#BizSpark Manager @Microsoft_SG, Founder @SGGeekGirls, Writer @sgentrepreneurs. I write about startups, technology and musings about life in Singapore.
Geek is the new cool. And we love our geek friends. What type are you? Source: BCO
The search for our beginning could lead to our end. The new movie Prometheus sees a team of explorers discover a clue to the origins of mankind on Earth, leading them on a journey to the darkest corners of the universe. There, they must fight a terrifying battle to save the future of the human race. In preparation for the upcoming film Prometheus (in theaters on June 8), Weyland Industries is accepting applicants to join the crew of the Project Prometheus spaceship. Today, the Internet Explorer team is proud to announce our partnership with Fox Studios to create the Project Prometheus Training Center — designed entirely in HTML5 — giving fans the chance to demonstrate they are capable of being a crew member on the Prometheus ship. The Training Center hosts a series of online physical and cognitive assessments that will test your ability to be a functioning member of the Project Prometheus team, including testing emotional and intelligence quotients, spatial relations, agility, and even your ability to withstand 46 G’s. The HTML5 experience leans heavily upon jQuery for the UI and controls, and the team even created a special 3D library for the Spatial Relations and Prefrontal Cortex Assessments to import features such as 3D models, lighting, hit testing and camera rotation. The code library will be available for download on our Internet Explorer channel on GitHub in the coming weeks. Do you have what it takes to keep your head at 46 G’s? Good luck! Check out the center here. Read more about the building of the HTML5 site on the IE Blog or check out the Promethus Youtube Channel.
Guess what’s brewing in our labs? It’s the start of the Windows 8 App Excellence Labs! As a part of our Windows 8 Developer Camps, Microsoft Singapore has been offering a free 2 hour App Excellence Lab to App developers. What is the Application Excellence Lab? The App Excellence Lab is when our friendly and lovely Microsoft engineers go through your Windows 8 app together with you and help you with issues or problems that you might have. We’ll let you know what is good, what can be better and how to go about doing it! The best part? After each successful App Excellence Review, conducted remotely, each developer receives a free token to the Windows Store. Here’s an inside peek on what goes on inside, our friendly Microsoft engineer and Developer Evangelists helping Jonathan (a student from Singapore Poly with his Win 8 app) and giving him advice. And remember, the Release Preview is now due the first week of June 2012. There are limited timeslots available in which you can get your App reviewed. Get in early, or you will miss out!
We know you’ve been waiting for this for some time now.. and we’re happy to announce that the videos from Campfire are finally here. If you missed out on the very awesome speaker sessions we had at #MSCampfire, fret not. You can now view all the sessions online. We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts. Drop us a comment here or on Facebook if you have anything you’d like to say! Remember, you can also find the speaker slides here.
We’ve been hearing a lot of talk about Metro, which is code name for a design language for Windows 8, Windows Phone 7, X Box and other Microsoft software. What’s Metro about anyway? Metro draws from classic Swiss design, with its emphasis on simplicity, typography leading navigation and way-finding graphics found in transportation hubs. The bold, clear lettering and iconography are key to helping commuters find their way to subways and air travelers navigate to their boarding gates. The key element in this design language is to allow users to focus more on the content that is delivered, rather than the various frames that we are used to. With its’ straight lines and rectangular tiles, it might appear that Metro design is easy to implement for apps, but the reality is that Metro was made for motion and content. The animations, content make a big difference when it comes to attracting attention to your applications. Simply put, the content and images draw you to the application itself, while the animations help you bring it alive. How do you go about designing an awesome Metro App? Here is a list of tips and resources you can refer to. 1. Get the tools to prototype. MSDN has a good repository of templates, icons and styles that you may refer to. These include: ...
