If you are interested in developing apps for Windows Phone 7, Microsoft have now released their presentations from the Windows Phone 7 Developer Mania conference that was held on May 26.
The presentations are in Swedish only, and highlights topics such as Silverlight development, XNA development, designing apps for Windows Phone 7 and an introduction to Windows Phone 7 “Mango”.
If you want to do a clean install of OS X Lion when it’s launched in July you can use the following tip posted at TUAW:
From the Unity Technologies Blog:
Light probes are an advanced technique for lighting dynamic objects and characters with high-quality baked lighting. It is possible to capture incoming direct and bounced lighting within a scene at a number of points – light probes. As a character moves through the scene, nearby probes are picked, interpolated, and the result is then passed to the shader to efficiently light the surface. There it can be sampled per-vertex or per-pixel, if you want to use the normalmap-perturbed normal to do so.
Looks very nice! Light Probes will arrive in Unity 3.5 for mobile devices.
Clever use of the iPad 2 Smart Cover to create a whole new type of application.
From Depixelizing Pixel Art:
“Naïve upsampling of pixel art images leads to unsatisfactory results. Our algorithm extracts a smooth, resolution-independent vector representation from the image which is suitable for high-resolution display devices.”
Nearest-neighbor scaling:
Using the algorithm by Johannes Kopf and Dani Lischinski::
Make sure you checkout the other cool examples on their web page.
Yesterday Steve Jobs presented Apple’s plans to build a new office building for up to 12 000 Apple Employees. Definitely worth a look.
Some quotes from Steve Jobs:
“It’s a little like a spaceship landed”
“There’s not a straight piece of glass on this building. It’s all curved.”
“I think we do have a shot at building the best office building in the world. I definitely think architect students will come here to see it. I think it will be that good.”
Looking at the video it’s clear how important Steve Jobs still is for Apple, despite being on medical leave.
“We’re encouraging our readers to switch immediately to the new FT web app, as many new features and sections will be added over the coming weeks. Make sure you don’t miss out on these updates.”
Financial Times have just announced that they are discontinuing their iOS apps and moving to a web app format. Not only do they no longer have to pay Apple 30% on all subscriptions, they also state the following advantages:
It will definitely be interesting to see consumer reactions to this.
The new Financial Times web app can be found at: http://app.ft.com