Adam Nathan's Old Blog

My New Blog

2010-10-31T17:16:15Z

You're now officially looking at my old blog. My new blog is at http://blog.adamnathan.net, or more simply, http://adamnathan.net. Along with this switch is a switch in focus. My new blog will mostly discuss Windows Phone 7 app development. Enjoy!

Announcing "101 Windows Phone 7 Apps"

2010-10-31T17:14:08Z

As I tweeted the other day, my new Windows Phone 7 book is now available for pre-order. Here's the first draft of the cover (with many app icons still needed to be filled in):

The title could be a little confusing (and we might still tweak it), so let me be clear that this is a book for software developers! Each chapter walks you through the creation of a full app, teaching you lessons about Silverlight and Windows Phone along the way. The first 10 chapters alone could be an entire book on Silverlight, with coverage of controls, layout, events, data binding, resources, styles, custom controls, and much more! I put great emphasis in creating apps that look and feel like the apps that ship with the phone, so you'll learn how to use the application bar, pivot/panorama controls, animations, etc. the way that they were intended to be used. And having created so many complete Windows Phone apps, I've got tons of tips and pitfalls to share.

The 101 apps are real apps. Apps that are (or will be) in the marketplace. Apps that people are willing to pay for. 101 apps == 101 chapters, spread across two volumes. Volume I covers 50 apps, and Volume II will cover 51 apps. Volume I is organized as follows:

Part I: Getting Started
Part II: Transforms & Animations
Part III: Storing & Retrieving Local Data
Part IV: Pivot & Panorama
Part V: Audio & Video
Part VI: Microphone
Part VII: Touch & Multi-Touch
Part VIII: Accelerometer

Each volume includes a disc with full source & artwork for the apps covered in that volume. Even if you don't read the book, you could take the source code to, say, Tip Calculator, and add some features to it. You only need to make yours slightly better than mine, and you might have the best tip calculator in the marketplace! Or, perhaps you could repurpose the source code and create a loan calculator. No matter what your app idea, "there's a chapter for that!"

To get more updates on this book, switch over to my new blog at http://adamnathan.net. Thanks!

WPF 4 Unleashed!

2010-07-20T23:26:37Z

I've been seriously neglecting my blog, but I just wanted to point out that WPF 4 Unleashed is now available!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672331195?ie=UTF8&tag=adamnathannet-20

Maybe someday soon I'll explain the differences between the two books it in more depth. :)

Silverlight 2 Unleashed Available for Pre-Order

2008-09-16T10:00:02Z

I told someone awhile back, "Don’t worry, there will be a Silverlight 2 Unleashed. The only real question is whether I'll be the one writing it."

Until a few weeks ago, I just couldn’t make up my mind. (I know, it was a bit late to decide!) But finally I did, concluding that life has been too hectic to write another book. Fortunately, Laurent Bugnion had already been writing a "Teach Yourself" book on Silverlight 2 over the past year, so it was natural to convert it into Silverlight 2 Unleashed.

I met with Laurent last year when he was getting started with the book, and I’m sure it’s going to turn out great! So check it out!

Popfly Games: Now With High Score Tracking!

2008-07-18T23:03:28Z

Yesterday afternoon we updated Popfly with arguably the most fun feature yet for both viewers and game authors. Popfly games automatically track scores, wins, and losses for the people who play the games. If you browse to http://www.popfly.com/Profile/Achievements.aspx, you can see your stats and find out about popular games you haven’t played yet:

On each game’s page, you’ll find a little scoreboard so you can compare your performance against your Popfly friends or game author:

And these features (+ more) apply to Facebook as well, now that you can turn any Popfly game into your very own Facebook game. Any game you create automatically gets a scoreboard that compares Facebook friends, a nifty profile presence, news feed notifications, etc. For example, you can check out the Facebook version of my Crayon Cannon game.

So, as a game creator, what should you do to take maximum advantage of this:

Use the game-level Score property (if you want to keep any kind of score). Any numeric values will do, and if you want lower scores to be better, simply click the lower score is better button on the Game tab of the creator.
Use Won and Lost scenes. You can have as many of these type of scenes as you want. And you can now add more at any time via the Add a Scene dialog.
If you don’t care about scores or win/loss records, you still might as well make your game end on a Won scene. That way your game at least gets credit for having been played every time that scene is reached.

New Game Creator features are now live!

2008-06-13T07:21:00Z

A few hours ago we released our 20th major update to Popfly, which includes our first update to the game creator since it was released just over a month ago. There are tons of new features for you game creators out there, so I want to highlight them for you:

1. The new "color swapper" enables easy customization of any actor’s colors

This comes in very handy for differentiating good guys vs. bad guys, or just giving your game a unique look without needing artistic skill.

2. You can now rename actors

This was long overdue!

3. You can now publish your own actors so others can use them in their games

Some of you have already created fantastic custom actors. I’m looking forward to seeing them show up in search results!

4. Guide lines & snapping in the UI designer make it easier to arrange your visuals just right

You can toggle this setting with the "Snapping" button above the scene or actor appearance designer.

5. Actor stamping makes adding multiple actors fast & easy

This might take a little getting used to, but it makes it much faster to add actors exactly where you want them to be. As soon as you add one, you can instantly move/resize/delete it before stamping more actors. And if you resize the actor, the stamp will adjust to these new dimensions. Click the arrow on the left to change to normal selection mode.

