Global Nerdy

The first Toronto Coffee and Code of 2011 takes place this Wednesday, January 26th! The folks at the Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar (968 Queen Street West, at Givins Street, a block west of Shaw, a couple of blocks west of Trinity Bellwoods Park) have invited me to hold a Coffee and Code at their location. I’ll be there from noon to 6 p.m., working away – if you want to talk about Windows Phone 7, Microsoft, the tech industry in general or anything else that comes to mind, that’s where I’ll be, and I’d be more than happy to chat!

Some quick notes:

• What is Coffee and Code? It’s me taking advantage of my status as a mobile worker and working in a cafe, where it’s easy to find me and chat, ask questions and let me know what you think. It’s also a lot more fun than having a conversation or meeting in an airless, windowless boardroom.
• What is Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar? I’m glad that these guys exist – they “get” the spirit of what Coffee and Code is all about. They’re a cafe designed for they call the “untethered class” – those of us whose philosophy is “have laptop, will work anywhere”. Rochelle Latinsky and Tamara Kremer of Cloud AdAgents, the people behind Cloud Free Agent Espresso Bar, were kind enough to invite me, and I’m looking forward to visiting and working at a new cafe!
• What’s going to happen? I’ll be “setting up shop” at Cloud Free Agent Espresso bar, and you should feel to drop by, whether for five minutes or the whole afternoon. I’ll be there to get some work done, but more importantly, to be available to you for conversation, questions and input as well as to buy your cofffee. C’mon down and visit!

Once again, it’s Wednesday afternoon, from noon to 6 p.m.. I hope to see you there!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

We’re at that same point as we were in the mid-80s to early ‘90s, when computer UIs were making the leap from 80 * 24 character interfaces (or perhaps 40 * 24, or if you had a VIC-20, a mere 22 columns) to GUIs and mice. This time, the new UIs are multitouch, and just as Solitaire taught millions how to click and drag, smartphones and touchscreens are now getting users to learn a new vocabulary consisting of touch gestures like tapping, flicking and pinching. As it was back then, today’s touch-driven, “natural” user interfaces aren’t just new territory for the users, but for developers as well.

One book worth checking out is the early access edition (it’s a work in progress) of Manning’s Natural User Interfaces in .NET. It’s a primer on creating NUIs and multitouch applications using the WPF and Silverlight multitouch APIs. It introduces the ideas and principles of natural user interfaces and then covers the WPF Touch API and Surface Toolkit as it walks you through the development of a multitouch application, and also learn how these concepts can be applied to Silverlight applications.

Manning’s got a deal that’s good for today (Saturday, January 22) only: use the discount code dotd0122cc in the promotional code box when you purchase either the ebook or ebook/paper book combo and save half off the price! Since the book is an early access edition, it means you get the current draft in PDF immediately, access to updates, and the final version when the book is complete (plus the paper version if you ordered the ebook/paper book combo). With this discount, the price of the ebook is below $20, a steal when you consider it’s an investment into learning about up-and-coming tech.

Also worth checking out: a “green paper” titled What is the Natural User Interface? It’s written by Joshua Blake, author of Natural User Interfaces in .NET, defines what NUIs are, how they’re evolving and how they’ll place a role in up-and-coming devices.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Expansys

There may come a time when you, as a mobile developer, need to get your hands on phone specifically for development purposes. After all, emulators, while handy, can get you only so far, and there are a good number of reasons that your everyday phone – even though it’s the platform you’re targeting – might not be the right thing to use.

I needed such a phone, and for mine, I turned to Expansys. If you’ve ever been to one of the major Microsoft conferences such as PDC or TechEd, you might have seen their booth. They’re the guys with all the intriguing-looking hand-held goodies. In my first few weeks at Microsoft (back in 2008), I picked up an unlocked Palm Treo Pro at their booth. They booth staff were very helpful.

If you need to get your hands on an unlocked mobile device or accessories, I recommend checking out Expansys’ site. They’ve got a broad selection of devices, many of which you can’t get from going to the Canadian telcos. They also have great service; back in December, I screwed up an order (chose a model that wouldn’t work with North American HSPA), but an email was all I needed to get it straightened out – I even got an email from their customer service informing me that the problem had been fixed and that the phone I actually wanted was on its way!

Samsung Focus

The Samsung Focus, a.k.a. the SGH-i917 or the rather unfortunate-sounding “Cetus” (a name that brings this Simpsons character to mind), is the WP7 device for Rogers subscribers. In the U.S., it’s the WP7 device for AT&T customers.

