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New Game Dev Tool: XNA Game Studio Express

Okay, now that I've made my crack about the statement of Chris Satchell, General Manager of Microsoft's Game Developer Group, let me get down to more serious posting.

XBox 360.

Don't let my habit of Microsoft-bashing fool you: there's some neat tech coming out of Redmond that I'm interested in. I've been rather pleased with the XBox 360 that I won at the Ajax Experience conference in Boston back in October, and I have been given the opportunity to give Vista another chance on some nice new hardware (more about that later). These two are about to meet in an interesting new way thanks to XNA Game Studio Express, which I'm dying to try.

As the XNA FAQ puts it, XNA Game Studio Express, which was released only a few days ago, is “a new game development solution targeted primarily at students, hobbyists, and independent game developers”. Based on the Visual C# Express 2005 IDE, XNA Game Studio Express is an integrated development environment built specifically for indie game developers who want to build games for both Windows and the XBox 360. It comes with the following:

  • XNA Framework, a set game development-specific libraries.
  • XNA Framework Content Pipeline, a set of tools for more easily incorporaing 3D content into games.
  • A full set of documentation, how-tos, and starter kits that demonstrate how to use the framework and content pipeline.

XNA Game Studio Express is free-as-in-beer, but in order to develop and play and games for the XBox 360, you need an XNA Creators' Club membership, which sells for $99 a year. (Perhaps I can use some of my blog juice to get one for free.)

It looks as though I should get started on my reading, and one of the things I'll check out the first part of a two-part gamesindustry.biz article titled The DNA of XNA, in which both Chris Satchell and game design guru Peter Molyneux talk about XNA and offer advice to budding young game coders.

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MS Exec's Statement Confirms Long-Term Potential for Nintendo Wii

If ever there was an argument for buying Nintendo stock, this headline from gamesindustry.biz is it:

MS exec questions long term potential for Nintendo Wii

Consider their track record in any field where they've gone up against real competition.

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Installation Headaches: Just One of the Factors Behind the Move to Web Apps

Installer icon for Vista

Nick Bradbury summarizes the installation experience (at the least the way it is for Windows users) in explaining why there's a move to web-based applications:

When you try to download something, you're presented with a security warning about how the software could potentially harm your computer. If you install the program despite this warning, your firewall often displays an intimidating dialog asking whether you really want to trust this application enough to let it talk to the outside world. It's a one-two punch that's driving away many would-be users of desktop software.

Maybe that's part of the problem, but I'm sure that there are other factors involved as well, such as:

  • Collaboration is easier with web apps: Collaborating on a file is often done by passing it around via email messages, which requires the extra step of attaching it to a mail message, not to mention the conceptual overhead of files and filesystems. I know lots of people who when asked “Where did you save your speadsheet?”, answer with “I saved it in Excel.”
  • Many web apps are free of charge to the user: For the casual user of web apps, the price tag of a desktop app may the barrier to entry; why buy something when someone's offering the same functionality for free?
  • Slickness: A good number of web apps — consider the 37signals ones — are beautifully designed, whereas desktop apps are staid-looking creatures by comparison.
  • No update headaches: This is really an extension of the headaches associated with installation. Just as web apps free you from having to do installation, they also free you from having to do updates.
  • Easier on the IT staff: At a recent presentation by Microsoft Canada, I watched a twenty minute-long presentation just on the application and update deployment features of Vista. This sort of thing has always been one of IT's biggest headaches, and moving to a web-based app — which gets rid of a lot of installation issues — is appealing to IT.

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Thoughts on the Silicon Valley Asshole’s Society

And all this time I’d thought that the Silicon Valley Asshole’s Society was just a list of people in my head, but as Marc Canter wrote in a recent blog entry, such a thing existed, and he was one of the co-founders along with Stewart Alsop and Dave Winer. Better still, in a move that only a supreme asshole would make, Jean-Louis Gassee came to the first meeting/party and proposed that they kick out Canter.

I imagine that the first meeting of a club of such bloodyminded personalities must’ve gone something like this:

legion of doom

A “Legion of Doom” meeting, as depicted by Seanbaby. Click to see the source.

Unlike the Legion of Doom, pictured above, I doubt that the Silicon Valley Asshole’s Society had any women members. I think this is one of those cases where there wouldn’t be much hue and cry over a lack of diversity.

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RSS is “The Next Big Thing” — and Has Been for the Past 3 Years

I got a sense of deja vu when I saw that the first item in Read/Write Web’s Predictions for 2007 was “RSS will go mainstream in a big way. A quick look back to their predictions for 2006 told me why: they predicted roughly the same thing — albeit more catiously — that RSS would “inch towards the mainstream”.

That still didn’t explain that nagging feeling that I’d heard exuberant RSS predictions before. All it took was a little Googling to find that this is at least the fourth year in which pundits predicted “RSS is gonna explode in the coming year!” Case in point…

2004

2005

2006

Perhaps I should start a betting pool on when the pundits will stop predicting that RSS will go mainstream next year. I’ll put money down on 2009. Any takers?

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Tech News Tidbits for December 19

Work these days has been keeping both me and George busy, but the Blogger's Credo (“No posting, no world domination!”) tugs at our souls, telling us to keep blogging. There'll be some of the usual editorializing and smart-ass commnetary later on today, but in the meantime, here are the news tidbits that have caught our interest:

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Google Drops the SOAP

A bar of soap on a shower floor.

Okay, maybe the joke in the title is “phoned in”, but it's late and I'm tired.

The quick summary: without much fanfare, Google has deprecated its SOAP API for search. The API will still be available to current users, but they've stopped issuing API keys for the SOAP service, and updates to the SOAP API have stopped. They're encouraging developers to switch to their Ajax API, which isn't as flexible in both the technological or terms-of-use senses.

Developers looking for a search engine with a decent API should take a look at Yahoo!'s Search API, which is not only available for use, but also REST based (which is a great deal less painful to code for).

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