Another Booties Fest

Something tells me my brain is going through baby fever. I wonder why :o)
Taking a small break from booties for a while though. 3 sweet cardigans on their way now, boy do they take longer than booties.

Spoiler Alert!! My baby’s going to be a…

Twas 20 week anatomy scan day today. Baby Laundry has 1 heart, 1 stomach, 1 bladder, 2 kidneys, 1 brain, 1 spine, 2 legs, 2 feet, 10 toes, 2 arms, 2 hands, 10 fingers and whatever else is there holding it all together :o)

So, after 35 mins of prodding and poking around making sure the above was all in place, we tried to determine whether it be pink or blue. At which point baby clamped its legs together as tight as it could. The two sonographers pretty quickly saw through the grey blobs and gave a verdict, though they couldn’t say they were 100% certain.

Here’s a nice profile view of our growing baby.

So what colour do you think schlee is?

(Click the appropriate colour to make your guess and I’ll tell you if the sonographers agree)

Surprise!

Here be the official spilling of the beans to the internet. Apologies to anyone we didn’t manage to tell in person who feels they should have been told before this, we did our best.

Here goes: Jed and I are trying our hand at growing a human child.

We’re at the 12 week mark as of today, and preliminary results are promising. The Junior Laundry is exhibiting signs of being indeed human. YUS!

Here are our first baby photos: (Baby is approx 5cm from head to tail)

Vegetable Garden. Grown a bit.

Current state of the vegetable garden. Ignore the weeds.

Two fun WP7 development Fakts

1) StatusBar != StatusBar

The statusbar at the top of the screen, referred to as “StatusBar” in the official WP7 interface design document and pretty much everywhere else, is not called a “StatusBar” in code. To set the visibility of the “StatusBar” in xaml, in your page:

<phone:PhoneApplicationPage
  ...
  xmlns:shell="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Shell;assembly=Microsoft.Phone"
  ...
  shell:SystemTray.IsVisible="False"
  ...
>

Apparently it’s actually called the “SystemTray”. This caused me hours of fruitless Googling “WP7 Hide StatusBar” when trying to figure out how to get rid of it in my fullscreen WP7 game, and I was a little annoyed at the end of it.

2) Generating XAML content in Expression Design for use in a WP7 game
For years now, Expression Design has been my favourite piece of vector graphics software. During my career as an iPhone application developer, essentially all graphic content of the apps I developed was made in Expression Design and exported to PNG or TIFF. This didn’t take any advantage of the vectory goodness other than to allow me to easily resize and re-export when I mucked up required sizes etc. but due to the simplicity and elegance of the software, made my job more enjoyable.

My masters project (a sheet music reader/annotator/organiser) however is positively dripping in vectory goodness. In this I have used Expression Design to export XAML drawing brushes for each bar of music displayed. This gives me smoothly zoomable music that looks, dare I say, fantastic. Anyway… moving on the grunt of this Fakt:

When I started developing FruitSalad for WP7, I decided to make it in Silverlight instead of XNA, so as to enable use of pure XAML graphic content. There were a few stumbling blocks on my way to getting this to work though:

-          Silverlight for WP7 doesn’t support DrawingBrush

So my WPF approach of creating a DrawingBrush for each graphical resource (in this case, each piece of fruit) and binding in to the Fill property of a rectangle (or Backrground property of a Grid panel) would not work at all.

-          Silverlight for WP7 doesn’t support ViewBox

Due to the complicatedness of each of my pieces of fruit, simply ctrl+shift+c –ing to copy the XAML used a combination of Canvas, Path and ViewBox objects. Not supported.

My solution: Use Expression design to export as XAML Silverlight 3 Canvas. This created simple enough XAML to use in a XAML app.

My next issue was how to actually use these Canvas items in such a way that I didn’t need to create a separate UserControl for each  different type of fruit in my game. Ideally what I wanted to do is have a Fruit object that changed its Content to the appropriate Canvas for its fruit type.

I couldn’t figure out how to do this sensibly, but did come up with an incredibly convoluted solution. The main problem I encountered was that I wasn’t able to Bind a StaticResource to the Content property of an element. So what I ended up doing was creating a Button Style Template for each type of fruit:

<Style x:Key="WatermelonBlock" TargetType="Button">
  <Setter Property="Template">
    <Setter.Value>
      <ControlTemplate TargetType="Button">
        <Grid HorizontalAlignment="Left">
          <!-- The Exported XAML Canvas -->
          <Canvas .... />
        </Grid>
      </ControlTemplate>
    </Setter.Value>
  </Setter>
</Style>

Then apply the appropriate style when the fruit type of the control is set:

private static void OnTypeChanged(DependencyObject d, DependencyPropertyChangedEventArgs e)
{
  FruitView view = d as FruitView;
  //Get the string key for the type eg "WatermelonBlock"
  string styleString = view.GetStyleString(view.Type);
  Style fruitStyle = view.Resources[styleString] as Style;
  view._RootButton.Style = fruitStyle;
}

The fruit object itself looks like this:

<UserControl>
  <Grid>
    <Button x:Name="_RootButton" Style="{StaticResource WatermelonBlock}" Click="Button_Click">
  </Grid>
</UserControl>

I think this is a messy solution, but at least it works. If anyone can find a better way to do this, I’d love to hear about it.