Here’s a quick run-down of the Focus’ specs:

Screen	4” (diagonal) widescreen Super AMOLED 480 * 800 WVGA
Processor	Qualcomm QSD8250 1GHz Scorpion
Memory	512 MB RAM 1 GB ROM 8 GB internal flash memory
Camera	5-megapixel rear-facing autofocus w/ LED flash 720p HD video recording
Input/Sensors	Multi-touch (4 points) touchscreen display Dual microphone 3-axis accelerometer Digital compass Proximity sensor Ambient light sensor
Networks	Rogers Wireless / AT&T Mobility Wi-Fi b / g/ n Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR A-GPS FM radio
Battery	1500mAh Li-on Talk: Up to 6.5 hours Standby: Up to 300 hours
Physical dimensions	Size: 123 * 65 * 10 mm (4.84” * 2.56” * 0.39”) Weight: 115g (4.07 oz)

Of all the currently available Windows Phone devices, the Focus is the thinnest and lightest.

• For a quick run-down of Windows Phone available in Canada, see this earlier blog entry of mine
• For a comparison of all the current WP7 devices in terms of weight, dimensions and some other features, see this article in ElektricForest.

The Unboxing

Expansys sent me an unlocked AT&T-branded Samsung Focus, which emerged from its bubble-wrap envelope in this box:

Here’s the box with the top removed, revealing the first layer: a mini-box with a “Welcome to AT&T” message and some quick start guides:

Next layer: the phone itself. The phone is in a little plastic bag and has two static-cling “stickers”, one on the front, one on the back (which I’ll show in a couple photos later on).

Beneath the phone: another mini-box with the meatier full manuals.

And finally, the last layer: the ancillary hardware…

Here’s the ancillary hardware, all laid out so that it’s easier to see: headphones, AC-to-USB plug, battery and USB cable (the phone uses the standard MicroUSB jack):

Here’s the front of the phone, with its static-cling “sticker” still on. I don’t think the Canadian phones have these “Don’t text and drive” warnings.

Here’s the static-cling “sticker” on the back of the phone, with the standard warning about adding a MicroSD memory card to the phone to push its storage past the stock 8GB. Unfortunately, Windows Phones are a little fussy about the type of MicroSD cards you insert to it – you should only those whose specs match the phone’s requirements. I haven’t seen much info about what these specs are, so for the time being, I’m holding off on expanding the memory. For the time being, 8GB ought to be enough for…well, maybe not anybody, but it works just fine for me.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Anger is Illogical, a film created by “OneMinuteGalactica”, takes audio from one of those “behavioural” films they used to show in schools in the 1950s and 60s and video from the original Star Trek TV series (run through a filter to make them look like they’re on 16mm film) and combines them for hilarious results.

Here’s another amusing little film from OneMinuteGalactica: Luke Skywalker has OCD…

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

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

I’d have published this earlier, but my recent hospitalization has delayed a number of projects, both personal and professional.

It’s the start of a new year, which means that once again, it’s time for an article on the statistics for the two blogs I own:

• my personal blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
• my technology blog, Global Nerdy

Accordion Guy

Here’s the StatCounter graph for visits to The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century from January 1st, 2010 to December 1st, 2010:

Here are the year-end summary figures – not quite 2.5 million pageviews in 2010 (1.9 million uniques), with a daily average of about 6,600 pageviews a day (or about 5,200 uniques). 

	2010 total	Daily average
Page loads	2,421,543	6,634
Unique visitors	1,897,620	5,199
First time visitors	1,789,299	4,902
Returning visitors	108,321	297

 

For comparison’s sake, here’s how Accordion Guy has been doing since I started measuring it in mid-2005. The blog itself has been around since November 2001 – that’s right, it turns ten years old this year!

2008 remains the biggest year by a couple hundred thousand, and that’s because it was a rather interesting year: I worked at three different places that year: Toronto’s worst-run startup, then b5media, then Microsoft. I got laid off and hired during the econopocalypse of 2008, and my getting hired by Microsoft, a very unexpected move, got a fair number of hits.

2011 should be an interesting year for the Accordion Guy blog, and hopefully, for you readers as well. I’ve already been hospitalized (a long blog post about that is coming soon), there’ve been some rather interesting changes in my personal life and I’m slated for some interesting travel soon. There should be stories aplenty!

Global Nerdy

Here’s the StatCounter graph for visits to Global Nerdy from January 1st, 2010 to December 1st, 2010:

Here are the year-end summary figures: just past 1.5 million pageviews in 2010 (1.2 million uniques), with a daily average of about 4,200 pageviews a day (or about 3,400 uniques).

	2010 total	Daily average
Page loads	1,548,619	4,243
Unique visitors	1,238,732	3,394
First time visitors	1,160,962	3,181
Returning visitors	77,770	213

 

Here are Global Nerdy’s year-by-year numbers since the blog was started in the summer of 2006.

Global Nerdy’s numbers for 2010 are roughly the same as 2009’s. Generally, when I write a tech article, I tend to post it to both Global Nerdy and Canadian Developer Connection, Microsoft Canada’s developer blog. When I announce a new article on Twitter, I provide the Canadian Developer Connection link first, because while Global Nerdy will make me a couple of bucks a day with AdSense, the performance of the Canadian Developer Connection blog is one of the ways my performance is measured at work.

There’s a lot going on this year at work in the tech world and at work, and as with Accordion Guy, 2011 should be interesting in Global Nerdy.

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