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Just Another Cool Tool

Cannot stop Sharing this with you, as the new phones are raining into the market here is another cool tool

Powered with Windows Mobile 6.1 Samsung Omnia gives a 5MEG camera, GPS, 16GB memory, etc.etc,

It looks to me that this one has the richest features on the market today,

 

Cannot wait to get my hands on one on theseJ

 

2D Animations with WPF

So, here is the catch; it is really easy to create animations with WPF, all you have to do is to create your objects and let storyboard handle the rest.

 

Lets give it a try;

 

First of all create a WPF applications in Visual Studio, then in the XAML window of Window1.xaml paste the following code

 

 

<Window x:Class="RichContent.Window1"

        xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"

    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"

    Title="RichContent" Height="557" Width="730">

    <Canvas>

        <Path Name="MyPath" Width="800" Height="800"

      StrokeThickness="20" StrokeDashArray="0.5,2"

      StrokeDashCap="Round" >

            <Path.Data>

                <CombinedGeometry GeometryCombineMode="Union">

                    <CombinedGeometry.Geometry1>

                        <EllipseGeometry x:Name="MyEllipseGeometry"  Center="200,200" RadiusX="150" RadiusY="150" />

                    </CombinedGeometry.Geometry1>

                    <CombinedGeometry.Geometry2>

                        <EllipseGeometry Center="400,200" RadiusX="150" RadiusY="150" />

                    </CombinedGeometry.Geometry2>

                </CombinedGeometry>

            </Path.Data>

 

            <Path.Fill>

 

                <VisualBrush>

                    <VisualBrush.Visual>

                        <TextBlock Text="Hello World" FontWeight="Bold" Padding="10">

                        <TextBlock.Background>

                          <LinearGradientBrush>

                              <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Yellow" />

                              <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="Red" />

                          </LinearGradientBrush>

                        </TextBlock.Background>

                      </TextBlock>

                    </VisualBrush.Visual>

                </VisualBrush>

 

            </Path.Fill>

 

 

            <Path.Stroke>

                <LinearGradientBrush>

                    <GradientStop Offset="0" Color="Black" />

                    <GradientStop Offset="1" Color="White" />

                </LinearGradientBrush>

            </Path.Stroke>

 

 

        </Path>

 

    </Canvas>

 

</Window>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Geometry will create 2 circles intersected which will have dashed side strokes,

clip_image002

Now lets add some animation to it; Insert the following triggers into your XAML Code; this will be a double animation and the contours of the geometry should be animated;

  

 

 

            <Path.Triggers>

                <EventTrigger RoutedEvent="Path.Loaded">

                    <EventTrigger.Actions>

                        <BeginStoryboard>

                            <Storyboard>

                                <DoubleAnimation

                  Storyboard.TargetName="MyPath"

                  Storyboard.TargetProperty="StrokeDashOffset"

                  To="20" Duration="0:0:10"

          RepeatBehavior="Forever" />

                            </Storyboard>

                        </BeginStoryboard>

                    </EventTrigger.Actions>

                </EventTrigger>

            </Path.Triggers>

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And Finally lets add some more animation to the whole Picture as another storyboard

 

                        <BeginStoryboard>

                            <Storyboard>

                                <PointAnimation

                                    Storyboard.TargetName="MyEllipseGeometry"      

                                    Storyboard.TargetProperty="Center"

                                    From="150,100" To="650,200" Duration="0:0:3"

                                    RepeatBehavior="Forever" AutoReverse="True"/>

                            </Storyboard>

                        </BeginStoryboard>

 

 

 

 

 

You now have a combined shape with 2 simultaneous animations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Create Games with Popfly

So, you have never written a game before and you have no clue how to do it,

Popfly gives you the ability to create and share games with your friends and family with almost no effort; just create your account and go to http://www.popfly.com/gamecreator , you will have anumber of characters and gamestyles and you can create yo0uor games in 5 minutes,

First select your template

clip_image002

Then you have only 3 steps left, select tour Actor(s), Scenes, play,

clip_image004

You have a number of actors here are a few of my favourites;

clip_image006clip_image008

And in the scenes you can select your music, background, obstacles, etc. For you intro and main gameviews.

