TechVibes points to StartupNorth’s story on PushLife being acquired by Google. According to TechVibes, this makes it the third Toronto-based company to be acquired by the Big G, with Bumptop (created by DemoCamp guy-at-large Anand Agarawala) and SocialDeck being the other two.
Congrats, Pushlife! It’s always nice to see a local company make good.
Even just five years ago, you might not have predicted that a computer programmer would have a movie made about him or that he and his software would be on the cover of MAD Magazine.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Today, at Yonge Dundas Square in the heart of Toronto, the three finalists for the Great Canadian Appathon, a 48-hour programming marathon to create games for Windows Phone 7, showed their creations to the judges. Their apps were:
The Great Canadian Appathon was a contest open to Canadian post-secondary students where they were challenged to write a great mobile game for Windows Phone 7 (the official mobile platform of the Appathon) in a 48-hour marathon session on the weekend of March 9th. The event was put together by the Toronto-based mobile game development shop XMG Studio with the help of the National Post, KPMG, Telus and Microsoft. As the Windows Phone guy on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, I was only to happy to catch the final round.
In the end, here’s how it broke down:
Plasmium takes its inspiration from the visual style of the Xbox 360 game Geometry Wars, sticking to “simple shapes but glowy particle effects and bright colours”. It was part stylistic decision, but also part pragmatic: they didn’t have an artist on the team.
“We’re all programmers of course,” said team member Michael Hoffman, “so we decided right from the beginning to overcome our lack of artistry [by using] procedurally generated graphics. And it looks very nice even though you can make those sort of graphics with just programmers drawing triangles.”
Plasmium’s team is from McGill and consisted of Michael Darwish, Michael Hoffman and Marek Zaluski.
Valley Raid is based on the classic Atari 2600 game River Raid, Activision’s scrolling shooter from 1982. Like River Raid, Valley Raid has the player piloting a fighter plane through a valley, destroying enemies and obstacles and picking up power-ups along the way. Unlike its ‘80s predecessor, Valley Raid is a 3-D game; in fact, it was one of only 3 out of more than 50 submitted to the Appathon that were 3-D.
“Because the game we chose was a 3D game and a 3D game is really tough to do, so the time was so short on us that we just had to code as fast as we could,” said team member Mahdi Tayarani Najaran.
Valley Raid’s team is from UBC and made up of Eason Hu, Mahdi Tayarani Najaran and Ben Sheftel.
Super Punch is a physics-based game in which you control a superhero who continually punches a supervillain through the air for maximum distance. Success lets you score points which you can use to buy upgrades to eventually be powerful enough to send the supervillain into space.
“We love the condensed time line because we come up with everything off the cuff and its all from scratch, you just have to come up with something really quick,” said team member Pieter Parker. “A lot of ideas died that first day, but one made it out and that was Super Punch.”
Super Punch’s team comes from two schools in Edmonton: Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and University of Alberta. It consisted of Stephen Baden, Jeremy Burns, Pieter Parker and Tyler Ste Marie.
Here’s a video of Super Punch in action:
Congratulation to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated!
No joke, this is an actual title of a presentation taking place today at the Enterprise Data World conference:
You’ve got to hand it to presenter Jim Goetsch: there’s no doubt as to what his session is all about.
Karen “DataChick” Lopez took a photo at the session and threw in a Ken doll for surreal good measure:
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Microsoft’s MIX conference, a gathering for web, mobile and UI-focused developers and designers, takes place next week in Las Vegas, from the 12th through 14th. You can expect to hear announcements and see sessions about Microsoft’s web and mobile technologies, from Internet Explorer to Silverlight to Windows Phone and more at this event. If you’re going to be there, we’d love to catch up with you!
If you can’t make it, there’s no reason for you to miss out on the keynotes and sessions, because you’ll be able to catch them online:
Creative Commons photo by i_yudai. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
By now, you’ve probably read the article titled Standards-Based Web, Plug-ins and Silverlight, which was written by three heavy-hitters within Microsoft: Walid Abu-Hadba (he runs Microsoft’s Developer & Platform Evangelism group), Scott “The Gu” Guthrie (Corporate VP of the .NET Developer Platform) and S. “Soma” Somasegar (Senior VP of the Developer Division). In the article, they talk about HTML5, Silverlight, and where they see both fit in the grand scheme of things. Their timing is intentional: the MIX conference is next week, and we’ll be doing a lot of talking about Silverlight and HTML5, and people have been puzzling over Microsoft’s stance on the two.
(If you haven’t read the article yet, go read it now, then feel free to come back here.)
In the end, what it all means is that you, the developer, have options:
If that message sounds familiar, it’s probably because you saw an amusing little video I made last year, titled HTML5 and RIAs: Friends with Benefits…
(Really, I need to make more amusing little videos. It’s fun.)
In their commentary on Standards-Based Web, Plug-ins and Silverlight, InfoQ point to some market research from Telerik (if you’re not familiar with development in the Microsoft sphere, they’re a vendor of components for .NET programmers) in which they confirmed that:
Whatever you love, we’ve got you covered with a commitment to both HTML5 and Silverlight.
Creative Commons photo by Friends of San Jacinto. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
The “It’s Your Call” philosophy extends to Windows Phone 7. Silverlight shines on the Phone as a way to build apps with standard controls and user interfaces, but we’ve also thrown in XNA for games and graphics-intensive apps as well. Pick the framework that works best for building your app and run with it!
And yes, we’re going to have the mobile web covered with IE9 for WP7. Joe Belfiore demoed it at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona back in February. It does HTML5 and it’s got the hardware acceleration goodness that its desktop counterpart has, too.
Creative Commons photo by Samantha Marx. Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
As is the tradition, there are always some interesting announcements at MIX, and you may be pleased at the options you’ll soon have. Keep an eye on the conference through this blog to find out what else is your call!
I never met Ryland Sanders in person, just online. Still, I feel that his passing should be noted because a) he often made me laugh, and b) he often made the internet laugh with his site, Says-It, and the many sign/sticker/seal generators he created for that site, including the ever-popular Church Sign Generator.
He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease for some time, and as a result died this weekend – twice. Once in the ambulance, and after being revived, for the second and final time in hospice. True to Ryland form, his last words were written in a note to his family: “WTF?” He was the same age as me: 43.
In his honour, here’s a “Church Sign War” purportedly between a Catholic church and a Presbyterian one. It was created with his Church Sign Generator, got forwarded like mad in a zillion emails and caused such controversy that Snopes had to step in and debunk it:
Requiescat in pace, Ryland.
This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.