted a multi-player game experience involving a battle between Kinect controlled angler fish and Windows Phone powered goldfish. Everything worked. Wave your arms to move your angler fish and they dance around the phone screen. Marshal your goldfish on the phone and the player on the Kinect sees tasty goldfish coming into range....

As the judges left for their deliberations I thought to myself just how happy I was to not be in their shoes. But, after a lot of deliberation they managed to come up with a top three. Here they are in reverse order.

Third place went to Battle Brothers. Well done folks. And to think that the textures were designed by someone who had never done them before this competition. Amazing.

Honeybadger Productions clutching their Kinect sensor prizes. Well deserved and a game with great potential.

Sheerware get the big prize. Richly deserved and hard earned. The sheer (sorry) attention to detail in the game and the way it looked Marketplace Ready was very impressive.

Final prize of the day was the Peoples Choice Award. It was great to see the teams showing off their entries to each other. We got the scores off Survey Monkey and the voice of the people agreed with our judges, awarding Sheerware the prize.

Three Thing Game serves as a reminder to me why I love my job so much. The whole thing was just splendid. Special shout outs to Dave G. for fantastic lab support, Peter, David P, Martin, Simon, Mark, Kevin, Warren and Adam for all playing their parts in making this the best TTG we have ever had. Thanks also to Lee and David from Microsoft and Dean and Dominique from MonoGame for judging and giving the competition industry chops. And thanks to the students for turning up and being so gosh darned awesome. I hope you all got as much out of the occasion as I did. And we now all look forward to the next event…