XBox pushes the boundaries at Microsoft E3

A host of new XBox titles at E3 this week. Most surprising for me was the first. Beatles Rockband. What were the politics involved in bringing Apple Corps to the table to produce this. Did they just do it for the money, or do they think that the time is right for the XBox to become more of a central media centre. It was certainly done one hundered and ten percent, with appearances from Olivia and Yoko, then Paul and Ringo who were allowed the luxury of talking. I wasn’t too impressed by Sir Paul and his chewing gum. Sometimes that man has no style.

Game09 at Imperial College

An interesting day looking at some new techniques in games software, pushing the angle of how a clever department at Imperial College in London, can help game studios with their research and production. It was a smaller group than I was expecting but it had an interesting group of talks, with some stimulating conversations around some of the research areas that the college students are involved with. I’ve been talking with contacts at other universities and they do seem to have the time to look into areas whereas a commercial company has to keep more tightly to their production plan. The computer department here has a lot of AI studies, which reflected in some of the talks.

Google IO Developer conference

Impressive keynotes at the Google IO conference over the last couple of days. Eric Schimdt opened but most of it was led by Vic Gundotra. He’s ex Microsoft, so not unused to being the lead in technologies and Google certainly seem to be pushing the leading edge as fast as they can. Lots more services; lots more apps, lots more things in the browser that you wouldn’t believe a couple of years ago (or maybe one year ago!). He gave everyone a free Android and a month free on the sim card. That made everyone smile, then surprise them all with Google Wave at the end. Very supportive of HTML5 and pushing Java everywhere. They made you want to start using all the apps now, even Google Wave which is still at an early beta.The big push is towards more openness. Google will open up areas where you can easily run your app; they make it easy to run in the browser but also now run when disconnected. It just shouldn’t be this easy for new programmers to do this. They will surely not be able to appreciate the skills of programming if they haven’t had hours wasted installing servers and more hours setting up a development system. This is just cut and paste programming but it makes me excited.

Thoughts on wireframes and mock-ups

I started looking around for some software that would allow a team to sketch out some quick interfaces to show clients, but I didn’t realize how many people were writing software for this. What’s more, I didn’t realize that all of them would have some special features that would would cause me to bounce around them for hours. I had to give several a test before knowing what I was looking for. Wireframing apps have been around forever, but there is a huge gap in price and facilities and these two factors are now always linked. I’ve been using real applications to mock up my screens in the past, so that no effort is wasted; I normally use Flex, Dreamweaver or Visual Studio, but more recently have needed to get into Expression Blend and now Flash Catalyst. These are all excellent tools, but when you’d like someone else to take some of the workload, you need something that they can pick up and run with straight away. Here I look at some of the utilities that might help to do that – iPlotz, Balsamiq Mockups, FlairBuilder, Axure, Protoshare among others.

Cloud Expo

I went across to the Cloud Expo at the Barbican. Not a huge event; not crowded by any means. There was a small set of exhibitors and some conference tracks with both business and technical sessions. Probably more people looking to see what a cloud was rather than those that were using it in earnest. I didn’t need to spend all day there, but I did see a couple of useful technical overview sessions from Simone Brunnozi of Amazon and Simon Wardley of Canonical, who support the Ubuntu software distribution.

Scoble Mind Map

I had an interesting hour last Wednesday listening to the FriendFeed from Robert. He was just about to talk to a meeting of CIOs and put up a picture of a mind map for the ideas he was thinking of discussing. He had a number of suggestions about both how to present the ideas and also what ideas should be covered. I found it enlightning so I’ve added the original mind map here for reference.

Microsoft Surface tests

I had one of these awesome boxes to play with this week. The Surface is Microsoft’s multi touch display table. It runs on Windows Vista Business OS and we can develop in a normal Visual Studio environment using C#. In our case, we wanted to look at ideas for use of the table by television presenters, so we looked at a few interactive ideas and the connectivity of the box.

Test drive of Confluence on Amazon EC2

I took advantage of the bargain deal at Atlassian the other day; a 5 user licence for Confluence and Jira for $10. I’d been thinking of trying it out after a mention at the FOWA conference last year. So, if it involved EC2 as well that could be an ideal project.

Luckily there is a pre-built demo image that I could install on the Amazon Cloud so I just sped through the very quick tutorial by Adrian Hempel It was as easy as he says.

Asynchronous delegates in C#

I wanted to understand delegates and ways of invoking code asynchronously a bit better, so that I could write a better handler for controlling a TCP socket. This is a post to show a small test program to handle a class with a long process in it that will fire an event when the process finishes. It was originally from an example by Silan Liu at http://progtutorials.tripod.com/C_Sharp.htm. I’ve added the class and events to his invoking.

Wasp3D gives a bit of a sting

We’ve had the Wasp3D guys over for a day or two of demos. They’ve been showing us their latest version and demonstrating the touch screen developments. It’s been interesting and they have some new techniques, but the vizRT designers are not convinced by the workflow yet.