Global Nerdy

I’m at the MIX conference as I write this, where the pre-conference boot camps are currently taking place. The actual conference doesn’t start until tomorrow, when this place will transform from a relatively idyllic (idyllic for Vegas, anyway) zone into a geek mosh pit with the population density of downtown Tokyo.

It’s still morning here in the Pacific time zone, and right now, there’s a packed room learning about HTML5 and CSS3. We’ve got a good number of people in the room who are diving into this stuff in earnest for the first time – some are coming over from the desktop dev / WinForms world, others are coming from programming on the back end – and I can see from the looks on their faces that they’re feeling a tad overwhelmed. If you’re among this crowd, let me assure you that:

a) CSS eventually does make sense, even when it sometimes does what you don’t expect (hence the “CSS is Awesome” mug, a joke that you’ll soon appreciate and that you can by at Zazzle.com),

b) CSS will make your life as a web designer / developer / whatever easier once you get the hang of it,

c) There are lots of people right here at MIX who’d be happy to answer your questions about CSS, including the Canadian Developer Evangelist team, which includes Yours Truly, John Bristowe and Fred Harper.

Later this afternoon: the jQuery boot camp!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Hackfest?

If you’re in the Vancouver or Toronto areas and you’ve been meaning to write apps for Windows Phone 7, there’s a Hackfest near you this coming Saturday, April 16th!

• If you have an idea for an app but don’t know how to build apps for Windows Phone, this event is for you! We’ll have experts and tutors on hand to show you how to write your first Windows Phone app, and it’s easier than you think.
• If you have the skills to build apps for Windows Phone but don’t have any ideas for an app, this event is also for you! If you’ve got C#, .NET, Silverlight or XNA skills but can’t think of what to write, the Hackfests are a great place to brainstorm with other people and come up with ideas for apps.
• If you’re looking for a job or clients, this event is also for you! Okay, Hackfests aren’t actually job fairs, but they’re excellent networking opportunities, and these days, 80% of the tech jobs out there are found by networking.

The Vancouver Hackfest

Vancouver’s Hackfest takes place this Saturday, April 16th from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 a.m. at BCIT Burnaby Campus (3700 Willingdon Avenue, Burnaby), Building SW3, Room 1710.

This event is free – click here to register!

The Toronto Hackfest

Toronto’s Hackfest also takes place this Saturday, April 16th from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. at the ObjectSharp offices (11 King Street West, Toronto), suite 1400.

This event is free – click here to register!

Get the Tools

If you’re coming to the Hackfests, you’ll want to bring a computer (preferably a laptop, unless you’re into heavy lifting), and to make the best use of the time, you should install the Windows Phone developer tools beforehand.

You can download the tools from the App Hub (create.msdn.com). They’re free-as-in-beer and they’re awesome.

You’ll want to do it in this order:

1. Download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools (Release Notes)
2. Download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools January 2011 Update (Release Notes) [Note: Installation may take several minutes and is complete when the install dialog box closes.]
3. Download and install the Windows Phone Developer Tools Fix

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

One of the topics that will be covered quite heavily at the MIX Conference (it’s taking place this week) is HTML5. It’s great to see it supported in Internet Explorer, it’s great to hear that it’s coming soon to Internet Explorer on Windows Phone, and now it’s time to get any of you who’ve held off on taking it up to get started and those of you who’ve already taken it up to get even better at it.

Dzinepress have put together a collection of Ultimate HTML5 Tutorials and Useful Techniques, and whether you’re new to HTML5 or an old hand it at already, there should be something in this set that you’ll find useful.

I’ve taken the links from Dzinepress’ article and grouped them into categories below:

Introductory Stuff

• HTML5: The Basics
• Coding A HTML 5 Layout From Scratch
• HTML 5 and CSS 3: The Techniques You’ll Soon Be Using
• The Power of HTML 5 and CSS 3
• How to Make All Browsers Render HTML5 Mark-up Correctly – Even IE6
• Structural Tags in HTML5
• HTML5 and CSS3 Without Guilt
• Semantics in HTML 5
• HTML5 Unleashed: Tips, Tricks and Techniques
• Yes, You Can Use HTML 5 Today!

Site Design

• Touch The Future: Create An Elegant Website With HTML 5 And CSS3
• Code a Backwards Compatible, One Page Portfolio with HTML5 and CSS3
• Code a Vibrant Professional Web Design with HTML5/CSS3
• Designing a Blog With HTML5
• Building a Live News Blogging System
• Coding a CSS3 & HTML5 One-Page Website Template
• Hybrid Column Layout

Forms

• Create a Stylish Contact Form with HTML5 & CSS3
• Have a Field Day with HTML5 Forms
• How to Build Cross-Browser HTML5 Form
• Rethinking Forms in HTML5

Drag and Drop

• Implementing HTML5 Drag and Drop: New Premium Tutorial
• Drag and drop Using HTML5

Canvas

• How to Draw with HTML 5 Canvas

Video

• Blowing up HTML5 video and mapping it into 3D space
• The video element in HTML5
• View Source Tutorial: Sticky Notes With HTML5 and CSS3

Storage

• View Source Tutorial: Sticky Notes With HTML5 and CSS3

Mobile

• How to Make an HTML5 iPhone App
• Design & Code a Cool iPhone App Website in HTML5
• Create offline Web applications on mobile devices with HTML5

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

What happens in Vegas…ends up on this blog. Well, most of what happens, anyway.

