December 21st, 2012
On Monday and Tuesday this week I was invited down to Modern Jago in London for Microsoft's Appy Christmas event. It was a relaxed workshop to hear some presentations about Windows 8 app design and develop your own apps to submit to the Store. I had a lot of fun, even though it was tiring having early starts and we walked around London a lot on the second day. The event was well catered with lots of crisps, coke and pizza - and some alcamahol on Monday night :D MORE
December 7th, 2012
I've made lots of progress on my JavaScript orrery coursework for the 2D Graphics module. I only have a few more features to add now, unfortunately some of them are the big ones like koch snowflake and gravity simulation. MORE
November 29th, 2012
Apparently it was a known fault and was being fixed. It took them a few weeks (seems a long time to me) but it has finally been addressed and I can now submit apps to the Windows 8 Store. I have canceled the previous submission of Flashdeck as I wasn't happy with the file system in-place. I believe I have found a solution and will try to implement it in the coming days but I have a lot of Uni work to do as well still. MORE
November 7th, 2012
For my 2D Graphics module coursework, I am tasked with making an orrery (a device that illustrates the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System) in JavaScript using HTML5 Canvas. JavaScript is a new language for me, I've never coded in it before. It is based on C so it was fairly similar to using C#, in which I've made a fair number of Windows Phone apps. MORE
October 30th, 2012
Our three things were 'fighting, toast, party'. Even before we got them Nick had an idea for a Geometry Wars style space shooter for Windows Phone 7. I liked the idea and along with Danny we tried to get words to fit the style of game we wanted. We unfortunately lost the word Atomic to another team and there were no space related words coming up in the draw so eventually all our words were random. We still wanted to do a space shooter game so we worked the words into the game. Danny came up with the idea to have toast be an acronym for 'Total Obliteration And Space Travel' which worked perfectly. MORE
October 27th, 2012
Well here we are again, it's always such a pleasure. Remember when we tried Three Thing Game before? (Portal 2 reference lol) MORE
October 26th, 2012
We got our three words on Monday at the Three Thing Game auction. We had £500 of "worthless cash" to bid on words but we never won anything and all our words were chosen randomly instead. We got Fighting, Toast and Party. An interesting combination, I can't really say anything about the game yet as it's a secret until the 24h developing session. MORE
October 12th, 2012
I have started work on Flashdeck Preview for the Windows 8 Store. Why the 'Preview' part of the name? Windows 8 is a new platform and I'm a new developer for it, so I have decided to make it clear in the name that this is an early concept of the app and at initial release will not be as full featured as the Windows Phone 7 version. Before Windows 8 general availability I hope to have at least the base features of the app working well and available in the Store. This would be the ability to add cards/decks, and then view, edit and delete them. I also hope to have a settings page, and the ability to search through your decks via the Windows 8 charms bar. MORE
October 9th, 2012
Three Thing Game time has rolled round again! We didn't get to compete in the semester one competition last year as it filled up really quickly. This year we were one of the first groups to sign up. Taking inspiration from Google's 'did you mean recursion?' joke, we're naming our team Did You Mean "Uncle Mike's Recursive Prolog Party"? as a joke on repeating last year's name. The team consists of me, Danny Brown and Nick Case, minus Shaun this time. I think we've learned a lot from last time about planning and organisation, and also about programming from the last months of Uni and over the summer. Odds of success are much higher so watch out other teams ;) MORE
October 5th, 2012
Oops, I forgot to make this post after the last one. So yes, I have installed Windows 8 on my laptop. I didn't want to install it on my desktop yet as driver support hasn't been fully completed and I didn't want any of my most used programs and games messing up under the new OS. My Sony VAIO laptop has been really good as my main machine for a few years before I got my desktop PC, even if the fan is very loud. I thought the best way to breathe life into the old computer was to replace the HDD with a Solid State Drive. MORE
