Archive for the ‘Xbox 360’ Category

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360Voice.com Challenges Windows Sidebar Gadget

Monday, November 17th, 2008

In my post introducing the Bungie Card Windows Sidebar Gadget I mentioned that I was making one more gadget that would be of somewhat more limited interest. Well, I’m finally finished with it: the 360Voice.com Challenges gadget! 360Voice.com is a fun little site that started off by giving your Xbox 360 a blog that would summarize each day’s gameplay. It’s since grown far beyond that, but the feature I like most is the “challenges“. Challenges are a little meta-game where you get some friends together and see who can win the most gamerscore via unlocking achievements over a set period of time.

I do a lot of these challenges, so I wanted to be able to keep track of their progress on my sidebar. The gadget shows you the time left in the challenge, the current standings, and the “live score”, which is the gamerscore each player has earned that day that hasn’t been counted in the official standings yet (gamerscore is sampled by 360Voice.com at midnight PST each day). Once the challenge is over, the winner is given a little crown and the gadget waits for the next challenge.

Fortunately, the 360Voice.com developers had the good sense to provide an XML web services API to their challenge data (and a lot of other stuff too!) so it’s not too hard to make cool things like this gadget that tie into their site. For this project I went ahead and included my favorite JavaScript library, jQuery, and a neat jQuery-based databinding library called chain.js. Using these made development a lot smoother – the old familiar Sidebar bugs and Internet Explorer weirdness was still there, but overall it wasn’t too bad. I’ve specifically designed it to be as light as possible on 360Voice.com’s API too, so hopefully it won’t impact their service.

I think this is the most attractive gadget I’ve made – it’s certainly the most data-rich. I’m really proud of how it came out. I hope everybody enjoys it, and if you haven’t ever done a 360Voice challenge, go start one! Also, if you like it, please rate it at Windows Live Gallery.

P.S.: While I was monkeying around with gadgets, I’ve made some minor changes to my Top Process gadget – the text-fade option is no longer there since it really didn’t add anything, and I may have fixed a couple minor bugs.

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Posted in Sidebar, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Bungie Card Windows Sidebar Gadget

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008

I suppose I’m a glutton for punishment. After writing my last two Windows Sidebar gadgets, I really meant to swear them off entirely. They’re really a pain to develop. But when my favorite video game developer, Bungie (recently of Halo fame) launched their new “Bungie Cards“, I knew I had to support them. Bungie Cards are basically like Xbox Gamer Cards, but for Halo 3. I assume when new Bungie games get released, they’ll feed into the Bungie Card system as well. My new gadget is not terribly complicated – it just displays your Halo 3 Bungie Card, in either the small or wide form.

When it’s floating, you can choose either form of the Bungie Card. It’s a little weirder when it’s docked to the sidebar. First, it scales down to fit the sidebar. Then, to see the wide version, you just click on the gadget and the wide card shows up in a flyout. It’s a nice way to keep track of things without taking up too much space. As a bonus, double-clicking on either form will take you to your Halo 3 stats page.

Like the other gadgets I’ve done, this was much more difficult to develop than it should have been. The hardest part was getting the scaled-down card for when the sidebar is docked. At first I just zoomed out the page, like I had done for my Xbox Live Gamercard gadget, but it looked absolutely awful. With the exception of newer browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari, “resizing” an image by just changing the HTML element’s dimensions has always used nearest-neighbor filtering, resulting in a truly horrid image. My first instinct was to try and use the MS-proprietary “filter” CSS property to apply a Matrix DXImageTransform that would do the scaling, since that transform has an argument that’ll get it to use bilinear filtering, which is at least decent. However, Sidebar seems to think that that is a dangerous “active content” operation and blocks it. I tweaked it around for a while before stumbling on a workaround – the BasicImage filter was not blocked, and if I applied any transform at all, the basic zoom scaling would filter the image in a more pleasant way. So right now I’m using an opacity filter set to make the image completely opaque. It’s silly, but it works, and I guess this is what I should expect at this point. Trust me, you wouldn’t have liked it before – the image on the left is the way it looks now, the image on the right is with the original smoothing method:

I actually have another Xbox-related Sidebar gadget in development which is more complex but of limited interest. I hope everyone enjoys the Bungie Card gadget – feel free to send me feedback directly, and please rate the gadget at Windows Live Gallery.

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Posted in Sidebar, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 1 Comment »

Setting up IIS7 (with bonus PHP instructions!)

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

Every time I try to set up IIS7 on a Windows Vista machine I run into the same series of problems. You’d think I’d have learned by now, but I usually just struggle through the cryptic error messages and get it working one way or another, then forget about it until the next time I need IIS7 on a machine that doesn’t have it. Finally I’d had enough and so I decided to write myself a little guide here so I won’t waste as much time next time. These instructions are basically the same as these, but with additional detail and screenshots.

(more…)

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Posted in Random, Web, Windows, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 3 Comments »

MSN Messenger needs to be able to sign in from multiple locations at once

Wednesday, June 20th, 2007

Like most Americans, I’ve been using the AOL Instant Messenger IM network for the last 10 years or so. As I’ve made more friends who prefer other networks, I expanded to multi-platform IM clients that let me sign into all the major IM networks at once. I’ve used Trillian, Adium, Meebo, and Pidgin over the years, and I have active screen names on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, GTalk, and various Jabber services. So when it was announced that the Xbox 360 would include an MSN Messenger client with the Spring update, I was excited. I’m already signed in to MSN all the time, so I thought this would just be another great way to stay connected.

Unfortunately, MSN has a pretty big problem. Whenever you sign in to your MSN account from one location, it signs off, all the other locations. If I’m running Pidgin on my desktop and I open Meebo on my laptop, my desktop gets signed out. And when I start my Xbox, it automatically signs on and knocks everybody else off. The end result is that I’m almost never signed in to MSN, which pretty much defeats the purpose. My buddy list reflects this – my friends are online only when their Xboxes are on. It’s worth pointing out that Yahoo Messenger suffers from this problem too, but it doesn’t bother me as much since I don’t have many Yahoo friends.

MSN getting kicked off

With more and more devices getting IM capability, I can’t see how this restriction can continue. My desktop is always on and signed in to my IM client. My phone will have an always-on IM client. Another one on my Xbox. Another on my laptop. Another at work. And I’m switching between them all the time. And with more and more people using multi-protocol clients, they’re less likely to notice the one account that’s decided to sign itself off. It’s especially frustrating on the Xbox, since it means I can’t just use my laptop to send IMs to my friends while I play and still get notifications on my TV. IM has the potential to be awesome on the Xbox, but not as long as it’s stuck with a one-device-at-a-time protocol.

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Posted in Web, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 4 Comments »

Xbox Live Gamercard Windows Sidebar Gadget

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

I guess I didn’t learn my lesson with the TopProcess Sidebar gadget, because today when I got home from work I was itching to make another. This time I figured I could stick to something much simpler. I had looked around for a Sidebar Gadget that would display an Xbox Live Gamercard, but none of the ones I wanted fit the bill. So I quickly whipped up my own.

This one is pretty standard. It lets you set which gamertag to use, and you can drop any number of them on your sidebar. When the gadget is docked, it scales down to fit into the sidebar, but when it’s undocked it displays at full size. Really, there’s not a lot to it. Once again, please check it out at my Sidebar gadgets page and go rate and review it at Windows Live Gallery.

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Posted in Sidebar, Xbox 360 | View blog reactions | 2 Comments »
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