We’ve been hearing a lot of talk around Metro, which is at the center of the new Windows 8 experience. Shane Morris, ex-Microsoft User Experience Design Evangelist and currently Director at Automatic Studio, was recently in town and shared lots of great tips about how to navigate Metro design. Code named ‘Metro’; this design theme is inspired by one of the most common sights we see in our daily lives – the Metro (or the MRT in our case!) If you’ve noticed, the signs, guidelines at our Metro/MRT stations have a clean, clear, distinctive design theme. The straight lines, squares and circles make it easy to distinguish and identify the stations. This is the key objective of the new Metro User Experience with Windows 8 as well. Shane shared that Metro is quintessentially a design that immerses users in the content. Instead of trying to re-create real life experiences on your tablet, it makes use of clean, modern and motion design to bring apps to life. This design also makes it easy to distinguish apps from one another – and if you as a developer make the effort to, you can easily bring your app to life with the ‘live tiles’ and attract users back to your application. Here are Shane’s slides: ...
#MSCampfire was an amazing opportunity for us to gather developers, IT professionals, students and start-ups together. Over the course of 3 days we saw 600 attendees come together to discuss and share about the latest in web and mobile technology, had the brightest student minds pit their heads together in the Semis and Final of Imagine Cup SG to tackle some of the toughest real-world problems and saw the grit and passion from start-ups in Singapore from the Singapore Satellite of Echelon by our partner E27. All these wouldn’t have been possible without your support. Thank you so much for attending #MSCampfire and we hope to continually see you for the rest of our events. For those of you who missed #MSCampfire, fret not! Our next event happening on 10 May is HTML 5 on Metro. During this session, we’ll speak specifically about how HTML5 is changing the way applications are designed and how best to use it to create Metro-styled apps! Register now at bit.ly/html5onmetro Here are the slides from each session and the coverage on it. 10:30 – 11:30 Keynote – Rob Miles (Coverage by E27) 16:30-17:30 The Kinect Effect: Infinite Possibilities – Rob Miles Slides and (mostly working) code from the presentations - here C# Yellow Book, Windows Phone Blue book and other free stuff - here .NET Micro Framework embedded development - here Gadgeteer embedded development - here Three Thing Game student madness – here Windows Phone development - here Dreamspark, free software for students - here Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio – here Kinect For Windows SDK – here 11:30 – 12:30 Prototype, Prototype, Prototype – Shane Morris (Coverage by E27) ...
One of the things that can really bug a user is when you don’t have access to your data. Over the last year we’ve been hard at work building SkyDrive alongside Windows 8, setting out a unique approach to designing personal cloud storage for billions of people by bringing together the best aspects of file, app, and device clouds. [caption id=“attachment_8881” align=“alignnone” width=“652” caption=“Special folder stays in sync with your SkyDrive”][/caption] Today, we’re excited to take another big step towards our vision by making SkyDrive far more powerful. There are new storage options, apps that connect your devices to SkyDrive, and a more powerful device cloud that lets you “fetch” any file from a Windows PC. Starting today, we are now offering: ...
Check out this awesome project by our Australian DPE team! From their blog: We decided to push the boundaries for HTML5’s canvas tag in this beautiful photo gallery visualiser. So we at La La Ninja decided to make ForestFly – http://forestfly.lalaninja.com.au by Tom Knight from Xamling ForestFly was designed to provide a simple, yet visually appealing method of viewing facebook photo albums. With limited knowledge of Canvas, HTML5 Video and Audio elements, our designer and I managed to complete the project in less than 5 days thanks to broad community knowledge and relative ease of use. ...
Windows 8 Developer Camp - HTML5 on Metro will be the biggest technical event Microsoft Singapore is organizing on Windows 8. HTML5 is here, and with it, web applications take on power, ease, scalability, and responsiveness like never before. HTML5 on Metro lets developers learn how to use the latest cutting-edge HTML5 web technology to build Windows 8 applications with unparalleled functionality, speed, and responsiveness. Featuring Giorgio Sardo, Senior Technical Evangelist, Microsoft Corporation Giorgio is a popular speaker worldwide and in the last 5 years he has presented at many conferences about HTML5, the Web and Mobile Platform. He is the mind behind many beautiful HTML5 applications and games at beautyoftheweb.com and Cut the Rope for IE. AGENDA 10 AM Behind the Scenes of Cut The Rope 11 AM Getting started with Window 8 Metro Apps 12 PM Lunch 1 PM Metro for HTML/JS Developers 2 PM Responsive App Design 3 PM Break 4 PM Client + Cloud integration with Azure ...