Michael Wolf
{Binding ME}
Friday February 05, 2010
MIX 2010 Zune HD app
We're starting to get pretty excited over here about MIX and SXSW. We will have a presence at both, but I have to admit I'm kind of partial to mix. So in celebration of MIX 2010 and the great music that is the heart of SXSW I built a zune hd music "mix" application.
This was developed using XNA and Game Studio 3.1 with the zune hd extensions. Using the zune media collection and the built in accelerometer you are able to shake the zune and pick a random song. There is also a "lock" button so once you have a song your ready to rock to, you can still drop it in your pocket with out the concern of shaking to a different song. If you have a zune hd and the development tools installed, ping me (@geekpunk) and I can send you a ccgame to install.
Overall XNA development is a lot of fun, and a great paradigm shift from Silverlight and WPF development. The biggest shift is from an event model like in most business development frameworks (wpf/silverlight) to a polling / query/game loop style model like that of xna. Another paradigm shift is similar to surface development and early silverlight 1.1 development, and that’s getting over the "control" hurdle. There are no "controls" and thus building an app like the zune mix app depends on some more manual methods of "controling" interactions and layout than you would in silverlight or wpf. Luckily there are allot of great resources out in the community to learn from (which I will list below). Also all the same ria style tricks you have learned through the years and design skills still totally apply. Over the next couple weeks we will have more and more things to show off at mix and sxsw, looking forward to seeing people there.
xna resources
- http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted
- http://www.codeproject.com/KB/game/XNALevel.aspx
- http://www.progware.org/Blog/post/XNA-Game-Development-(First-Steps).aspx
