Global Nerdy

If you’re curious about NUIs – that’s Natural User Intefaces – and if you’re going to be in the area of the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, you’ll probably going to want to check out this TorCHI session: Best Practices in Interface Design and Applying Them to Microsoft Surface. Here’s the abstract:

See how Natural User Interfaces such as Microsoft Surface and gesture-based UI’s such as Kinect are being applied in the real world.  This session will outline many of the “dos and don’ts” when designing for these new paradigms. More importantly, we will also discuss what techniques and behaviors can be applied to help a good HCI designer become a great one.

The session will be presented by James Horgan, Creative Director, Sales and Strategy at Infusion. James studied industrial design at Central St. Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, UK and has been an award-winning industrial and interaction designer for many of the world’s premier brands. James has had the good fortune to design everything from hearing aids for children to the world’s first Microsoft Partner Surface application, using a unique combination of visual, functional, and architectural skills.

Here are the details for the session:

• Date: Thursday, April 21, 2011
• Time: Refreshments at 6:45 p.m., session starts at 7:00 p.m.
• Location: Bahen Centre for Information Technology (40 St. George Street, just north of College), University of Toronto campus
• Cost: Free for TorCHI members, and you can join TorCHI now for a mere $20.00 per year.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Being a developer evangelist at Microsoft was my biggest, most influential, broadest-reaching job ever, and as this is my final week working for The Empire, I though it would be fitting to mark it with a different version of Europe’s classic ‘80s hair-rock hit, The Final Countdown. To kick it off, I give you the original version in all its mulleted Reagan-era glory. Crank up your speakers, bang your head, throw the horns and enjoy!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Billing itself as the biggest mobile development conference in Canada, MobileTeach will take place in Montreal from Monday, May 30th through Friday, June 3rd. It’s put on by our friends at DevTeach and part of the annual DevTeach conference (also taking place May 30th – June 3rd) and will cover Windows Phone 7 development along with development for the Esteemed Competition’s platforms.

Among MobileTeach’s sessions on Windows Phone 7 and Silverlight are:

• What you should know about WP7 Dev
• WP7 high-end app pitfalls and how to avoid them
• Secure and Personalize with WCF RIA Services
• Async Calls in Silverlight and WPF clients
• Optimizing Silverlight animation

There will also be a full-day post-conference Windows Phone 7 workshop on Friday, June 3rd run by our good friend Colin Melia, who’ll get you up to speed on Windows Phone development topics, including:

• Silverlight Development
• UI Design
• Data Binding & Data Access
• Development Tools
• Notification Services
• Cloud Services
• MVVM
• Application Model & Navigation
• Input
• Shell Integration
• Devices Integration
• Building Phone-compatible Services
• Marketplace policies
• and other select topics requested and a selection of XNA topics

For all the details, see the MobileTeach site.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’m told that if Brandon Foy’s funky indie ad (as in it wasn’t commissioned by Microsoft; he just came up with the idea and made it himself) for Windows Phone 7 gets 200,000 views, it’ll get aired in a national spot. Let’s give this young digital artist’s career a jump-start, shall we?

Brandon also created this ad (also for Windows Phone 7):

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.