TamsPPC – the Windows Phone Blog

Windows Mobile icons have always been an eeker of some sort: while not as batshitly difficult as S60 application icons, they have nevertheless given me quite some thought due to the lack of specification on Microsoft’s behalf.

Fortunately, Microsoft has now tackled the problem – the Windows Mobile blog team has just added a post which starts like this:

This post provides a step-by-step tutorial for creating professional iconography for your Windows Mobile application. With these guidelines and Adobe Photoshop, developers will learn to apply the appropriate styling and sizing to their image assets for use within their applications as well as in the Windows® Marketplace for Mobile. In addition to the tutorial, a Photoshop action file is provided for assisting with the creation of the required files. Developers who are planning to distribute applications on the Windows® Marketplace for Mobile are encouraged to utilize these guidelines to ensure their applications adhere to the application submission criteria.

Even though the tutorial is very well-written, it seems to require that wannabe icon makers own a recent copy of PhotoShop. This means that GIMP heads are likely to be left in the rain when it comes to sample images – but they can now get their hands onto the sizes there, too.

Further information can be had here:
http://windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone/archive/2009/07/24/creating-custom-icons-for-windows-mobile-6-5.aspx

GapiDraw, a high-performance graphics framework used for developing Windows Mobile games, has just received a significant update. Version 4.0 of the product adds the following features:

New features in GapiDraw 4.0

DirectDraw support. GapiDraw will now use DirectDraw instead of GAPI or GETRAWFRAMEBUFFER to access the display on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. Switching to DirectDraw means that GapiDraw applications can take advantage of hardware accelerated graphics and run in windowed mode, at the cost of slightly lower performance on devices without hardware acceleration.

Hardware-accelerated graphics. GapiDraw will now detect and use DirectDraw hardware acceleration on Windows Mobile devices if available. Functions supporting hardware accelerated graphics are marked in the documentation.

Windowed mode support. You can now run GapiDraw applications at high performance in windowed mode using DirectDraw on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later. In windowed mode you can take advantage of the SIP input panel to allow the user to enter text data.

Fullscreen toggle. You can now seamlessly switch between windowed mode and fullscreen mode on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices and later.

QuarterSize display. If you use the new display flag GDDISPLAY_QUARTERSIZE, GapiDraw will use a backbuffer that is half the width and half the height of the display, if either the width or the height of the display is greater than 320 pixels. This is a great option for developing and running mobile games on newer mobile devices with display resolutions of 800×480 pixels and more (in this particular example the backbuffer would be sized to 400×240 or 240×400 depending on display orientation).

GradientRect. GapiDraw 4.0 introduces an optimized gradient fill operation with support for opacity. GradientRect can draw top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left, and prerenders the entire gradient in two directions for very fast performance.

Performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 adds StrongARM and XScale precaching (pre-reading four cache lines simultaneously) to BltFast and AlphaBltFast for important performance improvements. GapiDraw 4.0 also has improved performance on stationary PCs in windowed mode and much faster GDI surface locking.

Documentation improvements. All documentation was reviewed and much of it was rewritten. A new and easy to follow “Getting Started with GapiDraw” tutorial was added. Click here for the new and updated documentation.

New advanced tutorial: Breakout. Learn how to use GapiDraw to create a complete mobile game using the easy to follow tutorial “Breakout”. You will find Breakout in the samples folder.

Improved Visual Studio 2008 support. All samples now include ready to run projects for Visual Studio 2008 mobile and stationary environments.

The basic license for the program costs rather steep 1000$, but allows you unlimited usage inside your company. The source code can be obtained for 3500$. Developers wishing to find out more can visit the GapiDraw web site and/or look at the above-mentioned tutorial.