Beyond Tiles: Western Europe Design Tour

By Arturo Toledo | May 10th, 2013 | No Comments

I think the time is right and the mood is proper for me to announce the upcoming Beyond Tiles, Western Europe Design Tour. It is a one-day design extravaganza where Microsoft, NOKIA, Toledo Design (Arturo and Alejandro) and some special guests (i.e Brady Voss from the Windows Phone design studio in Redmond, Vincent Garcia, from Avanade in Stockholm and NOKIA guests) will be sharing with you insightful and practical design knowledge to create Windows Phone and Windows apps that can go “beyond tiles”.

As recently discussed, it can only be the Community who pushes Windows and Windows Phone design to the next level. Luckily for us we have a couple good shepherds to guide us in this journey: Microsoft and Nokia. There’s so much more design potential for applications created under the original modernist principles of the 20th century, from masters like Gropius, Vignelli, Rams, Van der Rohe and Kubrick. Some call it Metro, others “flat, others “modern”, we just like to call it “Good Design”.

Windows Phone is more than just Panoramas and Pivots and Windows is more than just tiles. If you want to get a first (very first) hint at how to go beyond these out-of-box design paradigms with your own design innovation, then join us at this event.

The day will be p

via Toledo2.

Surface Pro will launch before the end of May in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. Surface Pro will launch in Korea, Malaysia, Russia, Singapore, and Thailand before the end of June.Surface Pro is currently available in the U.S., Canada, and China.

via Expanding Surface Pro and Surface RT Availability.

Player Framework: an open source component of the Microsoft Media Platform

Player Framework for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 – v1.2 now available (4/22/13)

Project DescriptionAn open source, robust video player framework for Windows 8, HTML5, Silverlight, Windows Phone and other application platforms.

via Player Framework by Microsoft – Home.

By now, you are familiar with Windows Store apps. There are some pretty cool ones available in the store, and publishers are adding more every week. A great thing about Windows Store apps is they are super simple to install and uninstall. But what about line of business LOB apps? You probably do not want to publish them through the Windows Store since that would make them publically available.Instead, you can sideload LOB apps. Sideloading simply means installing a Windows Store app without publishing it in and downloading it from the store. You install it directly.

via Sideload Windows Store Apps – Windows 8, Try, Test, Help | TechNet.

via Tablets vs PCs – YouTube.

PDF and XPS file formats are widely used across the world and you could need one day to display them inside your application. Today I would like to share with you a simple way to do so by using an open source solution: MuPDF (a multiplatform lightweight PDF and XPS viewer).

MuPDF is already working on a WinRT solution you can grab on this GIT repo: http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=user/mvrhel/mupdf.git;a=summary

I also used the work of Libreliodev and especially their advanced port of MuPDF for WinRT.

The result is a simple but really useful Windows 8 Modern UI app that is able to display a PDF/XPS file: http://www.catuhe.com/msdn/pdfreader.zip

via Reading PDF and XPS on your Windows 8 application using WinRT – Eternal Coding – Site Home – MSDN Blogs.

This Game Starter Kit for Windows 8 contains what you need to get started with game programming for Windows 8, including online high score in Windows Azure. The game kit is written in HTML and JavaScript.

via digitalerr0r | Modern art using the GPU.