June 13th marked a tremendous day in Canadian portable music history - at least in my personal calendar. This was the day that the Microsoft Zune was officially released to the Canadian public. Unlike some of my Canuckian counterparts who ordered theirs early from online retailers, I was a good little consumer and waited for my local Future Shop to get them in. Once the release was confirmed, I used my lunch break on that fateful day and bought myself a spiffy black 80gb piece of glory. I spent the rest of my shift playing with the menus and agonizing over the lousy bloatware music and video that Microsoft lovingly shipped for me.
It’s been nearly a month, and I’m still in love with this thing (and I’m reasonably impressed with the PC-side software that runs it.) It’s usually with me in the car, and I’ve loaded up my music collection as well as such visual classics as Rambo IV and Tank Girl onto it. However, what intrigued me since I first starting reading about it was the software potential.
From what I gather, the Zune basically runs on a hacked version of Windows CE. Both a friend of mine and I have been exploring the possibilities of developing games and applications for it using our beloved C#/XNA, and have found communities for such a thing popping up already. There are a ton of resources for this, but here is one of my favourite dev communities. It’s off of ZuneBoards. Clicky!
From some screenshots I’ve seen of projects in development, it seems the Zune hardware is even capable of limited 3D support, which is exciting and overdue news for mobile platform developers. I’m pretty excited to dive in and get my hands dirty with this, and in short order.
Unfortunately, as things are right now there is no way to create a “release” of a game for the Zune since XNA3.0 is still in it’s community testing phase, or something like that. Instead, any games or other applications designed for the Zune have to be installed the Alpha way. That is, you have to use the Visual Studio Express 2008 compiler to deploy the game to a recognized device. Not hard, but a little more time consuming than using a stardard Setup executable.
Anyways, this is all I have on this for now. As time progresses and the Zune development community grows out of it’s infant stages, I will post more and reveal my own projects as they arrive. If anybody here has some Zune apps or software they would like me to reveal, just send an email or leave a comment and I’ll be happy to take a look.
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