Working in Hotel Rooms

One of the pictures on the wall seems almost appropriate.

They say that when J.K. Rowling wanted to get some writing done she would check into a hotel and work there, free from distraction. Apparently as a result of this the final Harry Potter book was nearly called “Harry Potter and the Room Service of Doom”. But I digress.

I’ve spent quite a while in my hotel room working over the last day or so. Usually at three in the morning. I’ve found that I can plug the hotel room TV into my laptop, leading to the rather impressive dual monitor setup you can see above. And I have got quite a lot done. At the moment we are putting the starting touches to the sessions we are doing tomorrow, at the Windows Phone  Jump Start. I’m also digging out some of my favourite jokes. Should be fun. You can sign up here.

Scary music from beyond the grave

Just writing some stuff about Windows Phone development and what happens when an application is removed from memory. Then my music player (on random play) came up with Track 11 of Nine Objects of Desire by Suzanne Vega.  Now, that’s what I call scary.

Jump Start to Bellevue

My first meal in America. Of course.

Jumped (well, walked actually) onto a plane today to head off to Seattle for the next set of Jump Start sessions. Andy and I will be doing some more live magic next week on Tuesday, when we are going to present a bunch of advanced Windows Phone topics. I’m doing a session on more advanced XNA, including how to  make your games “Marketplace Ready”. You can sign up here. As soon as I arrived I shot off to the mall to take a look round and on the way back I got well and truly drenched by some traditional Seattle rain. It is nice to be here again.

Playstation Move Fun and Games

Of course I got a Playstation Move. I shot up down on the way back from work and had a quick play with the system before packing for Seattle tomorrow.(It is very annoying to be going away just as I get a new toy. I’ve just found out that the Xbox Kinect is released when I’m away in Berlin at TechEd 2010 too. Oh well.)

The controllers themselves are very well made, and feel great in the hand. They use internal rechargeable batteries and you need to have a bunch of mini-usb cables to charge them all up. The ball on the end which lights up is all squidgy, which doesn’t affect the gameplay much, but does make it less painful if you happen to hit anyone with that bit. Each controller is supplied with a sturdy looking wrist strap which you are strongly advised to use.

I happened to already have a Playstation Eye webcam which I plugged in and then spent a while getting lined up correctly. First thing I noticed was that you need quite a big room to play this properly. They say you should stand around 8 feet from the screen, which might be a problem in some bedrooms.

Then I had a go at the table tennis game, which I regard as the benchmark application for this kind of technology. Having lined up camera I got started. It really is impressive. The bat on the screen matched exactly how I was holding the controller. I could twist my wrist and move forward and back and the bat followed me exactly. Better yet, the things I did when hitting the ball (applying top spin and back spin etc) translated exactly onto what happens in the game. I was actually able to leverage my existing table tennis skills and use them to beat one of the computer opponents. I can see myself spending a lot of time with this game. Given the amount of jumping about that I ended up doing  it might even be good for me.

Finally there was just time to have a quick go with the party game. This is a bunch of deeply silly mini-games which are quite engaging for a single player and would probably be a riot for a bunch of people. Again, the on screen rendition of whatever I was holding (my favourite was the mole whacking mallet) was exactly fitted into the picture of my hand on the screen.

Final impressions, very good. It has the controller abilities of the Wii hooked up to the greater rendering power of a PS3. It is a bit expensive though, to get a webcam, two controllers and a couple of games you are nudging up to the price of a complete Wii system. The games that are presently available are OK, but a bit slight. It will be really interesting when some of the more hard core games get the Playstation Move makeover.

Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools Released

(the Windows Phone user is the one in the speedboat)

The final version of the Windows Phone developer tools have now been released. These are the ones that you can use to create applications for the Windows Phone Marketplace. They are also of interest to XNA developers because this SDK is also the one used to create XNA 4.0 games for Xbox and Windows PC. They are a free download from here. If you want an ISO image to use for an offline install of the SDK you can find that here.

Oh, and if you want to find out more you really should sign up for our advanced sessions on Windows Phone Development. Andy and I will be reprising our double act (and giving away another private jet) on Tuesday next week. You can sign up here.