6. 4 new events make it easy to create more powerful games (Scene Enter, Viewport Enter, Viewport Leave, and State Change)

For example, you could make a bad guy in a side-scroller move toward the hero only when the bad guy is within the current viewport.

7. You can now filter any Scene Enter/Leave or Viewport Enter/Leave event by one or more directions

Useful for many games, such as this one.

8. Creating multi-level games is easier, because you can now clone an existing scene

This saves tons of time. I used this to create a multi-level Kill The Peas.

9. Searching & browsing of actors has been enhanced

10. The behaviors list is now a bit more helpful, since it shows exactly what key has been chosen for a keyboard event

11. You can now turn a Popfly game or mashup into your own first-class Facebook application

You can do this by clicking "Create Your Own Facebook Application" option from the Facebook button on Popfly’s share widget.

Through Popfly, you create & control the core app and can upload an image to be shown in the app's profile box.
Through Facebook, you can control all kinds of things – icon, logo, what should be on the about page, etc. You get all the features of Facebook dedicated to your own app – a discussion board, analytics, reviews, wall, fans, etc.

Embedding a game (even as a plain ol' IFRAME) can be a pretty powerful thing. Check out what "What Now" (a kids' TV show in New Zealand) did with their Popfly game!

12. You can now see how many views your game or mashup has received

13. We've made some cosmetic updates to help authors highlight their creations and get feedback

14. We’ve added more actors

15. We’ve also fixed lots of bugs, including ones reported in our forum. A notable one: saving large games should be much faster (and avoid pesky unresponsive script dialogs).

Popfly Game Creator Sample: Type Type Revolution

2008-05-03T17:10:00Z

I'm here at Maker Faire, getting ready to demo the Popfly Game Creator, and here's a new game I just created:

You can click "tweak" to see how I created it, make changes, and save it as your own. But here's a quick summary of what I did:

I made the A, S, D, and F buttons by taking existing actors & changing their appearance. (Removing the icon and adding a TextBlock.)
I added an "Active" property to the A button initialized to 0.
I gave the A button a constant downward motion, and set its Active property to 1 when the button collides with the horizontal bar, then reset it to 0 when it uncollides.
I made the A button disappear when the A key is pressed AND Active=1 (using a filter on the event).
I incremented the built-in game-level Score property by 15 when the A key is pressed AND Active=1.
Handy shortcut: I copied the behaviors & properties on A to the S, D, and F buttons by using the "I want this actor to... act like Plus Button" shortcut. (Plus Button is the name of the A button. Yes, we don't support naming/renaming actors yet. We'll be sure to add that soon!) I then updated the references to the A key to the appropriate key.
On the main scene, I added a behavior to deduct 5 points whenever A, S, D, or F are pressed. (That way, the player gets 5 points deducted for an incorrect key press and 15-5=10 points added for a correct key press.)
I added behaviors on the main scene to spawn the A, S, D, F buttons at the top of the scene, each triggered by a timer that fires randomly between 1 and 3 seconds.
I added a scene change behavior to transition to the Won scene after 60 seconds.
I used a timer actor that already knows how to display elapsed time, but made it count down instead by initializing its ElapsedTime property to 60 (seconds) instead of 0 and changing the code in one of its behaviors to use a - instead of a +.

Enjoy!

Popfly Game Creator! (What I've been doing the last 6 months)

2008-05-02T21:06:00Z

At the end of last year, my team was nice enough to let me start working on a Silverlight-based casual game creator for Popfly, one that makes it easy to create a variety of games with no coding experience required. And here it is! For the past 2-3 months we've had two additional developers, a program manager, and a test developer focused on this, so today is a huge milestone for us. Everyone on the Popfly team has been a huge help making this happen. And since several of us only slept from about 3:30-7:30 last night, I'm not going to write very much right now. :) But here are some notes:

The whole thing works with Silverlight 1.0, as well as Silverlight 2 (currently in beta).
You can easily change any game (whether it's a visual thing or a logic thing) by clicking the "tweak" button at the bottom of all games and logging into Popfly.
We've got the best library of XAML-based artwork I know of (and this will continue to grow, especially as we open it up). Right now the artwork comes from a variety of places, but huge thanks go to Dan at lostgarden.com, the Expression team, and my wife.
We've got some great sound effects and music. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out where the music (classic songs such as "7 AM Illusion" and "Punkarama") came from.
I'm sure you'll have a mile-long list of feature requests. So do we! This is step 1... expect us to keep updating this regularly.

Here are two videos I've recorded to explain more:

One example of creating a game from scratch

A montage of some of our sample games (created with little or no code)

Enjoy!

.NET Rocks!

2008-02-07T18:25:00Z

I was fighting off a cold and perhaps not always thinking straight, but here I am on episode #314 of .NET Rocks!

Petzold strikes again!

2007-12-29T20:11:00Z

(Or, rather, struck again last summer.) I just found Jeff's post about receiving a book from Petzold complete with witty comments. I was also a lucky recipient of an autographed book, so I thought I'd share what Petzold had to say to me:

Funny stuff! (He's referring to this discussion, in case you missed it.) I haven't had a chance to read the book, but it looks really good. To say "thank you," I've been meaning to send him a signed copy of Silverlight 1.0 Unleashed, but I haven't been able to come up with something witty enough to say. "No third dimension, alas, but plenty of color?"