Windows Phone News: Life of the Party, Petzold’s Book Updated, Glow Air Hockey

The Life of the Party

Last night, I attended my friend Alexa Clark’s photo exhibit, which took place at Camaraderie, a downtown Toronto coworking space for indies and entrepreneurs. This sort of event at this sort of location tends to bring out techies with an interest in design and designers with a technical bent, and they all came up to me with the same question: So, do you have one of those Windows phones?

I pulled out my Samsung “Taylor” phone, let people take try it out, and here were the responses:

• “I like the main screen. Less cluttered than my iPhone’s.”
• (Flipping through the People hub) “That’s a great way to organize pages!”
• (Seeing my wife’s tile on the Start screen, pinned to the top) “So people can have their own icon right on the home page? That’s great!”
• (Seeing the way pages animate as you navigate) “That’s a nice touch.”
• (On the overall design) “This is a Microsoft phone?”
• “Love the clean look.”

Here’s what Wayne Lee, one of the people behind Camaraderie, tweeted about the phone:

Programming Windows Phone 7 Updated

Charles Petzold – the guy who literally wrote the book on Windows programming – is working away on Programming Windows Phone 7 and has released another free preview version of the book. The first preview had 6 chapters; this latest version weighs in at 11 chapters and 265 pages.

Here’s the current table of contents:

• Part I: The Basics
  • Chapter 1   Hello, Windows Phone 7
  • Chapter 2   Getting Oriented
  • Chapter 3   An Introduction to Touch
  • Chapter 4   Bitmaps, Also Known as Textures
  • Chapter 5   Sensors and Services
  • Chapter 6   Issues in Application Architecture
• Part II: Silverlight
  • Chapter 7   XAML Power and Limitations
  • Chapter 8   Elements and Properties
• Part III: XNA
  • Chapter 20   Principles of Movement
  • Chapter 21   Textures and Sprites
  • Chapter 22   Touch and Play

This preview is free-as-in-beer, and the final ebook, which comes out October 28th, will also be free-as-in-beer!

Get your hands on the book and associated downloads:

• Programming Windows Phone 7 in PDF format [4MB]
• Programming Windows Phone 7 in XPS format [8.2 MB]
• Sample code for the book (works with WP7 July beta)

Windows Phone 7 Game: Glow Air Hockey

Glow Air Hockey is a game Social Indulgence that lets you play air hockey game against the phone or a friend. There’s a little more information about the game at Glow Air Hockey’s page.

(In the video above, the red dots are the players’ finger positions as shown in the emulator; you won’t see them when you’re actually playing the game on the phone.)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.