Monthly Archives: April 2012

Apr 29 2012

Metro Developers are Designers

One of the things that is quite clear from Metro and Windows 8 (this has been seen with Windows Phone too) is that developers are no longer going to be able to chuck a load of controls on a form and deploy! Fantastic! This means a few changes though …

  • If you are a developer that creates user interfaces, you’ll need to be in tune with your design skills (see the link below)!
  • If you haven’t got any design skills then maybe you need to learn some (see the link below)!
  • If you are a designer or a User Experience (UX) specialist, you’ll need to familiarise yourself with the new Metro guidelines (see the link below)!
  • For everybody else … just see the link below!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/hh779072

Alternatively, you can carry on chucking controls on the screen and using tasteless colours but don’t be surprised if your app never makes it out of the store.

P.N.

Apr 29 2012

Microsoft in Manchester

It was great to see the different Microsoft Teams in Manchester over the last week. We (Quantiv) have had guys at a few different events including System Centre 2012, Hyper-V, Windows 8 and the Microsoft Partner Network briefing.

Two things have really stood out that I haven’t seen from Microsoft since PDC 2003 when the focus was a consistent .NET development experience:

  • The consist messages and development streams; everything from the PowerPoint slides to the client, server, phone and slate have been brought together under a consistent brand and experience. It will make things far easier for consumers and it looks great too.
  • The speed of development; having the consistent branding and user experience in place seems to have freed the development teams and there is just so much new stuff coming out it is untrue! There is loads of simplification, loads of new tools and features and basically empowerment of users. Although it is going to be a tough couple of years keeping up, I’m lovin’ it!

P.N.

Apr 28 2012

Why P. Nerdy?

Q) Slightly strange name right?

Well, once upon a time i just used to be the plain old PocketNerd (http://www.pocketnerd.co.uk), before cool things started to appear on the Internet. Now, you have to be really fast to get PocketNerd as a handle so i end up with all sorts of unusual and odd combinations in different apps. So, just like how Sean Combs changed his artistic name and became P. Diddy i’ve done the same and changed my artistic name to P. Nerdy! Lets face facts, Puff Nerdy is a bit too dodgy!

So, you can now get me as pnerdy on Twitter (@pnerdy), Facebook and of course as a www.pnerdy.com. PocketNerd is still kicking around too … especially on XBOX Live.

Q) Next question then, what can you expect from P. Nerdy?

Well, i’m still a techie and i still like to share information so, you can expect lots of Microsoft and state of the art technologies. Things you’ll see will include web stuff, Windows stuff, SharePoint stuff, Phone stuff, Slate stuff, Cloud stuff and lots of other stuff too …

P.N.