MIX ‘11, Microsoft’s most “right-brained” conference takes place this week! It’s the conference where we talk about the web, mobile, user experience and design, and it’s also where announcements about Silverlight, Internet Explorer and Windows Phone have traditionally been made. Last year’s announcements at MIX were pretty big ones: it’s where we got our first real taste of Windows Phone and the dev tools. as well as a first look at Internet Explorer 9. As far this year’s announcements, you’ll have to wait until Tuesday and Wednesday to find out what they are.

If you’re a Canadian developer attending MIX, we’d love to see you! John Bristowe, Fred Harper, Paul Laberge and Yours Truly will be all over the conference and if you see us, please come up and chat with us. We’ll also be throwing at “Canadian 3-Screen Mixer” on Tuesday evening: if you’re a Canadian attendee, check your email – we should’ve sent you an invitation.

If you can’t attend MIX, you can still catch the keynotes and sessions:

• The Tuesday and Wednesday keynotes, both of which take place at 12:00 noon EDT / 9:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00 p.m. GMT, will be streamed live, free, and with no registration required. Just point your browser at live.visitmix.com at those times.
• The videos of all sessions will be posted to the MIX site about 24 hours after each session. Take a look at the sessions to see what interests you.

See you in Vegas!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

TechVibes points to StartupNorth’s story on PushLife being acquired by Google. According to TechVibes, this makes it the third Toronto-based company to be acquired by the Big G, with Bumptop (created by DemoCamp guy-at-large Anand Agarawala) and SocialDeck being the other two.

Congrats, Pushlife! It’s always nice to see a local company make good.

Even just five years ago, you might not have predicted that a computer programmer would have a movie made about him or that he and his software would be on the cover of MAD Magazine.

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

Today, at Yonge Dundas Square in the heart of Toronto, the three finalists for the Great Canadian Appathon, a 48-hour programming marathon to create games for Windows Phone 7, showed their creations to the judges. Their apps were:

• Plasmium, a 2-D space shooter game that borrows some ideas and designs from Geometry Wars.
• Super Punch, a physics based game where you play a superhero punching out a supervillain for maximum distance.
• Valley Raid, a 3-D homage to the classic Atari 2600 videogame River Raid.

The Great Canadian Appathon was a contest open to Canadian post-secondary students where they were challenged to write a great mobile game for Windows Phone 7 (the official mobile platform of the Appathon) in a 48-hour marathon session on the weekend of March 9th. The event was put together by the Toronto-based mobile game development shop XMG Studio with the help of the National Post, KPMG, Telus and Microsoft. As the Windows Phone guy on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism team, I was only to happy to catch the final round.

In the end, here’s how it broke down:

Third Place: Plasmium ($1,000 prize)

Plasmium takes its inspiration from the visual style of the Xbox 360 game Geometry Wars, sticking to “simple shapes but glowy particle effects and bright colours”. It was part stylistic decision, but also part pragmatic: they didn’t have an artist on the team.

“We’re all programmers of course,” said team member Michael Hoffman, “so we decided right from the beginning to overcome our lack of artistry [by using] procedurally generated graphics. And it looks very nice even though you can make those sort of graphics with just programmers drawing triangles.”

Plasmium’s team is from McGill and consisted of Michael Darwish, Michael Hoffman and Marek Zaluski.

Second Place: Valley Raid ($10,000 prize)

Valley Raid is based on the classic Atari 2600 game River Raid, Activision’s scrolling shooter from 1982. Like River Raid, Valley Raid has the player piloting a fighter plane through a valley, destroying enemies and obstacles and picking up power-ups along the way. Unlike its ‘80s predecessor, Valley Raid is a 3-D game; in fact, it was one of only 3 out of more than 50 submitted to the Appathon that were 3-D.

“Because the game we chose was a 3D game and a 3D game is really tough to do, so the time was so short on us that we just had to code as fast as we could,” said team member Mahdi Tayarani Najaran.

Valley Raid’s team is from UBC and made up of Eason Hu, Mahdi Tayarani Najaran and Ben Sheftel.

First Place: Super Punch ($25,000 prize)

Super Punch is a physics-based game in which you control a superhero who continually punches a supervillain through the air for maximum distance. Success lets you score points which you can use to buy upgrades to eventually be powerful enough to send the supervillain into space.

“We love the condensed time line because we come up with everything off the cuff and its all from scratch, you just have to come up with something really quick,” said team member Pieter Parker. “A lot of ideas died that first day, but one made it out and that was Super Punch.”

Super Punch’s team comes from two schools in Edmonton: Northern Alberta Institute of Technology and University of Alberta. It consisted of Stephen Baden, Jeremy Burns, Pieter Parker and Tyler Ste Marie.

Here’s a video of Super Punch in action:

Congratulation to the winners, and thanks to everyone who participated!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.