Everyone that attended to the 4th Mobile Technologies Seminar by PocketPT.net won a free license of NDrive 3.1 for Pocket PC. So I left TomTom behind for a few days to try this Portuguese software. First of all I just love the user interface. The dark colors are great. In the menus you are able to scroll using your fingers, which is always nice.
The interface is pretty simple, which is normal since it has fewer functionality that TomTom. It doesn’t allow your to plan a trip and see it in images or to add pit stops to your navigation plan. But since I don’t plan pit stops very often, this isn’t a problem for me. And it has a demo version of the navigation when your GPS is off, and I am able to use to do some planning after all.
NDrive has a lot of Points of Interest (POIs) at least in the map of Portugal that I have. I really like the dynamic POIs that allow your to download information about the weather, traffic, events, pharmacies and speed cameras. I like that I don’t need to be online while driving to have access to this data. I can synchronize it before I leave home and head to my destination free of GPSR charge.
Another feature that amazed me was the amount of information about the POIs that is available. Below you can see information about Convento de Mafra (in Portuguese, thought). Address, description and even pictures. This software can be very useful if you are in some place which is not familiar to you and you want to choose a place to visit.
If you search for a restaurant, NDrive has not only the description and address but also phone numbers, e-mails and website. While reading these details you have a menu that allows you to browse to the website, call the restaurant or send the location information to a friend (ohh, and navigate to the restaurant, of course 
).
Some POIs have 3D models that are shown in the map. It is nice, I don’t think that it is that useful, but it is a nice geeky feature.
The software is very responsive and easy to configure. The driving directions are great, just as TomTom. One thing that I noticed as a problem was the information about speed limits accuracy. The information available in my map almost always tells me that I can travel in a higher speed that I actually can. As a consequence the time that is shown to me as the estimated travel time is pretty wrong. Nevertheless I must say that I paid much more attention to this speed issue in NDrive than in TomTom, so this can be a common issue, who knows.
From now on I will use NDrive instead of TomTom. It fits my needs. Thanks for this software license, PocketPT.net and NDrive.
Posted on 8:08pm 6/25/2008 by Bruno Silva in
My Life
First of all I want to apologize to all my RSS feed readers because just now I’ve noticed that I was making available only excerpts of my posts. I think this was happening since the last Wordpress upgrade I made. I had to change some code in Wordpress today to allow the RSS feed to show my complete posts.
In second place I want to anounce also to my RSS feed readers that don’t come to my website very often that I have a new theme 
Much clearer an easier to read, I hope.
Feedback is welcome.
You probably already know that developing a game that runs both in XBox 360 and Windows is possible and pretty manageable using XNA Game Studio. If you start developing your game for Windows (which is great to compile/debug your code more quickly), you can then duplicate that project as an XBox 360 game. The same files will be used, but during compilation, the assemblies of XNA Framework that are used are chosen based on the target platform.
Developing a game for both platforms isn’t that trivial. There are a lot of functionalities that are exclusive to each platform. For instance, the Gamercard integration that I talked about in an earlier post, only works in XBox 360. In the other hand, since XNA games targeting Windows are pure .NET managed code, you can use whatever .NET libraries you want (such as WiimoteLib )
If you have a game that you want to compile to both platforms, but which has slight differences, you can use the C# Preprocessor Directives. When you create an XBox 360 project, the XBOX and XBOX360 conditional compilation symbols are used by the preprocessor.
Those symbols can be used to create conditions that make the preprocessor able to choose which lines of code of a file to compile. The example bellow is pretty self-explanatory.
If you compile this game targeting the XBox 360 you’ll get a blue background, otherwise you’ll get a red background.
This is not a XNA or XNA Game Studio feature, but this was the first time I needed to use such feature. More information about C# Preprocessor Directives are available at MSDN.
O Pop Up andou por todo o país a dar uma cor diferente no dia-a-dia dos estudantes de cada local. Começou em Abril no ISCTE (Lisboa), passou pela Universidade de Coimbra, Évora, este presente na cidade invicta na FEUP, foi dar uma volta à praia na Caparica (na FCT) e terminou na passada quinta-feira onde nasceu Portugal, no campus da Universidade do Minho localizado em Guimarães. (…)
(…) O popup é sem dúvida uma grande festa! E mais do que uma festa, é um evento que é feito em conjunto com as universidades, com as Associações académicas e com alguns núcleos estudantis locais. Portanto esta é uma festa feita por todos os que nela participaram e contribuíram.
Ficamos à espera de voltar a ouvir falar, e mais do que isso, VER o Pop Up pelas universidades portuguesas no próximo ano lectivo. (…)
Excerto do Blog Oficial do Pop Up!
One nice XNA feature is the ability to manage Xbox 360 users gamer data. This way you can access your gamercard information which include your name, avatar, achievements, played games and list of friend among other things. How can you do that?
In the Initialize method of your game you must add a specific component into the game, in order to prepare the game to access the data.
Since while the Initialize and LoadContent methods are executed, the gamer data is not available yet, you must access it in the Update method. There you can check if a variable is set, and if it is not, you load the gamercard information. Be careful, you must not load the gamer data in every iterations of the game loop. Your Xbox will hang if you do that… It is an expensive operation. Try to load this data only one time or so during the game lifetime.
This example show your gamer picture in the screen, followed by some of your informations such as your gamer tag.
You can download the full source code and deploy it into your Xbox 360 console and give it a try. (I’ve written before about how to get a free XNA Creators Club Membership in order to allow XNA deploying).
