DCC Finalists bringing the house down with The Last Dance after all winners were crowned on 8th April It was an explosive weekend at Plaza Singapura as the inaugural Dance Central Championships came to its grand finale and Kinect Star Wars was officially launched! From 3rd to 8th April, at least 100,000 mall visitors came to experience the magic Kinect for Xbox 360 like never before. ...
User Experience Design is quickly becoming an interesting component in the web and mobile space. Whether you’re building an app for your phone or for your website, you need to focus on the user experience to differentiate your product and company. As a developer, it’s crucial to know what to look out for when it comes to designing interactions for your users. We’re glad to have Shane Morris, one of Australia’s most respected user experience professionals join us at Campfire. Shane is currently Director at Automatic Studio. Through consulting, mentoring and training he has helped organisations create compelling digital experiences since 1991. In that time he has worked on desktop applications, internet applications, mobile user interfaces, physical devices and web sites. Shane has taught user experience topics around the world and is a key contributor to “101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School” at ixd101.com. Hear him speak on day one about Prototyping and the Metro Design Language. Register now at campfire.weshipcode.com !
Happening from 13– 14 Apr at *SCAPE, Imagine Cup 2012 : Singapore Finals will be open and free for public viewing this year. The annual Microsoft Imagine Cup is the world’s premier student technology competition. Talented students from the various institutions of higher learning will compete and pitch their hearts out in this national software design competition to represent Singapore in the Imagine Cup Worldwide Finals held in Sydney, Australia. Students all over the world are to use their imagination and passion to create a technology solution that addresses the Imagine Cup 2012 theme: Imagine a world where technology solves the world’s toughest problems. In ten years, the Imagine Cup has grown to be a global competition focused on finding solutions to real-world problems. Since 2003, over 1.4 million students have participated in the Imagine Cup with 358,000 students representing 183 countries and regions registering for the Imagine Cup 2011 competition. The Imagine Cup 2012 competition is a platform for students to: ...
M- Power is back again! For those who missed the last training we had, here’s your chance to get your hands-on experience with Mango development! Register now, slots are limited. More details:
Well, we are near to MMS 2012 which is happening 17 April in Las Vegas. If you are late sleeper like me, you can watch the two Keynotes on 18 April and 19 April 12:00AM Singapore time. Click here to save the date A new bunch of technical documentation downloads for System Center 2012 is also released: •Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Operations Manager •Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Virtual Machine Manager •System Center 2012 Configuration Manager •Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Orchestrator •Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Service Manager •Technical Documentation Download for System Center 2012 – Unified Installer These are great resources for System Center 2012. If you have not tried System Center 2012, do it now through one Single download today!
Thank you for joining us for the Build for Windows 8 Event last Friday! We had fun with 200 fellow developers who came together to learn about the Windows 8 platform. Here are the slides for your reference. Do let us know if you have any questions and feel free to get in touch with us by leaving a comment, or tweet us @gospiffy for more information. Have fun developing for Windows 8! The Windows 8 Platform Designing Metro Apps ...
Campfire proudly presents two days of cutting edge learning and inspiration from April 13 - 14, 2012. Join us for an action-packed conference designed especially for developers, designers, UX experts and entrepreneurs in the web technology space. We’re flying in great speakers from across the globe specially to talk to you about trending topics like HTML5, The Kinect effect and so much more. If you’re looking to learn about the latest web development opportunities, then you’ve come to the right place. ...
Build for Windows 8 is the first dev camp we are running here in Singapore and we’re really excited to share with you the opportunities that Windows 8 brings to you as a developer! We’re really happy to have around 200 developers join us in this session. If you couldn’t attend today, don’t worry, we’ll be live blogging and sharing with you resources from the dev camp! Slides will also be made available here so remember to check this page out. Tweet us @gospiffy and use the hashtag #BuildforWin8SG 930AM - We started the day with an introduction with Alex introducing the upcoming events for Windows 8, including Campfire. We’re flying in speakers who are experts in HTML 5 and other interesting subjects in the web tech space to talk to you from 13th - 14th April! Register here: campfire.weshipcode.com 945AM - Our awesome director, Ziriad Saibi talking about the opportunity for developers. Windows 7 numbers are at 500M. That’s not even including other Windows powered devices. 10.00AM - Hammad, architect evangelist, talking about the Metro UI and demonstrating the investments that went into Windows 8 to create a beautiful user experience for everyone (yes, even developers). 1030AM - Search is an interesting factor for developers, when a user is searching on Windows and if your app is relevant, it pops up immediately on the results screen without having to go into a browser! 1045AM - Are you a HTML5 / Javascript / .Net/ C++developer? Then you’re already equipped to be a Windows 8 developer. 