Angry Birds Star Wars

They seem to be slapping the Star Wars brand onto just about everything these days. We’ve got Yoda selling mobile phones (for YodaPhone – that can’t be a coincidence) and various other droids going round Currys making eyes at washing machines etc.

And now we have the franchise extending to Angry Birds. Getting into the game only cost me 79 pence on my Windows Phone (although you can of course spend more) and I spent the money thinking that worst case it was the kind of outlay that I could walk away from. The good news though is that the game is really rather good. They have the genuine sound effects and you can use the Jedi force and light sabre to good effect in some levels. Well worth the price, and a lot nicer than I expected.

Surface Type Cover

I got my Surface Type Cover earlier this week. It makes the Surface even more useful, in that I can touch type up a storm on the device now. There have been some mutterings on the interwebs about performance and how things slow to a crawl when you are typing into the Word program. I’ve not noticed this. I did notice that the day after I received the Surface it did a dirty great upgrade of the Office 2013 installation, which might be why I’m not seeing problems.

I’ve been using the Surface for presentations and it seems fine. I even got one presentation directly off Skydrive, which was a little bit slow to render, but it worked well apart from that. The presenter view in Powerpoint 2013 is actually quite nice to use.

One Surface tip: I wanted to put a SD card full of music onto the Surface but adding content from removable drives into the Music folder doesn’t work. It seems you are not supposed to do this. Fortunately, with the whole thing being based on Windows you find that someone else has already figured out a way of doing this, which is rather nice.

Update on Monday, November 12, 2012 at 01:08PM by Rob

Some folks have asked for more details about the cover. So here goes. The keys actually move, and the distance they move is very impressive bearing in mind the depth of the keyboard itself. I like the feel of the keys. I reckon I could type quite a bit faster using the type cover than I can with the touch cover. The touch cover is nice enough, and way better than an on-screen keyboard,  but I miss the tactile feedback that you get with moving pieces of plastic.

The spacing of the keys is about right too and there is a tiny touchpad, around the size of a business card. This is actually one of the weaker points, in that the click parts are integrated into the pad at the bottom. This is fine for clicking on things but makes dragging things a bit of a, er, drag.

If you have a Surface I think you can make it much more useful by adding this cover. If you are thinking of getting a Surface as a replacement for a laptop then I reckon the keyboard would not hold you back much. I've used laptops which worse keyboards than the type keyboard. The thing that would hold you back a bit is the paucity of applications for the device. If your horizons only reach as far as Microsoft Office, email and web browsing, along with media playback and popular games like Angry Birds then you'll be fine. If you need a specific Windows application that only runs on "full fat" Windows 8 (the Surface that you can buy now only runs the "RT" version which supports the latest Windows 8 apps and nothing else) then you'd be best waiting for the Surface Pro which should be out in the new year.

Very Useful Seminar

We did our Rather Useful Seminar today about presentation skills. You can find out more here. Then I went over to a student presented seminar about game development. This was run by the Video Game Society. It was excellent. I had to leave early as I had to go off to a meeting, but what I saw set out very well what we had been talking about earlier. There were some nerves, but one of my rules is that the day I don’t get a bit nervous before I go out before an audience is the day that I retire from this job. If you don’t worry about doing it right, then you might not do it right.

Great work guys, looking forward to the next one. You can find the slides and sample code here.

IPS Monitors and the Pi Arcade Tables

Yesterday I ordered up an LG IPS224V 22 inch LED Backlit IPS Monitor from Amazon. Today, thanks to another free trial of Amazon Prime that I’ve signed up for (and set a reminder to cancel before I have to pay anything), it arrived. I joked to James (who is also building a PiArcade table and has ordered an IPS monitor) that I was worried that it might be a really good picture, and I’d have the problem that my arcade table monitor was better than my computer one.

Well, I’ve got that problem. This monitor is simply stunning, and has instantly replaced my trusty HP computer monitor of several years standing. The contrast is amazing, the angle of view very impressive (see the picture above) and the extra pixels really serve to make things easier on the eye. Since I spend a lot of my time staring at a screen I figure that this is a good investment and I’d advise anyone thinking about changing their screens to take a good long look at this one.

So now I have two monitors to get rid of, and another order out there on Amazon Prime……

Presentation Skills and Rather Useful Seminars

There will be a seminar on Presentation Skills on Wednesday 7th November at 1:15 pm in Lecture Theatre D (LTD) in the Robert Blackburn Building. Myself and David Grey will try to tell you how you can hone your presentation skills to win over an audience, or interview. I just hope we get the presentation right, otherwise we’ll look very silly.