So those are two of the roadblocks I reached when starting out with WP7 development. I hope my solutions can help others to convert fruitless Googling and forum searching into productive coding time. But where’s the fun in that?

WP7 Challenge

So, with 5 days before closing I decided to make a WP7 game to enter into the NZ WP7 challenge

This is what I came up with: Fruit Salad.

Now, bare in mind this is < 5 days development. And that 5 days included learning how to actually do game development in Silverlight and the several hours of freaking out every time it became apparent that my WPF fueled plan was impossible due to lack of <drawingbrush>, <viewbox>, translate transform bindings … so pretty much .. tremble at the awesomeness of my last minute coding skillz!

Application Description:

Fruit Salad

Fruit Salad is an exciting twist on the typical sorting game, as to
play, you need to learn Maori, challenging your memory and dexterity.

When the game starts two kete (baskets) appear on screen, along with a
never ending supply of fruit and vegetables. Sorting will depend on
the labels on the kete;
you might be sorting the fruit from vegetables, or the green from red.

Drag and flick kai into the appropriate kete but be careful, if you
sort into the wrong kete, or if you let the kai rot, you’ll lose
points!

So long, long-locks

Probably not worth a blog post, but what the hay.

This morning I paid a lovely lady to remove over a foot of hair from my head.  Tis the weirdest feeling to have so little hair. I haven’t had it this short since the dreaded hair cut of age 16….

Before and After

Vegetable Garden Take Two

After last year’s somewhat sad attempt, it’s time for round two of ‘Beverley gets all enthusiastic about growing vegetables for about a month then gets lazy and abandons the garden to the weeds’. That being said, we did have some successes last year: We got a tonne of chillies, a healthy harvest of beans (though we left them a bit late to pick), some tasty (though mutant) carrots and our early lettuce leaves were tasty.

This year I’m trying more of the same plus some new colourful things to hopefully make our dinner plates more interesting. Now that I come to think about it, most of the new crops are purple. I’m planting purple varieties of beans and carrots plus this year we’re trying out beetroot. After the success of our cayenne pepper crop, I’ve started growing thai chilli seeds too. Not because I have any desire to eat more chilli flavoured food, but I do like the look of the plants covered in bright, shiny red fruit (or are chillies vegetables?).

The other red offerings will be strawberries (Just finished straw-ing the strawberry patch), radishes and tomatoes. We failed miserably at generating tomatoes last year. I grew wicked looking seedlings of both cherry and moneymaker varieties but they never really took hold once they made it out into the garden. We think this was due to the shallowness of the garden, it was really only about 20cm deep. Late in the season we tried moving our pathetic looking plants into large pots with more depth, but by that stage it was too late. Though the plants did bounce back a little, they never yeilded a satisfactory harvest and were eventually left to be consumed by the weeds behind the garage. So, on my little seedling rearing shelf in the garage, I now have two new breeds growing, Italian and Roma. I’ve started several months later than last year on everything, but hopefully I’ll get some nice strong plants ready in time for the summer sunshine.

So that’s the plan anyway. Here are some pictures of various pieces of the garden thus far.

Crochet Companion Cube

I spent the last week making this for my dad for fathers day. One crocheted companion cube. I took inspiration from a couple of other peoples takes on the companion cube:

One here: http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=234375.0
A knitted one: http://knittedcompanioncube.blogspot.com/2007/12/knitted-companion-cube-assembly.html
And another crocheted: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/12/27/today-in-joystiq-december-27-2007/

So I decided to come up with my own pattern for one. Mine is a miniture (About 15cm x 15ccm x 15cm) , as I only had 4 days to complete it and I’m not the fastest crocheter on the block. Anywho… here’s the result, and a link to my pattern in PDF form:

Oh, and my pattern is loosely based off this easy crochet cube pattern. (Converted to work from the corners out rather than starting with the base face and working up)
http://www.crochetspot.com/how-to-crochet-a-cube/

Masters Progress : New Toy :o)

On Monday this week, my new toy arrived in the Interaction Design Lab; A 21.5” optical multi-touch monitor from the folks at Dell.

I’ve just recently started a MSc (in Computer Science) at The University of Waikato. My research area is all around digital music stand technology. I’m currently working on an application to display sheet music in crisp scalable vector format, the idea being for musicians to be able to view, edit and interact with their sheet music in ways that are either difficult or not possible with a printed page. I really want to take advantage of the modern trend toward touch and multi-touch displays to develop and cool and hopefully intuitive interface.

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