Steve Jobs

Today, we lost a true innovator, creator and visionary. Steve Jobs.

Game Programming and XNA

I have been game programming since start, while learning programming I did lots of small applications like hello world, then small features application for example Small Calculator which could do just addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, then I did a small socket programming application which could transmit file from one machine to the other. But my first ever full application was actually game. I developed that game using DirectX and Visual Basic 6, and this was in 2000. Game was very simple 2D Game with music, animation. Game was about Spaceship which is flying in space and lots of alien spaceships are heading towards spaceship and trying to destroy spaceship. Player have to save spaceship from aliens by using various weapons. Game was very simple but difficult to develop. I am not a person who can do good graphics, so I took help of few friends and few online tutorials get my graphics done. I read a lot about DirectX from MSDN site and developed game. It took me about 3 months to develop a very simple game.

Later on I moved to using VC++ and DirectX and found it to be damn difficult compared to Visual Basic 6, but I did notice lot of performance improvement with VC++ which is obvious. In 2002 when Managed DirectX was announced, I started using Managed DirectX with .NET Framework, and developed small games, and it was pretty easy compared to VB 6.

In 2004 Microsoft Announced XNA and in 2006 they released CTP of XNA. I started using XNA in 2007, and I was really amazed at what XNA could do and how easy it became for gamers to write games on multiple platforms without much code changes. Currently XNA can target Windows, Xbox 360, Windows Phone 7 and Zune.

I am going to write a blog post on game concepts and using XNA to develop game, I will cover 2D and 3D part both.

Happy New Year

Happy new year 2011 to everyone.. :) I am going to get into blogging about games and graphics.. will be posting at least one blog post in a week.

SQL to LINQ

These days I do lots of LINQ Queries, but many times I struggle to find how to write complex SQL queries to LINQ queries. LINQ Queries look very similar to SQL Queries but when we start writing complex queries, its very very different.

I found following tool which helps out: http://www.sqltolinq.com/

It does most of the work :)

Health issue and year 2009

Year 2009 has not been really good for family as far as health is concern.. otherwise it has been really good.. one by one everyone fell ill.. and 3 out of 6 were admited to hospital.. I was admited to hospital last month.. had typhoid.. still recovering from the damage typhoid has caused to my body.

I am going to make Mumbai User Group active again.. http://www.mumbaiusergroup.org

planning with UG meet this month for sure.

Xbox 360 Facebook Application Error 800700e8

On Xbox 360, when you try to start facebook application, if you get following error 800700e8 you need to do following steps to start running Facebook application.

You will be requiring Xbox 360 gamertag which has country set to United States. If you dont have, you can create one gamertag and set its country to US. Login with US gamertag id on Xbox 360 and download Facebook Application.

Once download is done, you can sign out and you can start using your original gamertag and run the Facebook application, and error will not come now.

Silence

I have been silent for few months.. and I guess I will be silent for few more days.. having very tight schedule and few things in life going such a way which is making me change my priorities. I am not sad, I am not happy.. I am just ok.

I really hope things happens as what I want, whether it is good or bad I don't care about it.

Michael Jackson – King of Pop

June 25, 2009 was really a shocking day for many people,  Michael Jackson – King of Pop was declared dead on this day. I loved his songs and his dance moves a lot. Check out the following song of Michael Jackson, Will you be there, my most fav. song.

Knowing bit about Michael Jackson through his interviews and wikipedia, I guess this song talks a lot about what he feels and how he feels about his life, he was all alone needed love of people. He was going to come back with This is it concert that he was going to do in few days.

For us fans of Michael Jackson, he is still alive and always with us. :)

lyrics of the song - http://www.lyricsfreak.com/m/michael%20jackson/will%20you%20be%20there_20092671.html

Mobile User Interfaces

 

 

Have a look at the above four images… These are the home screens of the various mobile devices, major screen shots from Windows Mobile, Windows Mobile is very flexible and allows you to customize its UI the way you want. Anyways coming back to topic.

