Blog List

A little late in coming I know…but on 26th December Brisbane was host to the first DDD Brisbane! We’d sold out quite a lot before the event and had 40+ people on the waitlist so it can only be a good sign that people are keen for these types of events. We were there early to setup to hand out lanyards (which was the secret password for free coffee) and the all important swag.



Damian gave the keynote and all important logistical...

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After being fortunate enough to be a Software Design Finalist Judge for Image Cup for the last 2 years, I’ve been invited to be part of the keynote and give a breakout session at the QUT Image Cup Smackdown Event 23rd November. If you aren’t aware this years worldwide finals are going to be held in Australia! If you can’t make the event and want to more about the competition itself, check out the main website http://www.imaginecup.com/.

Imagine Cup is the premier student technology competition in the world challenging students to create solutions for the worlds toughest problems.

Imagine Cup Smackdown brings students a prime opportunity to learn about Imagine Cup and learn from experts on what will assist you with solving those tough problems using technology!

Taking on the concept from the highly successful Smackdown 2010 event held at QUT last year, Imagine Cup Smackdown will showcase some of the latest technology and amazing demo's which will blow attendees away.

Imagine Cup Smackdown will not only hold a keynote event but will provide attendees the opportunity to deep dive into tracks including Software & Technology, Business and Design & UI.

See below for the confirmed awesome speakers of Imagine Cup Smackdown!

Lawrence Crumpton - Microsoft Bronwen Zande - Soul Solutions...

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The folks over at YOW! 2011 are putting up a couple of free tickets to the Brisbane conference and offering a discount to the Girl Geek Dinner ladies to attend.  For those that aren’t familiar, YOW! is part of the GOTO global conferences which includes QCON.  If you have never been to a YOW! event be ready for some great talks and training. 

YOW! is known for breadth and depth. Checkout these links for your interest:

Agile JavaScript and Web Devs Ruby, JavaScript and Web Java and JVM Cloud Computing, NoSQL and BigData Microsoft Brisbane Free Ticket 1 – Anyone attending...

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While we were sleeping on the weekend the latest version of the Kinect SDK for Windows was released – Beta 2. It also mean a new web address for everything KinectSDK here: http://kinectforwindows.org/.

There’s been a bunch of changes to the install aswell as the actual SDK. Here’s a few things I found when I upgraded to the newest version.

Installation

If you already have a previous version of the SDK installed you must uninstall it first. If you try to install Beta 2 over the top of a previous version you will receive the following error:



Install location - If you’re having trouble finding the dll locations the samples and documentation now have a new home under C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Kinect\v1.0 Beta2 – so you’ll have to update all the references in your existing projects to point to the correct directory in here.

RunTime...

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I’m a big fan of SCRUM / AGILE / insert other name that helps me actually get on doing my job and be able to get it done more efficiently without being tied up in titles, roles and rank. I’ve always like the retrospectives in the sprints I’ve done. I find it a great way for everyone to reflect on the awesome stuff they did, what things they tried that didn’t work so great and to really decide as a team what you want to improve/change for next time. It’s a great way to air the dirty laundry and start with a clean slate. The problem I’ve often encountered is these meetings can get quite boring after awhile if you do them the same way and ask the exact same questions each time. Inevitably, people fall into roles of being quiet while the more dominant get more airtime.

Changing up the retrospective to have different formats can be a great way to bring out the voice of different types of people by tapping into different talents and comfort zones. I also find it’s a great way to get people talking about what happened in a different way and makes them think of things that they wouldn’t have come up with with the tried and true method.

I’d previously taught the team how to run the “emotional” kind of retro, where they plot their happy/sadness on a graph over the duration from the sprint. We got some good results from that but had a few comments about how...

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This week we were able to expand TransHub to 7 cities – now including Canberra. We were able to do this because the dataset for Canberra became available on data.gov.au.

Just over 5 years ago we saw the first campains to “Free Our Data” in the UK. Governments in every country collect and hold a massive amount of data, much of it very useful in our everyday lives, and quite often data you have to pay to get hold of and not necessarily in a particularly useful format. The idea behind this campaign was the Governments should collect the best quality data possible and then make it available for free to all.

In recent years there has been a push for Australian government agencies to make more data available to the public. Since then Data.Gov.Au has been created.

Data.gov.au provides an easy way to find, access and reuse public datasets from the Australian Government and state and territory governments. The main purpose of the site is to encourage public access to and reuse of government data by providing it in useful formats and under open licences.

The great thing about putting up the data so the public can use it, is that developers, businesses and hobbyists can use the data and mash it up in ways that were never before thought of and...

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After our initial launch of TransHub Sydney just over a month ago, our biggest feature request is to have a version for other cities. We’re pleased to announce that as of yesterday we now have 6 cities – 5 in Australia, and 1 in New Zealand on the marketplace:

Australia

Adelaide http://adl.transhub.com

Cairns http://cns.transhub.com

Perth http://per.transhub.com

Sydney http://syd.transhub.com

Townsville http://tsv.transhub.com

New Zealand

Auckland http://akl.transhub.com

 

In Australia we’re currently beta testing Canberra and hope to have that available to you very soon also. For New Zealand – we’re looking into Wellington if there’s interest. For other countries, we’re looking at adding some features for displaying/calculating distances in miles so we can support a number of cities in the USA.

We’re in the process of upgrading the application to Mango so we can address a number of the features you’ve been asking for.  We’ll be putting out a call for beta testers for that soon, so...

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Since we announced TransHub Sydney there’s been a few articles popping up around the place. Thought it’d be a good time to put the ones we know about in one place.

TechAU interviewed John at Teched Australia about TransHub and posted an article the day TranHub went live on the marketplace – TransHub taps Gov Data to Minimise Multi-Mode Commute Times

 

WPCentral did a write-up about the app just after TransHub hit the marketplace: TransHub lands down under in the Marketplace

 

1800 pocket pc did an article on the spotlight finalists: Apps from Spotlight 2011

It includes a brief video interview we did at Teched Australia

 

We made it into the app list on cnet : http://www.cnet.com.au/friday-app-wrap_p2-339306461.htm

 

Yesterday, the MVP team posted about TransHub on their blog: MVP’s Windows Phone 7 App Wins Top Honors – and Helps Ease Public Commute in Sydney

...

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It’s been a few weeks since Teched, but it also feels just like yesterday. We’ve been busy with TransHub and Build and Tuesday we even did a last minute Qld MSDN User Group presentation on the Kinect SDK.

For anyone that missed our talk the video of our Teched Australia talk is available online for download or you can watch it below:

While we were at Teched, John spoke to Stuart Kennedy about the potential we saw for Kinect SDK and got a mention in an Article in The Australian – The Kinect hits the fast lane for mull-use apps.

Day 1 of Build is over! Today Microsoft shared with the world their brave new Operating System, Windows 8.



Honestly we weren’t expecting much more than a new touch shell on Windows 7. We were wrong. A whole new API, WinRT, provides c++, c# and HTML5 developers with the full power of windows in new “Metro” applications. These applications can be packaged up and sold through the new online marketplace, it looks like a next generation of the current Windows Phone marketplace.

It was interesting to get some stats around Windows 7:

Approaching 450,000,000 copies sold Consumer usage is greater than Windows XP 542,000,000 people signing into Windows Liver Services per month

...

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