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.
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.
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.
Posted on 9:35pm 12/29/2007 by Bruno Silva in Utilities, Web
To avoid spam a technique which consists on displaying e-mails as images instead of plain text is increasing each day. Plain text can more easily discovered by spammers. Because today I wanted to add an e-mail to this website I search for a website where I could generate an e-mail image.
I’ve found this nice one http://safemail.justlikeed.net. You can choose font and color. You can easily do this in paint for example. But this service stores your e-mail image, so you can use it in blogs or forums just by referring it.
About a week ago I wrote a Power Point add-in which uses my XBox360GamePad Component to enable users to control a slide show with the XBox controller. Well, it’s kind of geek and maybe useless add-in, but it was a compelling objective who drove me to try MS Office development for the first time. It’s a shame that I don’t have a wireless controller… You can download this Add-in and have fun diving into the project code or just try it in a final user perspective by installing it in your Power Point 2007. I must warn you again that it will only work if you have XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed. I’m still trying to find out how to distribute this applications without this huge requirement.
Now I’ll leave here some tips/guidelines on MS Office development. I hope it will be useful if you want to start developing in this widely used software piece.
2. Create a new project in Visual Studio. You can choose from a bunch of project templates by choosing the Office targeted version (2003 or 2007) and the application to which you’ll develop the add-in.
3. After you create an add-in project a file named ThisAddIn.cs will appear in the Solution Explorer. It has two event handlers: OnStartup and OnShutdown. I think that those names are self-explanatory. They are triggered on startup and shutdown of the add-in. There are 2 objects that you must know about to be able to interact with the Office application instance where the add-in is running. They are Globals.ThisAddIn and Globals.Ribbons. You can use the first one to access the context where the add-in is running and the document that is opened. The second one is used in MS Office 2007 development and allows you to manipulate the Ribbon.
Here I leave some properties, methods and events available in Globals.ThisAddin (note that inside the ThisAddIn.cs this object is equivalent to this keyword. If you have some more files that global object can be useful). These examples were extracted from a Power Point add-in.
Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.
ActivePresentation.Slides (property)
ActivePresentation.SlideShowWindow(property)
ActivePresentation.Save (method)
AfterNewPresentation (event)
SlideShowBegin (event)
SlideShowNextSlide
Just have fun exploring the API and I am sure you’ll find something useful to you. You can fill your plugin as you wish. You can add some windows forms triggered by some event or bind document contents to a database.
4. You can use Visual Studio to design Ribbon tabs or even add buttons to the MS Office applications main menu. Add a new item to your project and choose “Ribbon (Visual Designer)”.
5. When you run this project in Visual Studio it starts a MS Office application instance allowing to debug your add-in.
