Rob at Campus Party EU

 
I call this photo “Down in the trainstation at 6:00 am”..

What do Rob and George Osbourne have in common? Well, not a lot as it turns out, which is definitely good news for him. But one thing we do share is that we are both at Campus Party EU today.

I don’t think George did a talk on Windows Phone development though, at least I didn’t see him at mine making notes. I had a great audience of folks who were all keen to have a go at writing something for Windows Phone. There was quite a wide spread of development experience in the audience, so I kind of went for the “broad comedy” approach that seemed to go well enough.

This is the audience being warmed up for me.

And this is Riaz doing the warming.

They have an Xbox one here, not sure what the game is though. The whole thing is great. Like the Hacked.io event I went to earlier this year, but much, much bigger and international. The clue is in the name I guess. A big chunk of the dome is full of people making things, doing stuff and sharing ideas. A lot of fun is being had and good done.

I found this drawn on one of the Whiteboards. Indeed.

For those of you who were at my talk, you can find my Windows Phone App Studio screencasts here. You can find App Studio here. And you can find me in the open area near the Xbox One sitting typing at my Skinned Surface.

Windows Phone Progress Indicator

You might find this useful. If you want a Windows Phone program to show that it is busy, maybe updating content from the network, binding data to a page or emptying a bank account then it turns out this is very easy. All you have to do is create a ProgressIndicator and bind it to the SystemTray.

ProgressIndicator prog; 
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
    prog = new ProgressIndicator();
    prog.IsIndeterminate = true;
    prog.IsVisible = false;
    prog.Text = "Leave me alone. I'm busy";
    SystemTray.SetProgressIndicator(this, prog);
}

The code above makes the ProgressIndicator in the OnNavigatedTo method for the page, there are lots of other ways to do this. You can set the colour of the text and background of the display, but I use the default because I’m boring. If you set the IsIndeterminate property to true (as I have above) , this means that you don’t know how long the action will take. If you set this to false you can then use a SetValue method to adjust the size of the bar that is displayed.

Then, when your program is busy it just has to go:

prog.IsVisible = true;

This turns on the busy indicator. I’ve made a tiny demo application which uses two buttons to turn the indicator on and off. You can find it here.

Peter’s 3D Printer

I went out this afternoon to take a look at Peter’s 3D printer. You can find out more about it here. I’ve actually seen it now. It’s awesome. The most impressive thing is that all the parts were designed by Peter and some of them were printed by me. And it works. To the point that the fan mount on the picture above was actually printed by the printer itself.

I made my printer from a kit and I’ve been slowly discovering the best way to get things from a roll of plastic fibre into a useful shape. The learning curve has been steep at times, but what Peter has done is much more tricky. He has had to construct and align all the components himself.

The design of the printer is totally unlike mine. The position of the printing head is controlled by the movement of the three carriages up and down the three pillars. The controlling software drives stepper motors that are connected to cable that is looped around each pillar and pulls the carriages up and down. The great thing about this design is that the head can move really fast, and during printing the item being printed doesn’t move at all. The tricky thing is that printing in straight lines involves all the motors making complex movement (which is not a huge problem, the software does all the tricky maths) but any inaccuracy in the movement will result in straight lines becoming curved or slanted.

Peter has spent a lot of time aligning everything and now he is getting some excellent results. Eventually he will be using his printer to make a whole new one.

This is my favourite view of the printer.

To Infinity and Beyond

Went up town today and bought the “Cars” playset for Disney Infinity. Clearly there is no hope for me.

Lumia 1020 Lunchtime Photos

So I take my Lumia 1020 for a walk at lunchtime and then, on the way back to the office, I snap 5 pictures at different exposures. Today I blend them using Photoatix and I get this. I’m starting to seriously love the camera in this phone.