Android

Giving up on Windows phone developing for now today I have installed Eclipse and the Android SDK which has obviously taken most of the afternoon only for the emulator to run like an absolute dog, I am yet to see a running application. Just installed a much earlier version of the SDK in the hope that I have enough memory to run that...the last option will be to see if I can run it on Linux.

Beer

Beer. Yesterday afternoon I met up with Phil for a beer in the Lamp Tavern in Digbeth and expected to be heading off home round about nine to be back for my well required beauty sleep. But it didn't really go like that, drank at the rate of about a pint an hour unlike Phil who was on about seven and a half an hour and is now complaining of a hangover. Joe turned up. Dave was there. The Destroyers were in the back room making a video promo and were all getting quite drunk during the waiting around period.

Windows Mobile Phone Development

Before Christmas Nick very kindly gave me a windows mobile phone so that I could take part in the Alphalabs.cc art and code development competition.  I spent a while trying to come up with ideas that would be suitable for this venture and this week decided that I should get cracking and start coding something and prepared to rush headlong into some serious development.  I hooked up my laptop to the Interweb for the first time in months and months and downloaded the free visual studio tool, no problems, I ran the installer only to be told that I needed to update Vista to SP2, ah bugger.

I checked the version of Windows I was running to realise that SP1 hadn’t been installed nor had the updates required so that I could even do that.  Hmmm.  Three hours later I’m in a position to install SP1, another three hours, great.  I give up for the day/night and decide to continue the next day.    The following day, I get through the thirty or so updates required and a surprisingly quick SP2 install in only four or five hours.  Then comes the Visual Studio install which is fairly painless and I think right, great, I be able to do some coding tomorrow.

Think again big boy, my laptop not being top of the range doesn’t have a dedicated GPU therefore I can run the Windows Phone Emulator to print Hello World! out on the screen.  Grrr.

This morning I have installed Zune, registered my phone as a dev phone and tried again but oh no to be able to test things on an actual phone I have to give Microsoft £65 a year.  Now if I had a laptop which actually met the spec that they require for VS for Mobile Devving I might be tempted but as it doesn’t I know if things don’t work after I’ve paid out then MS support people are going to tell me to get lost and pay for a better computer oikboy.  Bah!

Why can’t windows phones be command line based?

$> phone
$> connect 08237838343
$> say “Alright mate how is fings hanging”

…

$> disconnect
$> exit

Ha.