Announcing the Microsoft @ GDC App

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So this is nice Smile My Windows Phone app just hit the Windows Phone Marketplace (you can find it in the marketplace under Microsoft @ GDC – or just click this link to install it directly on your phone). It’s a little app that gives you details on all of the conference sessions and talks that Microsoft are sponsoring, putting on, or otherwise giving at GDC this year.

Other features include:

  • Lets you favorite talks you want to attend
  • Walking/Driving directions using Bing Maps just in case you get lost (or don’t know where the W is for the Blacks In Gaming mixer, although how you go to GDC and not know where the W is, I have no idea)
  • The calendar is “live” in that talks in the past get grayed out, and talks you’re in the middle of have a progress bar which shows you how long is remaining.
  • Your favorited talks (click the heart) get added to your agenda – which also shows you your calendar appointments mixed in.
  • Everything’s split out into tracks – including tracks for the Main Conference vs. Summit & Tutorial sessions, so you can see which GDC Conference Pass you’d need to attend a talk.
  • Full Bios on nearly every speaker
  • Full talk details – just click and read!
  • Opens up IE for more information on some events, and to let you register for them
  • And pretty much everything can be pinned to your Windows Phone start menu for easy access.

I think it’s pretty neat, and I put in about 320 hours of work on it over the past 3 1/2 weeks – thank you Darci! (and thank you to the rest of the Microsoft Advanced Technology Group for all of your amazing support over the last few weeks).

And! I was the sole developer (and graphic designer… and UI designer, and copy-editor, and…). There’s not a lot of people who can say that they shipped an entire official Microsoft application by themselves, but now I’ve done it twice (the last time was last year’s Gamefest Assistant, which is the ancestor of this app).

It’s a good week Smile

And next week… off to GDC, where I’ll be speaking on Tuesday at the Producer Boot Camp, giving a talk on how to manage teams across disciplines and under pressure. The title? It’s Not Rocket Surgery. (Download the app and favorite it now!)

Why would people listen to a software enginerd about how to produce? What can I say… I’m a bit of a generalist Winking smile

About the author

Simon Cooke is an occasional video game developer, ex-freelance journalist, screenwriter, film-maker, musician, and software engineer in Seattle, WA.

The views posted on this blog are his and his alone, and have no relation to anything he's working on, his employer, or anything else and are not an official statement of any kind by them (and barely even one by him most of the time).

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