Auri's Blog

http://live.visitmix.com/resources for all the code, samples, and more.

Yo-yo champion to entertain us while we wait…

They’re showing PhotoSynth being overlaid on maps. Also, overlaying geotagged images on maps in Bing. Very cool. Photos are taken from Flickr (and others?) and create what looks like synths. www.discoverbingmaps.com

Scott Guthrie (Corporate Vice President, Developer Division, Microsoft) is here. Biggest MIX event ever.

Talking about Silverlight EVERYWHERE. In the Media, RIA, and on the phone.

Silverlight was installed on 45% of all devices as of PDC 2009. Almost 60% now.

The almost-instant videos of Olympic events were created with a “Silverlight Rough Cut” editor. Way cool. All the code is being open sourced! Download at http://smf.codeplex.com.

Silverlight 4 will have Output Protection and Offline DRM, as well as Webcam, Microsoft, and Multicast Streaming. However, I’m wondering what kind of issues this will represent…

Slide of Silverlight 4 new features. Trusted apps that can reach outside sandbox. Hmm…  Right-click is a “new feature” – good thing Christian pointed that out – funny 🙂 Private Mode Browsing? Neat-o… Great for porn sites.

WYSIWYG XAML design editor in Visual Studio 2010… that should be nice. I need to play with that.

Showing Expression Blend 4. “Great support for Silverlight 4.” Free Upgrade for Expression Web 4, so if you have Expression Web 3, you’ll get 4 for free!

eBay is using Silverlight. Inviting them on stage now to talk about it. Showing eBay Simple Lister Beta. Can take photos of images and add them to listings. Sounds like a great online tool for eBayers. You can drag a photo from the desktop right into the application. That’s pretty cool. This app will be announced/released at the Silverlight 4 launch. eBay opened the “Open eBay” applications marketplace in the past month, so applications can be marketed on eBay. http://appstore.ebay.com

I really need Buzzword Baby at this point… The Cynergy guy is presenting.

I think I just wet myself over Silverlight 4 and Expression Blend 4. The Sketch Flow is AMAZING. Very, very interactive.

Expression Web 4 RC is now available for download.

Final version of Expression Web is being released next month.

Joe Belfiore is coming now. Then Scott’s going to show how to develop.

Development platform being announced. Corporate VP, Windows Phone.

Assuring us this is a real phone.

Wide tiles are called “double wides”.

What’s the ProjectX showing up in Belfiore’s calendar?

I’ll Be Late feature. Press the button and it asks you if you want to email the folks know that you’ll be late.

Idea of a hub is to create a central location that is task oriented. User can go there and find everything they care about relative to that data type. Sounds like Libraries in 7, but evolved. Hubs use a “panoramic experience,” which means the experience is wider than the screen.

Social networks must be aggregated via WINDOWS LIVE in order to be included in the feeds shown on the phone.

Whatever kind of music or video you like to use will appear in the hub… not sure what this means. Sounds like third-party apps will be allowed. Hey, maybe we’ll see iTunes for Windows Phone 7 Series! j/k 😉

Going to show apps written using XDA for the phone.

Showing AP Mobile app.

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Now showing Hush Hush diary app from Jackson Fish Market.

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Neat app, but obviously a very canned demo 🙂 Didn’t see the emoticon keyboard in the demo… maybe it was disabled. But that was strange.

Showing third party apps and how they can add value (i.e., link in) to the built-in apps.

Extras shows up in menus. Apps can identify themselves as “Photo Extension” and provide options. I’m imagining this is how the rest of the apps integrate. I like the floppy disk icon in the photo editing app extension.

Showing a 3D game called The Harvest. www.Lumaarcade.com appears to be the developer. Uses capacitive touch. This is an Xbox live game, so achievements can be earned.

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Ok, he wrapped up. And now we’re back to Scott, who will explain how to build these apps.

Windows Phone 7: Silverlight + XNA

• Fully hardware accelerated
• This is Silverlight. No limitations. No compact framework bull***t anymore it seems 🙂
• Three templates built-in to VS2010 so far: Phone App, List App, Class Library.
• Designer is like VS2008, but XAML, but has the awesome designer stuff we WANT. That’s awesome. Double click and add code, just like you’d expect. This really changes the development game, since Apple and Android tools suck compared to Microsoft’s.
• An emulator is provided. It’s a “real phone”.
• Still don’t see emoticons in the keyboard anymore. What happened? Must be a setting?
• Finally, orientation support in the emulator.
• You can set the supported page orientations – that’s good 🙂

Scott’s about to show how to build a Twitter client

• Added a Silverlight listbox
• Not using the real Twitter, though, lol (api-twitter-com rather than api.twitter.com)
• Using LINQ-to-XML to parse the XML and bind them to the twitter items class and to the Listbox
• Ok, that was very cool – a Twitter client in less than 5 minutes
• If you’re running on a Windows 7 system with multi-touch, you can click and drag on images and get full multi-touch in the PC, and on the emulator! 🙂

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Inviting Jon Harris, Senior Product Manager@ Microsoft, on Designing Windows Phone Apps in Blend

Showing Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone

Is that a separate product? Doesn’t appear to be, so maybe he misspoke.