11.00AM - Short break! Time for some tea. In meantime, meet Kim, our presenter for Metro UI later on! 1115AM - We are demoing a camera capture class. Its really easy to set up! Hammad just made the audience scream ‘Metro’ and we now have videographic evidence of your presence here - uploading to Facebook. (Just Kidding, you guys are great!) 1120AM - Tiles are a great mechanism for drawing users’ attention to your application! Make sure you take some time to customize it. 1130AM - Content before chrome. Interesting research shows that browser users are hardwired into thinking that our browser chromes are the main part of experience and not the content itself. The Metro UI allows content to come first. Immerse your users in the thing s they love instead of wasting space with the chrome. Let layout flow from edge to edge, pan only on a single axis to create a sense of stability. - more on that later during the UX session. 1140AM - Life is made a lot simpler when you use the templates from Visual Studio to create your first Metro style app. 1150AM - Introducing the App Bar: Most apps will have the app bar at the bottom that allow the user use common commands. 1157AM - Try Semantic Zooms to show richer, meta information on your groups. 1203PM - Design for touch first! Most people use the sides to navigate through the apps.. don’t expect them to use too many fingers at once! (Unless you want them to spill their Starbucks coffee all over their tablet.) 1215PM - Lunch! Did you guys enjoy it? 1.20PM - Full and ready to learn more about Windows 8 development! Kim is sharing about resources for developing on the Metro UI. He’s also giving great tips about the commanding surfaces that allows users to have greater interaction with the touch device. R. emember to check out our tutorial about Visual Blend, that will help you prototype UIs quickly. 1.35PM - Need design assests? Download them here. 1.45PM - Remembering to scale your graphics properly is important! Run it on the emulator to try how it looks like. 1.50PM - We love animations that make your app feel more alive. Built in controls are provided for free. You can also look for more in the Windows 8 Animation Library. Very useful. 2.00PM - 5 T-Shirts given to our awesome attendees! Great questions on the APIs, porting of apps. Keep the questions coming in! 2.05PM - Darren Sim, talking about integrating applications with web services. 2.13PM - Again, search is universally accessible and contextual. Darren is demo-ing it right now! 2.40PM - A really funny presentation from Darren who is sharing about how to call certain features using javascript. The tutorial is found on MSDN. 3.00PM - So many questions! And the IE T-shirts seem to be really popular. 3.15PM - Breaktime! We took some videos of the attendees, thanks for the feedback. Great to see Android and iOS developers here as well. Seem like the market share is an interesting factor when it come to deciding which platform to develop for. 3. 30PM - Hammad, our Win 8 champ, is on again. We’re learning about extension methods that bridge the gap between the new Windows Runtime and managed code. When you use Runtime, your apps are going to be super fast. 4.00PM - Ed Quek from Microsoft APAC is sharing about the Windows Store right now. 4.05PM - demoing the Windows Store, did you know that 70% of apps get buried in the app store? Windows is going to help you overcome that! Check out how to sell your apps and the descriptions you’ll need here. 4.30PM - As a developer you get 70% of whatever you sell on the store. If you get over US$25,000 you get 80%! It’s a tiered model. 4.38PM - Trials matter. You get a 70% better chance of converting users into paying ones by offering trials! Keep that in mind when you’re deciding the price and sales model. 4.40PM - Singapore is one of the countries with that will have the Windows Store supported. Go little red dot! 4.45PM - The cost to register for a Windows Store developer account in the United States is 49 USD for an individual and 99 USD for a company. For the price in your local currency, see Developer countries and regions.
We have compiled a great resource of Visual Studio 11 Beta in our previous post, now it’s time to know all about its sibling: Blend for Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Beta. It is a WYSIWYG design tool that helps you create Metro style apps using both HTML-CSS-JavaScript or classic XAML. Blend is designed to work seamlessly with Microsoft Visual Studio 11 Express Beta. Metro style app projects can move seamlessly back and forth between Blend and Visual Studio, making it possible for designers and developers to work on the same application in their preferred development environment. Before you start developing apps using Blend for VS 11 Beta, first thing you need to know: you must run Blend on Windows 8 Consumer Preview to develop Metro style apps. If you are running Blend on Windows 7, using current Beta release, you can’t develop Metro style apps. ...
Hurray! More integration with Windows 8 powered devices! The Windows Phone team announced on their blog today that the release of the Windows Phone SDK 7.1.1 Update is now available for immediate download on the Microsoft Download Center. The two highlights of this update are: Develop apps that work well on the new 256 MB devices Use the WPSDK 7.1 to develop on machines running Windows 8 This update goes a long way to making it easier for folks to build apps that target both Windows Phone and Windows 8; the WPSDK 7.1.1 runs quite well side-by-side with Visual Studio ‘11’. Particularly with the Consumer Preview out, the ability to run the IDEs side-by-side has been a major request from our developer community. For Windows Phone developers, this is a great opportunity to explore the Windows 8 marketplace as another channel for your applications. Find out more about developing on Windows 8 in our ‘Build for Windows 8’ workshop this Friday as well.