Pete's Eats

Great to see Silverlight on Apple’s download pages today, marked as a ‘staff pick’ too…

As it says on the site:

About Silverlight

A cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the web.

• Deliver media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIA) for the web that incorporate video, animation, interactivity, and stunning user interfaces.
• Seamless, fast installation for users, thanks to a small, on-demand, easy-to-install plug-in that is less than two megabytes (MB) and works with all leading browsers.
• Consistent experiences between Macintosh computers and Windows-based personal computers without any additional installation requirements.
• Create richer, more compelling web experiences that take greater advantage of the client for increased performance.
• Many more features.

What’s New in this Version

• new media APIs
• improved performance
• better serviceability
• bug fixes

Also, the new Silverlight showcase is up now – check it out here, but watch this space as we’ve got some awesome additions coming very soon…

It doesn’t actually have to be Starbucks, it could be anyone, big chain or not… The first time I saw one in the US I thought it was ridiculous, and completely ott to have a drive-thru coffee shop. But, oh, how I was wrong…

Most other people who I know and live in Brighton don’t drive, so they won’t get this but it’s impossible to get anywhere near a coffee shop by car *anywhere* let alone in Brighton. I drive lots (my office(s) are hours away from home) and it would be really nice to be able to get a decent coffee to have on the journey.

There must be someone out there looking for an angle in the coffee shop business surely…

How do you crowdsource the tagging of a vast image library?

Google Image Labeler is how.

How does it work?

You’ll be randomly paired with a partner who’s online and using the feature. Over a two-minute period, you and your partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide as many labels as possible to describe each image you see. When your label matches your partner’s label, you’ll earn points depending on how specific your label is. You’ll be shown more images until time runs out. After time expires, you can explore the images you’ve seen and the websites where those images were found. And we’ll show you the points you’ve earned throughout the session.

Brilliant fun, and a brilliant idea too. Addictive in a strange way too.

I’ve been playing with Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio since I got into the Xbox 360 a bit. If you currently develop Flash games, you should check it out and you might be inspired to produce something for the console (or Windows platform itself – not in the browser). There’s a fairly large community behind XNA too, and loads of code for you to pick apart and learn various aspects of programming for the platform.

With that in mind, the Farseer Physics Engine is well worth checking out. It’s an easy to use 2D physics engine designed for Microsoft’s XNA and it’s really simple to use. It has some great features that make learning game programming a little bit easier – and more fun too.

Most interestingly though is that the physics engine is now available for Silverlight too. I understand that it needed 10 lines of code editing to make the jump from XNA to Silverlight… Now that’s how to reuse code!

Download the code and read the documentation here.

Check out some basic examples of it in use here.

Watch some tutorial videos on XNAtutorial.com here.

Features include:

Collision

• Concave and Convex Polygons Supported
• Multiple Collision Geometries Per Body
• Collision Categories For Complex Interaction Between Physics Objects
• Collision Callback Mechanism

Dynamics

• Joints
• Revolute Joint (body to body or fixed to world)
• Angle Joint (body to body or fixed to world)
• Slider (Prismatic) Joint
• Pin (Distance) Joint
• Force Controllers
• Linear Spring
• Angular Spring
• Easy To Build Custom Force Controllers (Explosions, Steering Behaviors, etc.)

I’ll be posting some examples here soon too…

I’m reading John Krakauer’s ‘into the wild‘ again at the moment. I’ve read most of Krakauer’s books I think but this one has just been made into a movie, directed by Sean Penn, so I wanted to re-read the story before I saw it.

By chance, I was reading the Outside Magazine website and saw a blog entry there about a guy who’d trekked out to the bus (read the book!) and taken bits of it to sell on eBay. It’s worth reading the excerpt from the eBay Q&A thread. Anyway, the guy also made a video of the bus when he went to collect the bits to sell. If you do read the book anytime soon then this video might help to ‘paint the canvas’ a bit…

This entry isn’t too eloquent and I apologise. I’ve had a bit of a data-nightmare this week and have been caught between the stresses of multiple OS installs and the associated waiting times. It’s not going well…