Looking at above four images, which user interface really appeals you? Now, if I am going to use new UIs for first time, it definitely appeals me.. for example iPhone UI is great, I love it.. it appeals me.. similarly HTC Diamond or HTC Touch Pro UI is very nice and appealing. I used all the above phone for several months. User interface is great, nice to play around with.. but then it starts getting boring more you use it.. more boring it seems.

I like to keep information at my fingertip. Basically you can say I am information greedy and I always want to have information when I need it.

Now, lets look at the screen shots of Mobile UI one by one from top left to right bottom. If you look at the first screenshot top left, first screenshot is very much normal, not appealing at all.. just shows time, owner of cell phone, how many msgs in inbox or emails in inbox, shows appointments and task list in home screen.

2nd Screen shot shows, time, weather, shortcuts to few programs and appointments.. but if I want to go from time to weather or shortcut.. I have to click or touch on relevant tab button.

3rd screen shot which is bottom left.. is kind of similar to 2nd one.. but provides more things on the screen.. like speed dial, preview of msgs, emails, pictures, etc… but for all this I have to click on relevant tab.

4th screen.. just shows me programs, nothing else.

Now, as a information hungry… 4th UI fails for me completely, I do not get any information easily.. I need to click click click and get the information I need. Time consuming.

looking at 2nd and 3rd, I do get information, but not much.. only a little.. and for more information again click.

1st screen… provides me information that I need just at a glance.. I dont need to click anywhere.. no need to scroll.. a great UI for information.

User Interface design and interaction wise.. 2nd, 3rd and 4th are great.. but does not give me enough information.. in which 4th one fails like anything.. 1st wins..

so on my cell I disabled all HTC cube or HTC Touch plug-in and gone back to my normal Windows Today screen.

I will be more glad and it will be more useful, if companies design user interfaces keeping information in mind rather than making people wow about the how it looks and how it animates, etc...

Technorati Tags: mobile,ui

ISO Image burning in Windows 7

Microsoft listened to its customers again, finally from Windows 7 you can straight away burn ISO images or in ur DVD or CD :)

Select image file and u will get Burn disc image option in tool bar :)

Are we animated?

well, yes title is correct. Are we animated? Have a look at the above advertisement, I am sure all of you have seen that and liked ad a lot.

After few days, in news channel we saw how this ads were made, and to our surprise this ads were done by wearing a suite and not animated characters, and we were all surprised, telling everyone that this ad is done by actually a real person wearing a suite.. I was also one of them. One day I was just sitting idle and thinking about ZooZoo ad, and thought I got was kind of amusing and funny for me. About 10-15 years back, if same ad was made and animated characters would have been used.. we would have surprised and said to everyone.. hey this ad is animated.. looks so nice.. you see what am trying to say? We are seeing so many animated things around us that for us anything which does not look real we think is animated. We forget that in earlier days people used to wear a suite and perform things like Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc.. but now we have got so much into digital world, that we have taken each and everything granted that it is computerized. Day is very near when we will see everything done on computer.. whole movie with actors like Shahrukh Khan not really a human but animated character, and when we will see real person performing we will be surprised. I know it is very extreme thought.. but still doesnt it really sound funny we getting surprised knowing that real person is actually wearing suite and acting like a ZooZoo.

GTalk issue

WHERE THE HELL IS OK BUTTON?

No Christmas in Sweden without Donald Duck

Nice interesting read: http://www.thenewsvault.com/cgi/xtra.pl?go=12302934366

I like Donald Duck a lot over Mickey Mouse. I just love Donald Duck.. I can also do mimic of Donald Duck :D

btw, belated Merry Christmas to all.

Fennec Mobile Browser – Alpha 2

Mozilla has recently released Fennec mobile Browser’s Alpha 2 release.

more info here: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081224-mozilla-releases-second-alpha-of-fennec-mobile-browser.html

Who says Footers are boring?

