Category: Software
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I’ve been looking at this application evolution since more that six months. It runs on Windows Mobile, it is freeware and brings to the tips of your fingers a little bit of the iPhone user-experience.It is a contact manager that replaces the default one and allows you to scroll your contacts with your finger.It allows sending SMS, creating a favorites list and adding pictures to your contacts.You can set different themes. My favorite is the black one in the side picture. Download it here.
Still based on the ideal of using your PDA only with your fingers you also can find a keyboard in this website. Download it here. |
Nowadays I don’t use this software. I’m in a minimalistic phase as a windows mobile user. Only the essentials to have it working. (Qtek S200 performance made me took this decision).
Vanilla is a free and open-source forum software easy to install and with a huge amount of add-ons.
I liked this software because the core software that you install is an simple forum. Maybe too simple for most people, because it doesn’t even bring a WYSIWYG editor. I wish that I’ve found this software some months ago. I needed to install a forum system in some client website, but they wanted something simple and fully integrated in their website design. I found a poor solution then, because I wanted to avoid PhpBB. It’s great but it was too big.
Next time I’ll give a chance to Vanilla.
Although game developing is not my area of interest and my knowledge about this field of work is reduced, I have been hearing and seeing some stuff about XNA. I’ve seen a few demos and one thing that I was curious about was how to make those 3D models which are used. In XNA tutorials, webcasts and demos generally the focus is on the developing process once we have the models.
Yesterday I spent some time searching for information and trying out some stuff. I’ll share with you those steps that allow you to create and import 3D models into XNA games.
1. Installing 3D Studio Max. Dowload the 30 days trial and install it.
2. Create your 3D Model. Excuse me for the awful model, but this was the first time I tried 3D Studio Max. It’s just 3 deformed spheres.
3. Export your model ( File > Export). Choose FBX file type. A settings window will open. I haven’t explored this window. The default settings worked fine for me.
4. Create a new project in XNA Game Studio 2.0 and right click the Contents item in solution explorer. Choose Add Existing Item and choose your model FBX file.
5. From this step on you can follow this tutorial: Displaying a 3d model on the Screen from Step 3: Load the Model by Using the Content Pipeline available in MSDN.
You can download the code I made that leaded to this post.
In the last few days I’ve been working with theVirtual Earth API in my spare time. I made a demo application of Virtual Earth. In this demo I used a Windows Forms application to wrap a Virtual Earth (VE) map (which is loaded in a HTML page into a WebBrowser control).
In that HTML page I added some Javascript functions that wrap the VE API in some functions which I call via the WebBrowser control. This way I can manipulate the map in Windows Forms. I’ve added support to my XBox 360 GamePad Component. You can use your game pad to pan and zoom in/out in the 2D map. You can also switch between map styles (road,aerial, hybrid, bird’s eye). This is still a developer’s toy, since you need XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed to be able to run this application. Oh, and you also need .NET Framework 3.0.
I was surprised when I found out that the beta 3D view in VE natively supports the XBox 360 controller.
The least but the last feature I added was support for Microsoft Speech. I added a welcome message, and if you say the name of a country (in English) the map moves into that country (or to be more specific, to the country name that the application understood…). I’ve achieved this by loading a XML file, which I found over the web, that contains the name of many countries (not sure if contains them all). After loading this file the code is pretty similar to my previous post about Microsoft Speech.
That’s all! I’ll be pleased to answer some doubts and hear suggestions about this demo.
During last month I had to record some demonstrations in my computer. I used the well known Camtasia Studio. Well, now the trial is ending, and I don’t want to buy this software 
Today I found a nice software that can be used to achieve the same result. It is called CamStudio. You can record your screen while you perform some action like record an interaction with some software, record a presentation, etc. Then you can deploy it as an AVI file or flash video.
Maybe it isn’t new for many of you, but for those who haven’t ever heard about this software, give it a try.
Uma das coisas que me agradou imenso no Windows Vista foi a parte de Relatórios e Soluções de Problemas. O ideal era o software ser isento de falhas e esta funcionalidade do tipo “tapa buracos” não existir. No entanto tal realidade é utópica, portanto o melhor é considerar que os problemas vão surgir, e tentar lidar com eles. No Windows XP sentia-me frustrado a cada erro fatal que aparecia e cuja solução era “Enviar relatório”. Mais valia estar escrito “Enviar informação que não vai resolver o meu problema, mas que me deve fazer sentir que a Microsoft está solidária comigo”. Como mostro de seguida a minha experiência no Windows Vista tem sido mais simpática a este nível.
A minha primeira experiência na resolução de problemas no Vista foi com a webcam integrada de um portátil HP de 14.1″ que andou muito na moda há alguns meses (passado 1 semana de o comprar o preço caiu 100 euros e preferi devolver :P). A webcam gerava um Blue Screen no Vista (eles existem!) e reiniciava-me o PC. O sistema operativo ao reiniciar detectou o problema, e deu-me instruções acertadas que efectivamente resolveram o problema. Fiquei encantado.
Hoje não fiquei encantado, mas surpreendido. Não resolvi o problema, viva as falhas bizantinas! Andava às voltas com o meu bem amado Firefox quando o dito cujo crashou. Não é nada habitual mas lá aconteceu. O Vista lá detectou o problema e deu uma sugestão que achei interessante.
Uma referência directa para o site de suporte da Mozilla e a referência com link para uma versão do Firefox indicada como a mais recente. Seria de esperar pela maior parte das pessoas algo do género “O Firefox não funciona. Temos pena, usa o Internet Explorer”, no entanto é dada uma resposta que tem em consideração o utilizador. Ok, não deu uma resolução para o problema, mas acho que foi simpático
