In some of my previous WP7 blogs, such as Basic XNA Graphics for the WP7, I go over how to build basic 3D models for your applications. What happens when you want something more complex? You need a good 3D tool to generate those models for you. I started exploring Google SketchUp as a possibility for generating 3D models for the WP7. I found Jim’s Blog on how to load a Google SketchUp model into a XNA game. Jim used the DirectX/XNA Exporter Plugin. So I installed the plugin and started playing around. I thought it would ...

I’ve been to a lot of technical conferences, both as a presenter and attendee, so I feel at least somewhat qualified to offer my opinion of the recent Google IO conference in San Francisco. I am not here to enumerate the product announcements or offer my in-depth opinion on every topic, you can find all you want of that (and more) out on the web.  Instead I am going to try and convey the general feeling and impression I got from the event, colored with my years of experience in the software industry.

Geeks, gadgets, and giveaways...

A very common UI paradigm in mobile development is the scrolling list of items.  You have all seen it: flick your finger up and down and the data scrolls by, touch an item and drill down into the details for the touched item.  Here are a couple of examples from our Falafel 2 Go app:

You can probably imagine this is a critical performance area for a resource constrained mobile device: there could be many ...

Yesterday evening, my Falafel pals at Microsoft Tech Ed asked for a barcode to display in the Falafel booth so that attendees could easily find Falafel 2 Go in the Android Market.  The popular format for doing this is something called a “QR Code”, a 2 dimensional barcode that can embed links, emails, phone numbers, and other digital media. 

At first I was thinking it seemed a bit tedious for an attendee to have to use their camera to find our app in the Android Market.  While the QR Code can be used to embed many types of digital ...