Auri's Blog

To all my Windows Phone Developer Friends –

There’s a lot of speculation, spin in the press, and [deserved] poor sentiment towards Microsoft and the handling of Windows Mobile development going forward.

That being said, we haven’t seen anything yet, and we won’t until MIX!

Let’s stay cool until we get the tools, and hear how things will play out. Then we can have informed opinions.

Remember, Microsoft is an 800 pound gorilla. They can build and shatter markets – not like they used to, but they can still do it.

And I think they can with mobile.

Windows Phone 7 Series – we all know this – is a necessary "reset" as they are calling it.

Writing apps has been easy, but our apps have required a lot of extra work to build great UIs. The OS has had more leaks than Swiss cheese.

I think Microsoft did the right thing. For those of us who have been writing apps using .NET for years, we continue to leverage that knowledge, and the ease of use of building apps. Have you tried writing an app in Objective C? How about trying to call a Web service in Android?

I feel we’re going to get good news out of MIX. The rest of the development platform at Microsoft (mobile) is hopefully finally catching up. Oh, and they’re opening up an opportunity (it seems) for single development multiple platform – write an app using XNA / Silverlight / WhateverisannouncedatMIX and you can sell it on Windows Phone, Zune and XBox 360. You should also be able to port your desktop apps, and tie them together with other Microsoft (and other) platforms more easily.

Of course, I don’t want to start on the speculation route.

So, that’s my $1.05 for the day. Enjoy 🙂

Best,

-Auri

Should be a good day and place for it…

WHAT: Windows Phone Development Cocktails & Conversation
WHEN: 8PM to whenever
WHERE: MIX Lounge, which is located in THEhotel, part of Mandalay Bay.

Please follow @AuriGroup on Twitter for more details.

Could you spread the word, please? Please retweet! 🙂

Wouldn’t it be great to have a Windows Phone Developer Party at MIX? Not “official” by any means, but just a way for us developers to get together, go over what we have learned, what we want, and maybe even give a lot of feedback to Microsoft? Heck, if we’re paying $1200 (or more) to go to a developer conference, why shouldn’t all these great minds (ahem) get together?

Let me know… Ping me on Twitter at @AuriGroup or @Auri or send me an email at http://aurigroup.com.

Every year, I record the Superbowl and create a DVD with just the game with no commercials, and the a separate disc with just the commercials and the entertainment (halftime concert and so forth). This year I bought an ATI Digital Wonder CableCard tuner and recorded the CBS high definition cable feed and it came out beautiful.

This year I decided to use Microsoft’s free Windows Live Movie Maker to edit the 1080i video, which is stored in a Microsoft TV file. While it has done a fine job, I ran into some issues that I hope will make it to the Live Movie Maker product team so they can make this an even more stellar product.

I have categorized my list of entries as Feature Requests, Update Requests, and Bugs.

Yes, I fully understand it’s a free app. But it’s a fantastic free app, and hey, it’s Microsoft, and they can do anything 🙂

So here we go:

• Bug: Live Movie Maker does not appear to continue encoding / saving a video if the computer locks. This is a problem, since Windows 7 automatically locks a computer after 10 minutes by default.

Figure: I started encoding at about 12pm, and the app appeared to be encoding just fine, at the 3% mark after 20 minutes. I left for lunch. My computer had locked the screen, and I didn’t touch it again for a few hours. When I unlocked it around 3pm, it wasn’t even past 7%. But the percentage meter started moving again after unlocking. As long as I prevented the computer from locking (it was plugged into a power supply and did not go to sleep), the video kept encoding. I got to the 41% mark before I left for the day. I left the laptop at the office overnight, and when I arrived in the morning and unlocked the computer, it was only at 60%. Ouch. Maybe it doesn’t stop encoding, but it sure does slow down to a short-bussed snail’s pace.

• Bug: Timeline preview doesn’t always appear to work, especially with high definition video. It just remains a long black area.

  UPDATE: It is actually not a black bar, it’s just the first frame of the video, continuously repeated.

Figure: Screen shot of the timeline bug.

• Feature: Utilize GPU video encoding.

• Feature: Save individual clips / trimmings as video files.
• Feature: Assign names to individual clips / trimmings.

Figure: How do I tell these clips apart? A textbox underneath the clip would be very helpful.

• Feature: Fast forward / reverse while trimming.
• Update: Seconds in Trim Tool is nice, but the seconds don’t show anywhere else – it’s minutes/seconds on video playback, so the position is hard to match up.
• Update: Provide a Properties context menu option to get information about the current video clip.
• Feature: Is it possible to see realtime video decoding with the slider, so we can slide quickly through video?
• Feature: Auto-save of projects, in case the app crashes, so you don’t lose all your work.
• Feature: Commercial removal feature, or a more obvious API for writing plug-ins? DVRMS Toolkit has commercial skip, so maybe that can be ported?
• Update: Maybe a paid version with more features?
• Update: Multiple in and out points in Trim Tool.
• Update: Ability to save in Blu-Ray ready formats like H.264 or MPEG-2, or allow plug-ins for different video encoders.

