Smartphones have come a long way in recent years, what with their mind-blowing 3D graphics and all. And yet, you still need to be careful when using gradients in simple 2D games, because if you don’t change your colour bit depth settings, things could get ugly.

When creating Windows Phone applications, the default setting is to run everything at a 16-bit colour depth, which can cause the horrible atrocities you see above. 16-bit colour means a total of 65 536 available colours, and while that’s not usually a problem, when you start having very shallow gradients like the ones above, the individual colour segments start to get wider and cause a problem known as banding.… Continue reading

If you’re developing for Windows Phone 7, you’ve probably heard (or even made use) of Microsoft’s incredibly useful Windows Phone Task Launchers (and if you haven’t, well sit down and listen up, Sparky, you won’t want to miss this). These launchers allow you to easily run various useful tasks like these:

• Taking your users to your game’s review and rating page on the Marketplace
• Launching the default browser and opening your app’s website
• Sharing a message about your game on various social networks

And when I say ‘easily’ I mean literally in two lines of code, which is awesome, but it’s a little misleading because there’s a problem…

Crash And Burn

The naive, copied-straight-from-msdn method of coding would probably lead you to making a “Rate Me!”… Continue reading