Free Windows Phone Dev. Training

You don’t get much for free these days. Except that sometimes you do. Getting training on things computing is often a horribly expensive business. But now and then you get some astonishing offers. Nokia and Microsoft have teamed up to set up some training days in London which are free to developers with an interest in Windows Phone development. There is one this Saturday, and another on the 11th May. Click on the dates to find our more and register.

I know they are going to be high quality because Andy Wigley is doing the training. If you have coding smarts and a good idea for an app,  but have never written for Windows Phone, then you should go along and get some great insights into mobile development. Tell them I sent you.

Will the real Percy Pig stand up

It has come to my attention that I’ve made a terrible error. I’ve been writing posts extoling the virtues of Percy Pig sweets, (which I’ve been buying from Sugar Sugar Sweets – three for two on Wednesday) when it turns out that these are really Porky Pig sweets. The real Percy Pig is a trademark of Marks and Spencer as you can see above. I found this out when I bought a pig for number one wife for easter. The chocolate tastes great, but we are having a real problem eating Percy, shorts and all as we don’t like saying things like “I’ll have his leg, looks delicious…”.

We’ve solved this by convincing ourselves that this is actually a model of Percy, who is alive and well and living happily in a sty in Bournemouth. Oh yes he is.

Fun with HDR Photography

I’m getting quite into this HDR photography lark. It doesn’t always result in photographs which are lifelike, see above, but I quite like the effect and anyway, it’s my blog…

This picture was produced by the Photomatix program which you can get from HDRsoft for less than the price of a video game. The only real pain is having to take three copies of each photograph, an underexposed one and an overexposed one which are then combined with the software. If you are into photography and you haven’t had a go at it, then I’d recommend that you give it a whirl. It transforms quite dull scenes into much more interesting ones.

TechEd 2013 here I come

I was very pleased to find out a little while back that I’ve been invited to deliver a couple of sessions at TechEd USA in June. I’m doing two sessions on Windows Phone 8, one about using background agents and the other about adding speech to Windows Phone 8 applications. I’m really looking forward to going out to New Orleans and taking to the stage. It was even nicer to find that my old partner in crime, Andy Wigley, is also giving some sessions on phone development. It looks like it is going to be great conference. And I hear it can be quite warm out there. I might even pack my shorts…..

Gadget Show Live 2013

Went off the the Gadget Show Live today. This is our final trip out of the holidays, and has been much anticipated. We last went in 2010 (scared to find that this was actually three years ago). This time we actually made it to the live show, which was great, family friendly, fun. Including audience controlled video gaming, as shown above. There were lots of things on show (although there were fewer 3D TVs on display this time – funny that…) Anyhoo, I took pictures of the bits and bobs that took my fancy.

These robots are great. Just don’t ask the price.

These are a bit smaller and simpler, but no less interesting. They move around as a swarm. I’m very tempted to write some XNA that does what they do in software, although the hardware ones are a lot more fun.

There were lots of 3D printers around the place. This one looks nice enough, but I prefer Una.

What a pity none of these phone cases will fit my Lumia….

This is a “4K” resolution TV, although I’m not sure the photo does it justice. You can’t quite see the price tag, which was 25,000 pounds…. For that money you could probably buy a house with that view.