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.)