Design, UX, and Cool Things

• iPad to Windows Store app: Design case study (Bart Claeys and Qixing Zheng) – Frequently it’s not the technology that is standing in the way of porting a good app… it’s the UX.
• Batch: 300+ free icons for interface design – works great with Metro Modern UI. Free to use, but be a sport and donate if you can.
• TouchDevelop – a Microsoft Research project for developing apps on a tablet-style interface, build apps on devices for devices
• Practical SketchNoting (Jason Alderman) – Sketchnoting is the art of taking visual notes over simple text. The result is something closer to a comic and is a great way to enhance the readability and use of notes.

Windows Phone

• Microsoft Media Platform: Player Framework – open source video player for Windows Phone, Windows 8, HTML5, Silverlight.
• Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Videos (Andy Wigley) – 21 videos delivering giant piles of information about the new features in Windows Phone 8
• Sharing Code: Windows 8 and Windows Phone (Matt Hidinger) – Great overview of the ways we can share code across Windows8 and Windows Phone
• Basic Lens sample – It says “basic” but it’s actually a pretty involved and comprehensive sample project of lens integration.
• Speech-Enabling a Windows Phone 8 App with Voice Commands (F Avery Bishop) – Voice Commands for Windows Phone 8 are a very cool and very powerful feature. Brings a lot of new functionality to the developer and a new way to interact with apps.
• Install Apps From a microSD Card
• Debugging an HTML5 Windows Phone App – notes on doing real-time debugging for apps running in a WebBrowser control.
• Geoposition Advanced Tracking Scenarios for Windows Phone 8 (Daniel Estrada Alva) – Includes how to use MovementThreshold so we can do updates when the user moves a certain distance.

Windows 8

• Windows 8 in a Clinical Environment – Not a “real” app, but a cool and inspiring implementation of Windows 8 design principles applied to a line-of-business clinical setting
• Windows 8 Game Development using C#, XNA and MonoGame (Tara Walker) – A big “missing piece” in my desire to do everything is being able to make simple games. I hope to dive into this and this is where I’ll start.

Windows Azure

• iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services (Push Notifications) (Scott Gu) – Mobile services on Azure is at the top of my list of things to play with more. That team is doing amazing work.
• WCF, Windows Azure and Windows Store (Nisha Singh) – A bit of a “back-to-front” walkthrough connecting a Windows 8 app to a solid Azure backend.

Code I Use (Tumblr)

• Basic MVVM Model
• Cycle Through Color Spectrum in Javascript