Then all that is left to do is to play !! Enjoy

clip_image010

Its fun, its easy, give it a try!

 

 

PHP on Windows Server 2008; 130% faster

 

I have recently seen this post by Mathew Hardman about their work with a customer on PHP on windows. The test were saying that these results would come out, but having the real tests with customers is a different thing.

So their work with a local Singaporean travel portal StreetDirectory.com yielded the folow,ing results using PHP on Windows Server 2008 and FASTCGI.

 

Graph1_thumb3

One interesting thins is that They just got the applications and put that on a Windows 2008 Core servers with no performance  Tuning, just out of the box.

The report can be downloaded from Mathew's Sky Drive here,

 

 

Flickr and Windows Live Photo Gallery

 

A recent Update made WLPG support loading to Flickr, this is just great news as you will not only be able to upload to flickr but this is also a new example of S+S where software and services collaborate for people.

The way it works is pretty simple as 123, just select the pictures you want to upload, select Publish -> more Services -> Publish on Flickr.

Posting on flickr from WLPG

And of course you will need authorization

Posting on flickr from WLPG

In case you would like to get the update, Windows update will do it for you. If you do not have automatic updates on, go to http://update.microsoft.com. Please note that the update will work only if you altready have WLPG Beta.

Enjoy!!

 

What is coming from the cloud in the sky?

 (read This article on silverlight pages)

There are a lot of thing coming for developers nowadays, and all seems to be coming from the web cloud. All throughout the year many new technologies have been introduced. Not only these are exciting(at least for me) but also it seems that these technologies will direct the programming paradigm as well. Shall we look into developing Software delivered as a service, or couple services with services, what tools we shall use etc. etc.

Let me not start a long article and talk about the tools that have been introduced in the last months.

Silverlight, formerly WPF/E was the most interesting one.  Replacing WPF/E and  coming with a bunch of charming examples the tool made developers start to think about  creative interfaces, and maybe get non-developers; artists, designers to start thinking about  "unleashing their creativity". http://silverlight.net/community/communitygallery.aspx

And Surface ;  which is basically a special computer equipped with Vista, Cameras, and sensors to form up a surface computer that enable people to use natural hand gestures, touches and physical objects placed on it.

My favorite example on this is the Silverlight surface demo, try it out here.

Surface on Silverlight

That said there are a lot in innovative products that are falling down from the cloud; lets check them out

Popfly is the drag and drop meshup programming tool where you can create web pages and gadgets as well, in Popfly you can use Virtual Earth, Flickr, Facebook and many more trendy blocks to create meshups and even get these meshups to your desktop into the gadgets area in Vista, check it out! Popfly is not broadly public yet and is invite only!

PopFly

Then the list goes on by live.com services; some of which are http://local.live.com/    where you get the 3D view and representations;

These are real modelings for these cities. And if you want to drive in these cities check out the Live Search Maps where you will be traveling on the streets and drive towards your destination!!

At http://labs.live.com/   you can traverse various places through the edge mapped hundreds of pictures along with a 3D model. These include San Marco; Space Shuttle; Ely Cathedral  by BBC; Trafalgar Square; South Korea ; Rome etc. Check out the video section for more details on this technology;

With all these live applications there comes a fun and rich interactive for our applications; and these are not limited to search applications only. Revolutionizing WPF capabilities for Browsers(yes almost all Browsers, IE, Firefox,  Safari on Mac ) will blow your applications away;

 

Applications are definitely are getting to a more interactive and fun to use way. Check out Miss Dewey for example; an interactive search that will make you search for things!

So, download  Silverlight and get the developer toolkit for live.com. And dive into the amazig graphical experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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