Mr Squeek’s Roller Coaster Ride

One of the student teams in our Three Thing Game this October ended up with “Fairground, mouse, jungle quest”. So they came up with Mr. Squeek’s Jungle Roller Coaster ride. It is now in Windows Phone Marketplace as a free download.

Not sure why it is called “grind”, but that is the best way to find it. Great fun.

Media Player and Marketplace Certification with Windows Phone

One of our students was having problems with Marketplace Certification for his XNA game. The game was failing certification because his game background music was playing over the top of any media that the phone user was listening to. There is a simple way to fix this, which is not to play your game music if the user is listening to something. You can do this by testing to see if the media player is stopped before playing your music:

if (MediaPlayer.State == MediaState.Stopped)
{
    // play your own music here
}

The MediaPlayer class lives in the System.XNA.Media namespace. If you are writing a Silverlight game you’ll have to import the XNA libraries.

Skydrive from Windows Phone Apps

The latest version of the Windows Live Connect APIs let Windows Phone 7 apps interact with the Skydrive storage of phone users. This makes it possible for us to write programs that authenticate users and store pictures and documents in the Cloud. I reckon this is a really significant development as it opens up lots of really interesting possibilities for connected applications.

Find out how to get started here.You can find a sample Windows Phone application that uploads pictures here.

Old Age Gadgets

I was up in the loft today getting down our Christmas tree and found a few things that I thought would be fun to photograph.

Remember this?

I think I’ll print a large version of this to stick on the wall.

My first mobile phone next to my present mobile phone.

Christmas Shopping on Oxford Street

We took a day trip to London today. Great fun. We were even brave enough to go down Oxford Street. To say it was busy would be a bit of an understatement. But it was nice.

Political Note: I don’t usually comment on politics on this blog. My opinion is that no matter how you vote The Government always seems to get in. But I feel I must apologise to the rest of the world about the behaviour of our Prime Minister with respect to the European Talks last week. When a previous Prime Minister was negotiating very important treaty stuff he hid a diplomat under the table who passed him notes with sensible things to say written on them. Apparently our Mr Cameron did the same, only he took Jeremy Clarkson.