Cube Mania and Web Development

I think I may be getting too far into this Nissan cube thing

I really like my Cube. I went out last night to a Hull Digital Developer group meetup. There ware two good talks, one by John Polling from “The League of Extraordinary Developers” (great name) about SASS and Compass and CSS and another by James Greenwood from Strawberry about HTML5.  Both speakers knew their stuff and the content was interesting (although I’m not really a web developer type person myself).  But I must admit that my thoughts kept going back to my little tin box outside and the drive home in it…Next time I’ll be more focused. 

Oh, and don’t forget if you are from Hull that you need to register for Hull Digital real soon. Looks to be a good one.

The Misleading World of Atari Box Art

These are really funny. And these.

Windows Phone Screen Stealing Status Bar

I got some very useful comments on my post about how to make XNA games use the full screen of the Windows Phone. The thing that I didn’t make clear was that in an XNA game you will lose screen space even if the bar is not displaying anything. The best way to view the effect of this is to go into the settings of the phone (or emulator) and change the Background to light (Phone>Settings>theme).  Above shows what you get. The status bar is drawn white and the game screen area is scaled down by that lovely hardware in the phone itself. As you can see, your game is losing out on screen space.

If you want to make full use of all the screen you just need to add this line into the constructor for your game:

graphics.IsFullScreen = true;

Much better.

Windows Phone 7 Games

I hate this sign

I had a student come to see me today. One of our soon to be second years. He had spent some time working on a Windows Phone game and wanted to try it on a real device. He was using the accelerometer and not sure he was using it correctly.

Worked first time.

He had a touch controlled configuration menu and everything. Excellent stuff.

If you are on the Hull campus and want to try a Windows Phone app on a real device give me a yell and drop round some time.

Got Cube

Picked up my shiny, new-ish, Nissan Cube today. It is every bit as great as I thought it would be. And it has footwells that light up in different colours.