• Update: Make toolbars, such as effects, detachable or have them show your favorite / recent filters, since it’s a timewaster to keep scrolling down to the “fade from black” and so forth on every clip.
• Feature: Export to BluRay / AVCHD (this would be nice in Windows Media Center as well).

A lot of people have liked my post about Whoops pages, so I wanted to share some examples, including some my company has done. After the screen shots are some pointers for building your own Whoops pages.

Moon Dog Tavern’s Web site, where the owner is an avid cyclist:

I Left My Phone At Home, where we blame the gremlins:

B3TA’s Site:

Huml:

Many more examples can be found here.

Considerations for Whoops pages:

• Give the user links to pages that are most likely to work, including the home page (let us pray)
• Provide access to a contact form and/or phone number if you are a commerce site
• Whoops pages aren’t just for 404 (page not found) errors – they are almost mandatory for when something goes wrong (server errors) and making sure your development team knows something’s gone wacky!
• Watch your traffic reports and error logs to address these issues that customers are likely not reporting
• If you are using ASP.NET, you can configure your whoops pages in your web.config, including settings different pages for different types of errors.
• It’s also a good idea to point your Web server to more creative error pages, since you’re never guaranteed that CGI pages (ASP.NET, ASP, PHP, JSP, and so forth) are going to use your Whoops page for every document type.
• Don’t make your Whoops pages very intensive, such as including video from your own server (hint: use YouTube or some other video service instead). If there’s a popular page that isn’t working anymore, your bandwidth costs could go through the roof!

This actually reminds me, we have to do a new one on our own site <grin>… sending the email off to our UX team now!

Now, I personally think it would be funny to Rick Roll people on the Whoops page, but you may tick off your customers 🙂

Well, I’m a COLTS fan! What better way to celebrate our second trip to the Superbowl than a stadium shaped Bundt cake? But I’m also a geek, so why not also make a synth of said Bundt cake?

Here’s the Bundt cake (more photos here):

Here’s the links to the synths (I created two, just playing around with synth): (updated Feb 8 to fix some broken links, whoops)

First try: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=ac179592-570f-46c3-9089-750672ccb65c

Second try: http://photosynth.net/view.aspx?cid=39192387-1271-4ccd-851e-617d92e394db

In case you don’t know what PhotoSynth is… It’s a sweet free tool from Microsoft where you can take photos of an environment or object from many different angles, zooms, and perspectives and it will combine them all into a 3D environment you can navigate. That 3D environment also uses Microsoft’s “Deep Zoom” technology to enable instant loading of the synth at any resolution – loading only the part you need to view, but at the detail you need.

Try it out and let me know what you think. Or, create your own Synth today!

Bundt Cake Tech Specs:

• Mould was stadium shaped
• Blue sugar and white vanilla chocolate chips are in the cake
• Gummy bear spectators (hey, the Bears couldn’t make it to the ‘Bowl this year)
• Cream cheese frosting spires
• Aluminum foil Goodyear blimp (thanks to Steve for the idea)
• Green M&Ms for the turf
• Blue and White M&Ms for the Colts on the field, black and gold for the Saints
• Blue (Blueberry) and White (Coconut) Jelly Bellies for the Colts team on the sideline, Black (Blackberry) and Gold (Banana) Jelly Bellies for the Saints
• Vanilla icing for the sideline
• Some candy sticks for the field goals
• Plastic Colts emblem in the end zone

Well, I’m a big fan of “Whoops” pages, and Microsoft PhotoSynth’s site has a pretty cool one…

If you build Web sites, you should try to have a Whoops page in case anything goes wrong. It helps the user feel better about the site not working – much more so than a cryptic server error page or 404 “page not found” error.

You’d have to be a cave dweller not yet have heard of the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. Simply text the word QUAKE to 20222 on your US phone and $10 will be donated to the fund. However, I have met a lot of people who are not comfortable with texting, and they ask me to do it for them. Well, how hard could it be?

To make it simple, I wrote Help Haiti, a Windows Mobile app with a Donate button to quickly donate $10 from your phone. It also shows you a progress bar! How simple is that!?!

In addition to the good feeling you get after donating, you can also learn more about Haiti and find information numbers and Web sites, right inside the app.

Download it for free today at http://aurigroup.com/helphaiti.

I’ve also submitted it to the Windows Mobile Marketplace, and hopefully it will be available there soon 🙂

Here are some screen shots of the application in action: