Note that this gallery works better if you’ve installed Microsoft Silverlight…, which is good because if you’re at this site you’ve got it riiiight?! So you can see our little featured section at the top?!
So with Microsoft finally letting down the curtains on the Zune HD, many tech sites are getting round to previewing and showing off the device for your viewing pleasure. And just for you, here’s a collection of the best vids:
Microsoft recently released the third version of their web application framework, Silverlight, which enables web developers to create fully featured rich internet experiences for web sites (For those still confused, think of it as a better version of Flash). Along side the Silverlight 3 launch came the launch of Expression Blend 3, the development tool for creating these Silverlight experiences, and inside it comes a few nice little demo applications.
One of them just happens to be a Zune Originals demo app, allowing users to rotate their Zune in 3D, whilst fully customizing it with designs, colours and personalised text. It’s a cool little experiment, and just for you guys to get a taste of it, I’ve uploaded it here for you to check out! (Requires Silverlight 3, obviously! Note that you’ll need as big a window as possible for it to work properly, no netbooks here!)
Also, slightly less news worthy is the fact that I’ve decided to take advantage of Silverlight, and if you’ve been on the site the last few days you’ll have noticed our new features box at the top of the page, with 3D transitions and such. I’ve written it from the ground up in about 3 hours following the Silverlight 3 launch, so there are still a couple of quirks I have it work out, but by and large its usable, and looks kinda nice!! Depending on what you guys think, I may transfer more meaning parts of the site into Silverlight as well to create a far more interactive user experience.
Engadget got another chance to have a quick play around with the Zune HD, albeit one devoid of nearly any content. Unfortunately they don’t bother checking it out much, like scrolling down the menu to see what’s there, or even clicking on “internet” to see the interface, the type of things that die hard Zune fanboys are dying to see! In case you haven’t guessed then, there’s now an “internet” option in the menu, presumably to launch the built-in web browser. After all, where would you expect the browser to launch from? Anywho check out the rather brief showing below.
Posted by Johnny on 24 Jun 2009 in HD, Media, Zune
Shortly after Engadget posted their hands on pictures of the device, Gizmodo has come on ahead and given us a much more thorough tour of the new UI and model, complete with a video showing off the new UI goodness!
Also included is a much better photo gallery showing off the devices design.
So, what do you guys think? Personally I think it’s all looking very swanky, a far better interface than iPod touch to be sure. Also, judging by the extreme smoothness, and especially in respect to how fast the image rotates when the device is rotated (not even iPod touches smooth interface can match that), one can only assume this device is packing some pretty serious hardware underneath. Nvidia Tegra? It’s looking very likely right about now.
Still, there is still something nagging at me… where are the new features guys?! Anyway, leave your impressions and thoughts in our forums!
EDIT: Seems CNET also have a video hands on of the device, so here it is below!
Posted by Johnny on 28 May 2009 in Flash, HD, Media
So, Zune HD just got official yesterday, and today we’re already starting to see some hands-on, real life shots of the device, courtesy of Engadget. First, they got a live demo of the device from none other than Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s current head honcho, complete with badly taken, blurry pictures, and now they’ve been given the chance to go hands on with it themselves, with some decidedly better photography to boot.
According to Engadget, the new interface is just like a pimped up extension of the current interface, with more emphasis on non-essential visual flourishes to make the interface seem more appealing, like lots of flipping images and smooth scaling fonts zooming in and out. Unfortunately their hands on look doesn’t really get past the home menu, though you can check out the device in all its’ slim, sleek glory over at their photo gallery.
Normally I wouldn’t I post about free content on Zune Marketplace, especially Video content (due to region restrictions which prohibits us UK’ers from getting all content from the video Marketplace), but this happens to be a very special case…
Catch the new third season FREE premiere episode as video podcast from the acclaimed Showtime series "The Tudors" in the Zune Marketplace. THE TUDORS focus is on the rarely dramatized, tumultuous early years of King Henry 8’s nearly 40-year, omnipotent reign of England played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers.
Now, I know what your thinking… “Well isn’t this a video download, what use is it to us international zuners?”. Well, thankfully it’s being distributed as a Video Podcast, meaning Zune users from all around the world are free to download and enjoy the entire hour long episode!
The episode is available in near DVD quality 640 x 390, 29FPS, coming in at 660MB/s. If your looking for some good drama to watch, catch the free show available now on the Zune Marketplace as part of the Showtime Podcast.
Forum member Rouge Planetoid, has recently released a new version of his ZuneCardr application which allows you to create a Zune Card as an image. If you have .NET 3.5 SP1 on your machine then give it a go – and let him know what you think in our forum thread!
ZuneCardr comes with lots of customisation options to let you build your own Zune Card from your PC, with a selection of built in themes, and support for custom ones, along with choosing which albums you want to display and of course, even some simple colour switching! And when your done, you can export it into a couple of different formats which you can then share with the world however you want! Download it now!
And, as an added bonus, he’s even created an exclusive theme just for our zoone community!
Click on the link below to download the theme (with instructions inside the folder, be sure to read them!)
Again, please stop by our forums to give a big thanks to RougePlanetoid for all his work!
Like nice, bright eye catching displays to grab your attention when you walk into a shop? Well look no further than these new Zune retail displays! Planned Marketing Solutions International (PMSI), a company well known in the industry for retail designs, is currently working on updating the original Zune retail displays to something a little more fresh, and a little more capable of selling those devices!
A fair sight different from the traditional off-putting brown Zune displays of old, these new mock-ups feature clean curves and the Zune’s now trademark orange and pink energy bar design, to create a display of colour that will no doubt catch many shoppers attention, and at least get them slightly interested in what’s going on here.
Extra emphasis has been placed highlight things like Xbox 360 integration (soon to receive quite a boost!), wireless sync and music discovery, along with showing off the awesomely designed Desktop software and compatible third party accessories.
Or course these are but renders, and it’s probably likely that even if they do appear in stores, they won’t last long, as the next wave of hardware is due to hit this Autumn, though then again it could simply be a case of switching the art work. As cool as these would look in American stores, something tells me they’d just feel far better in somewhere closer to home… say a U.K. store, come on Microsoft!!
So, here’s a new something I’m trying for the weekends, a quick roundup highlighting some of the more interesting games and applications that have hit our Games Marketplace during the past week.
Responsible for millions of hours lost of work time on PC’s, the popular single player card game “Solitaire” comes to Zune thanks to coder Netrix, who’s efforts have resulted in a sublime recreation of the game. Featuring well designed graphics, and optimized to help reduce battery consumption, whilst including basic favourite options like 3 card or 1 card draw along with 2 different scoring options, this isn’t just a quick afternoon knock up of the game. A lot of effort was put in, and it really shows. The only think its really missing now is some touch control.
One of the things the Zune firmware is curiously missing is support for displaying Asian language characters in song info, instead displaying them as square boxes. Of course, for those with large collections of music with these characters, this can be really annoying.
Thankfully, sectionboy has come along with a solution: An XNA based Zune Player! Using a smartly designed GUI, sorting your albums by genre, it natively displays all the Asian font characters. Check out this video to see what its like in action. Of course, performance is better on the Zune 30, but it still works albeit with added slow-down on other models. Its also worth checking out if you just want another cool way of displaying your music on Zune.
Update (20/02/09 23:38 GMT): It’s now LIVE! Check out the Games Marketplace here, or click games in the nav bar above, or the link in the nav bar on the right. Enjoy =) Comments and user registration will be coming soon, and I’ll be letting Dev’s know how they can get involved real soon too. Oh, and please visit the Feedback thread in the forums to vote in the poll and, y’know, leave us some feedback on it!
Simple to browse. Pleasing to the eye. Easy to contribute to. Full of everything Zune XNA related. That was my entire design document for the original Games Marketplace. Did I succeed? Well I got the first half I reckon. But that’s not good enough, only reaching half your goal. So I took the entire thing back to the drawing board. I needed to re-think. I scrapped the oddball, re-jiggered forum backend, and decided to find something powerful and flexible enough to achieve my goal. And I found it. Meet the all new Games Marketplace.
Over he last few (looooong) days, I’ve been working on replicating the general interface of the older Marketplace onto our new system, but improving it in the most important area: the download pages themselves! Gone are the hard to read and un-intuitively laid out pages, replaced with cleaner and more clearly laid out ones.
Notable features and changes include:
Bigger, fatter, chunkier download button, which has been moved up the page from the bottom, to make downloading easier
CCGAME downloads take centre stage with the download button
Cleaner, more compact download pages
File information is now tabled and easier to read
Ability to upload additional related files (e.g. extra skins, themes, etc)
Developers now only have to simply fill in the required fields to have their downloads automatically entered to the database
Advanced sorting options
Users can now rate downloads
Users can now comment on and discuss downloads
New sorting options
Added “Email to a friend”
Okay, it doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, when you see the new system in action you’ll appreciate how much better it really is. This new system is FAR easier for both games developers and myself to maintain and add games and applications to, as well as FAR easier for users to find and download programs. Hopefully you’ll all like what I’ve done with the place! I’m just putting the finishing touches on it, and within the next 24 hours I’ll open it up to the public!
So then, have I succeeded in my original 4-point plan then? Well, I’m now 3/4’s of the way there, and now the last part is just going to get easier!
Posted by Johnny on 19 Feb 2009 in Media, Site, XNA
Whilst writing up the newest entry for the Video Conversion guide, I decided to take a little nose around inside the code for Windows Live Movie Maker BETA. Not very interesting stuff for the most part I can tell you.
One little tidbit I did come across though is shown above: A video Publishing encoding profile, just for the Zune!! What this means that any video can be set to encode with this profile with settings specially tailored to Zune. Unfortunatly this profile isn’t enabled, and can’t be enabled through the options. (I succeeded at one point but it went on to crash the program). Hopefully in future versions though we’ll see this option enabled.
Practically, this really doesn’t make much difference, as both default encoding profiles already in WLMM Beta are perfectly configured for encoding videos for Zune, both for the device and TV-Out, though one specially for Zune is always nice for that extra piece of mind… even if the settings are basically the same! (For the record, the Zune profile encodes at 320×240 resolution, with settings very similar to the “Windows Media portable device” profile)
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Responsible for millions of hours lost of work time on PC’s, the popular single player card game “Solitaire” comes to Zune thanks to coder Netrix, who’s efforts have resulted in a sublime recreation of the game. Featuring well designed graphics, and optimized to help reduce battery consumption, whilst including basic favourite options like 3 card or 1 card draw along with 2 different scoring options, this isn’t just a quick afternoon knock up of the game. A lot of effort was put in, and it really shows. The only think its really missing now is some touch control.
One of the things the Zune firmware is curiously missing is support for displaying Asian language characters in song info, instead displaying them as square boxes. Of course, for those with large collections of music with these characters, this can be really annoying.
