Orta talks iPhone Development

Orta and title slide. Nice hat.

Orta (or Ben Maslen) is graduate from our department who is into iPhone development and other cool stuff. Our student computing society, Hull Com. Soc.  invited him up to Hull to give a talk about what he has been up to.

Very good presentation. Nice to hear some of the things that we go on about during the course coming back at us from an ex-student. Orta made the point that when you start doing something like this that you must actively engage with the developer community, asking questions and helping others. Just writing a game and putting it out there is one thing, but you also have to work at “being out there” to promote both yourself and the things that you have done. 

From what he showed us, he seems to be doing pretty well at it.

Imagine Cup Pressure

Christophe and Daniel operating under extreme pressure in my office..

Yesterday night two of our first year students just managed to get their Imagine Cup Game Development entries submitted for round 1 of the competition. This process wasn’t helped by me getting the submission date wrong, and telling them they had more time than there actually was….

Anyhoo, the games are in and now we have to wait to find out if we have made it to round two.

I’ve got a new Windows Phone

Unfortunately it’s not real. Like many other facets of my life, it exists only within the mind of my computer. However, it does work, and I can write programs for it using the latest version of Visual Studio.

If you want your own Windows Phone 7 Series device you can head over to here to perform a one stop download that gives you all the tools you need, including Silverlight, XNA and the emulator.

If you are feeling rich (or are a student on Dreamspark) you can even signed up for the Developer experience here.

iPhone Game Development Lecture

One of our ex students (I only know him as @orta!) is giving an iPhone development talk in the department on Wed, March 17, 3:15pm in Lecture Theatre A in the Robert Blackburn Building. He has had his iPhone apps published (and even featured in Apple commercials) and so it should be well worth turning up.

Update on Monday, March 15, 2010 at 09:51AM by Rob

..and I'll be doing a talk on Windows Phone game development in Week 8 after easter...

What’s Wrong with this Picture

Some time ago I bought a book about Actionscript development. Paid full price too. I wanted to find out more about the language that powers my Chumby device. In the section on working with date and time values I found the following gem.

Did they test this? What time value did they use?

I had to show this to number one son to make sure that wasn’t going mad…