I was working on a web site and trying to look for few good footers.. Well, footers are not boring you can do a lot of things with footers, while I was searching on Yahoo!, I came across following link through digg.com

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/25-stylish-website-footer-designs/

25 stylish website footer designs.

101 Classic Computer Ads

Just found following web site:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/08/08/101-classic-computer.html

Shows 101 Classic Computer ads.. if you knows about earlier computer era.. this is must see for u all.. great stuff :)

Box and Reality

Below picture says it all

Xbox 360 Name

Following comic strip will give you idea on how Microsoft came up with name Xbox 360

http://i40.tinypic.com/xkneae.jpeg

of course its not true :)

Google’s Native Client plugin – Alternative to Microsoft ActiveX

Google has released a new experimental plugin called Native Client plugin for its browser, and Google aims to make it work on all major platforms and browsers. Google also claims that it will be a lot safer than Microsoft ActiveX.

My Note: Looking at past record with Google specially with Android, I seriously wonder how safer Native Client will be.. Google had made same claim earlier when Android was in Beta (BTW almost all products of Google are in Beta)

More info: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081209-safer-than-activex-a-look-at-googles-native-client-plugin.html

36-24-36

I was just talking about age.. dirty mind people.

Found this here: http://phatchicks.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-2243721,prtpage-1.cms

Job Posting talks about Zune-Xbox and Zune-Phone

More info : http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-10126637-27.html

Usefulness to Career Success

Silverlight 2.0 Resize using Resized Event

I remember doing this in Silverlight 1.0, when Silverlight 1.0 released, I thought of giving it a try, I wanted to make sure that Silverlight application that I create should resize it self based on browser size. I am very much particular about width and height for the web sites and web applications, as well as for any other applications. I do not like pixel values much, I prefer working in terms of %, as it makes my application layouts dynamic and adapt to the preferred size of the user. I remember doing this kind of thing in Silverlight 1.0 using Javascript, discovering how to do it was a bit difficult but it was easy to do in Silverlight 1.0

Recently, I started writing an article for my web site http://www.learnitonweb.com/ article on Menubar in Silverlight, and I wanted to do layout in %s format or dynamic format. This time I was using Silverlight 2.0, which means using languages like C# or VB.NET, this is where I really thought it will be really easy to do that, and yes it is.. following code will do that.

in C#

public Page()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
            App.Current.Host.Content.Resized += new EventHandler(Content_Resized);
        }

        void Content_Resized(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            this.Width = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth;
            this.Height = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualHeight;
        }

in VB.NET

Public Sub New()
       InitializeComponent()
       AddHandler App.Current.Host.Content.Resized, AddressOf Resized
   End Sub

   Private Sub Resized(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As EventArgs)
       Me.Width = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualWidth
       Me.Height = Application.Current.Host.Content.ActualHeight
   End Sub

Without resize you will see your Silverlight Application as follows:

Silverlight application with resizing

Windows Mobile Web Browsing

There is no good web browser available for Windows Mobile, Pocket IE is pathetic, half of things doesnt work in it, specially AJAX enabled sites, so I use Opera Mini.. but Opera Mini has its own issue, biggest issue is no copy-paste :( I really dont get it why people do not provide copy paste? including APPLE so called next gen iPhone.

anyways, Microsoft has been working on better version of Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile (IE6) you can have a look at it here - http://www.modaco.com/content/blackstone-blackstone-modaco-com/277328/modaco-custom-rom-for-blackstone-1-08-12-17-ie6-cf3-5-uc-1-19-based-more/

It does look amazing and makes browsing experience on mobile wonderful.

Toilet Paper Cheque

In Britain one man tried to pay his parking fees by writing a cheque on toilet paper, police officer refused and dragged him to a court, judge gave him funny punishment but at end winner is common sense.

More Info: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1096553/Payment-loo-Toilet-paper-cheque-lands-man-court.html