Just a quick post – there is an article in the The Witness (2/25/2014) newspaper today about me.
Monthly Archives: February 2014
VALA: Alpha goes live!
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that quite a while ago we got accepted into AppCampus (seriously, go watch the video that got us into the program) with a game about llama slaughter. We were then invited to Finland for a month-long intensive training camp called AppCademy.
Since then we’ve gone through lots of iterations, scrapped the project multiple times to start from scratch, and had team members change. The core team is now Renier Van Der Westhuizen (who has worked on awesome games like The Harvest for WP7) on art, and myself (Matt Cavanagh) on code. And we’re bringing in a few people here and there to help.
Say hello to Vicious Attack Llama Apocalypse: Alpha (VALA: Alpha in the store)!
Netduino and Windows Phone Bitcoin tracker on Azure
My intern and I were asked to do a talk at the Durban University of Technology to the 3rd year IT students to excite them about the possibility of using Netduinos or/and Windows Phones in their final year projects.
We didn’t want to just show them a blinking LED, but rather something that would be relevant to a real-world scenario – so we came up with this:
Sorry for the horrible GIF. What you can probably tell is that it is a time-lapse of the Bitcoin price changing. The graph represents that change, and the LED glows green when it goes up, and red when it goes down. (There is a typo on the screen – USD should be BTC).
Playing with the Nokia Lumia 1020 shutter speed
It was Kaila’s (my Wife) birthday yesterday, and all she requested was sparklers. Turned out to be a ton of fun!
All the photos here were taken with the Nokia Camera app on my Lumia 1020. All settings were default except shutter speed was set to 4 seconds. I didn’t have my 1020 camera cover so these are all taken free hand (no tripod) which means they’re slightly blurred (pretty hard to hold a phone still for 4 seconds ). The photos are untouched besides cropping and upping the contrast a bit.

MyEdit for Windows and Windows Phone
We developed the MyEdit Windows and Windows phone app for Media24.
The MyEdit app is the ideal one-stop hub for discerning readers wanting to read content from South Africa’s top magazines and news titles – and the best part is you can personalise the app so it is organised according to your likes and interests.
News, entertainment, sports, parenting, recipes, technology, home and garden – there are dozens of stories in these categories and more in one easy-to-access station. MyEdit Lists are a regular feature too – read quirky listicles revolving around issues everyone is talking, tweeting and texting about.
This app offers auto-renewable subscriptions:
• Subscribe and get full access to content from 36 magazines, including Huisgenoot, You, Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Fairlady, Go and TopCar for only R60 a month.
• All subscriptions are 1 month in duration. Content is updated on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, depending on the publication frequency of each title.