Held at the NTUC Auditorium on 10 May 2012, this developers’ camp introduced Singaporean developers and IT professionals to the power of HTML5, elaborating on how the markup language will feature prominently in creating software for the Windows 8 platform.
A fully immersive experience
Senior Technical Evangelist Giorgio Sardo and Architect Advisor Hammad Rajjoub opened the event, talking about the multiple touch capabilities of the Metro UI and demonstrating the fluidity of the tiled start menu. With its graphic-intensive approach, full-screen interfaces and standardisation of gestures across applications, the user experience is expected to be intuitive and effective.
Rajjoub mentioned that Windows 8 works across a range of diverse platforms, despite the differences between specs such as mobile screens and large-screen monitors. He demonstrated how the search function is integrated across apps as well as web, with a one-stop “live updating” solution for the user.
Placing emphasis on the new “snap” function, Rajjoub showed how switching from one screen to another would enable easy multitasking while running several apps at the same time. He also noted that coding processes for Windows 8 will feel familiar to those accustomed to C# and Visual Basic. Be it HTML, Javascript, C# or Visual Basic, all could be used to create Metro-style apps.
Smooth gaming processes
Sardo shared his experience with gaming on Windows 8, showing the camp participants an exclusive sneak preview of Resident Evil that smoothly rendered with little noticeable lag on his laptop. XBox games are “easily ported to Metro”, he said, opening up the platform to a whole new market of gamers.
Going into his work on the award-winning game Cut The Rope, Sardo said that it was originally written in Objective C. As such, rewriting each line of code into Javascript in order to keep the user experience similar was a bit of a challenge, he shared. Sardo showed how he animated sprites by scrolling and looping images, explaining that this was a common graphics engine for most games in the industry.
Animating the ropes was the biggest challenge, he went on, given that over 20,000 triangles and shadows that made up the ropes needed to be coded individually to run smoothly. Originally, Zepto Labs wanted to kill the projects as the ropes took too long to load, but ironically after a few tweaks, the game was running “too quickly” on HTML5! The game had to be slowed in order to deliver a consistent experience across platforms.
Although existing code can be ported over quickly to Windows 8, Sardo warned that this demonstrated the power of HTML5, but shouldn’t actually be put into practice. Full-screen immersion is important for applications, often more so than websites.
Fully integrated support for developers
Digital Marketer Tan Chun Siong closed the event with his presentation on some tips and tricks to engage the user. Designing a good application, he said, must not be simply focused on making it “faster”, but a more holistic approach must be used in order to study how users actually utilise the application.
With the standardisation of Windows Library Javascript tools, the open and customisable features shown to developers at the event is predicted to be most useful to applications that are information-heavy, such as recipe books or reference materials. This is due to the fact that there are already attractive templates available for developers to fill with their individual content.
Be sure to follow our speakers on Twitter for the latest updates on Windows 8!
Giorgio Sardo: @gisardo
Hammad Rajjoub: @HammadRajjoub
Bruce Wang: @linanw
Tan Chun Siong: @tanchunsiong
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