Build a Super Bowl touchdown light with Spark and IFTTT

I love football. Few things make me as happy as drinking beer and watching the Packers on Sunday. Despite living in Seattle for nine years and enjoying watching the Seahawks and Wisconsin alum Russell Wilson play over the years, the NFC Championship game was too bitter of a pill to swallow to enjoy watching the […]

Create logos for Windows and Windows Phone with one SVG

In a previous post, How to make an app logo that doesn’t suck, we talked through the importance of using vector graphics for your logos to maintain fidelity as they are scaled up to higher pixel density screens. We used a tool that I wrote called Vector to then export the logo to all the […]

Building a delicious “hamburger” button app layout

In the previous post, Designing a delicious “hamburger” button app layout, we walked through, why apps use the hamburger layout style and some design elements that make up a good implementation. In this post, we’ll walk through how to build a great implementation in HTML and JavaScript, targeting Windows Phone and Windows 8. We’ll work to build […]

Design a delicious “hamburger” button app layout

Facebook’s hamburger button layout is probably the most well known across platforms. In this post, we look at how to make a good one. Image from: thehamburgerbutton.com An increasingly common trend in apps on all platforms is to create a clean landing page that reveals the purpose of the app, and neatly tuck away all […]

When artists make games…

Amazing things will happen. For the past few months I’ve been working with an incredible gallery here in Minneapolis, Light Grey Art Lab, on a top secret game project. Today, they just opened the call for art for “Dream Arcade.” Artists in their collective will start to sketch out their game ideas and to contribute […]

Add a touch gamepad to your HTML5 game

As we discussed in the last post, Design a game that stands out, a great way to differentiate your game is by having touch interactivity. Many touch games are not nearly as great as their console counterparts simply because they have crummy controllers. For many games, it’s appropriate to have some sort of game controller […]

Design a game that stands out

Mobile games are amazingly popular. Whether you’re launching an Angry Bird while you’re kicking back on the couch watching TV, or flapping a bird waiting in line at the grocery store, we love playing games. If you’re currently are, or considering entering the world of game dev, you may already know how competitive the space […]

Bring your App Studio apps to Windows 8

Windows Phone App Studio Beta is awesome. It’s a great way to build your first app for Windows Phone. It lets you choose different design templates and styles, and lets you pull in different data sources, from RSS feeds, to YouTube, to Flicker or even Bing. In this post, we’ll talk about how to take […]

Introducing WinJS TouchControls

In an earlier post, I walked through step-by-step how to build pull to refresh. While informative, it is a lot of work if you just want to add this cool trick to your app. In this video, I show you how to use TouchControls to add pull to refresh to your existing app in a […]

Handle projectors when using actual size in your app

In a previous post, Using Actual Size in your Windows 8.1 app, we talked through step-by-step how to build an app that displays content with consideration of the actual screen size. Since then, I was demoing my awesome RealRuler app, and it didn’t work on the projector. Screen size info can be zero As good […]

David Washington

Microsoft Hacker