Building an MVC app. Just dragging View Models into the app and adding it to the Data panel in Expression. He can create object data sources and work with them while designing. Drag them into the design surface and the app databinds and shows the data. Pretty cool.

You can import Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator documents inside of Expression Blend. I don’t know if this already existed, but that sure will help from the dev side – no more asking for JPEGs. I wonder how this affects the image size when deployed?

Can make any XAML page into a “control” … not sure what this means. Keynotes never have that level of detail, but will definitely try to learn more about this feature.

Supposedly Windows Phone 7 developer tools are now available, but I don’t see the tools online yet. Keep watching http://developer.windowsphone.com.

  Waiting for SDK…

All developer tools will be FREE FOR PHONE DEVELOPMENT. This is a very cool deal.

UPDATE: Tools will be available from MSDN or http://developer.windowsphone.com after 11AM Pacific.

Showing Netflix app. Scott Stanfield showing the app.

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You can stream movies to the phone with the Netflix app, and it can change the bitrate on the fly (read Smooth Stream on phone!).

You’ll be able to resume movies, too! NICE!

Third party content integrates into the video area if asked.

Back to Scott…

Silverlight on Windows Phone 7 supports Deep Zoom. I wonder if they’ll add PhotoSynth to the phones? PhotoSynth + GeoTagging would be way sweet.

Showing Graphic.Ly app. View comic books on phone.

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Many of these apps are showing list views. While that’s cool, how do the other types on non-game apps look?

Showing Deep Zoom on the comic books. Also showed thumbnail view. Pretty cool. But I’m not a comic book fiend, but the tech demo is pretty nice. Losing the audience a bit – wondering what they’re going to show that is just super amazing.

Note that there is zero mention about porting your existing apps.

Scott’s about to show Location and Map support. Users must give permission to use Location and Map – although he hasn’t provided information on this permission stuff. No demo of Marketplace yet.

Foursquare’s Laura Foy is about to chat about their Twitter app. Funny – her intro image shows a Macbook Pro.

I’d really like to see the install process and Marketplace.

Next up: Jeff Sandquist of Shazam

Windows Phone 7 apps can access the raw audio input from the mic.

(just thought about this… you’ll finally get a Windows Phone 7 Series at MIX… in the form of an emulator <grin>)

Looks like you can download music found in Shazam straight from Zune Marketplace.

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Scott’s back, talking about Push Notification support.

Charlie Kindel will show Major League Soccer’s app.

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Now for a demo of Marionette. Dressed up Steve Ballmer and tossed him around a bit. Funny.

Inviting Loic Le Meur from Seesmic on the stage.

Showing Seesmic Desktop running entirely on plug-ins.

Mobile version of the app is mostly the same code used for Seesmic Desktop.

Coding4Fun: Cannon

App to remotely control a cannon. Uses accelerometer to steer the cannon. Hahaha. Cool.

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Shooting shirts into the audience. This thing has RANGE. Nice.

They will be open-sourcing the code to the cannon.

Now on to XNA

Free Visual Studio plug-in to enable the XNA stuff…

Larry Hryb is showing GooSplat and Battle Punks, written using XNA.

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Showing how the same Harvest app will work on PC, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone.

Demos were created in about 3 weeks. (question: how many people? what are the details behind that data?)

On the Marketplace

There are both TRY and BUY buttons in Marketplace

He sort-of said you’ll be able to upload from Visual Studio or Expression to Marketplace. Not sure if that’s what he meant, but that sure would be cool. Kind of like Azure’s deployment model

You can download the Windows Phone Developer Tools… including Visual Studio 2010 for Windows Phone, Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone, and XNA Studio for Windows Phone. These will be FREE FOREVER.

http://developer.windowsphone.com

It’s up!

Ok, I’m at MIX and the swag is in. No, the “you get a Windows Phone 7 Series” are NOT true – yet. There were a lot of rumors, so let’s dispel those now:

• NO Windows Phone 7 Series
• NO Free Zune Windows Phone 7 Series Development Kit
• NO Windows Phone 7 Series SDK (yet!)
• NO advanced electronic hardware has been handed out yet whatsoever

Even the #mix10 conference folks tweeted to dispel the rumors. Apparently it got pretty out of hand 🙂

But there has been some pretty cool swag so far (images are below):

• Cool name badges with Windows logo + zipper
• Awesome “Love the Web Together” T-Shirt
• Pencils galore (umm, ok)
• Magic 8 Ball (typical MS conference fare)
• Microsoft Translator Leeds timer
• “Field Notes” notebook – pretty cool since it says “The Brutality of MIX Online”
• MIX 10 playing cards and water bottle

 
Figure: Name badge.

Figure: The T-Shirt.

Clockwise from left: There are pencils in that tube! Magic 8 Ball, Field Notes, HP Pen (no e-Ink), and MIX 10 Playing Cards.

 
Figure: Pencils.

  The “Field Notes” notebook.

 
The timer + clock.

Ooh! A water bottle! It says Windows Phone, though, so that’s cool 🙂 No, the laptop was NOT handed out.

More coming after the keynote… will try to live blog, but pffbt…

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.