I, along with a couple of friends, have just launched a new Twitter based contest called TrickOrTweat. The idea is that once a week we will announce a new topic and then encourage people to come up with responses. The best response (in our opinion) will win a Tweat (a prize) provided by our sponsor for that week, the worst response will earn itself a trick (booby prize) just for fun.

We are always on the look out for new sponsors for contests, so if you’re interested in sponsoring a contest email Sponsors@TrickOrTweat.net.

If you’d just like to have a look, participate and maybe win a prize then check out the website and twitter page for more information!

Over the weekend I decided to finally take a dive into the world of Silverlight, Microsoft’s cross platform/browser plugin aimed at delivering the next generation of interactive web based applications and media experiences. I started off by getting the free trials of, and then playing around with, Expression Design and Expression Blend (I got the preview edition of Blend 2). After a very unproductive Saturday all I ended up with, well apart from a but of knowledge of the software, was this:

www.Roy.Herrod.co.uk/Silverlight/Greenball

Sunday was a bit more productive and a lot more fun as I got into programming some C# for the back end of my SilverLight app. I created a generic Button class for my two buttons (left and right) and then created a display panel, for displaying the image. I created the animations in Blend and then programmatically created multiple instances of the display panel to show the different pictures. Here’s what I had at the end of Sunday:

www.Roy.Herrod.co.uk/Silverlight/ImageDisplay1

It’s by no means impressive but I think it’s not bad for my first attempt with this new technology

(Edit: Removed embedded Silverlight apps and replaced with URLs)

Well I finally decided to start one of the few personal projects I have in my head, this one is called NetworkClipboard (a better name will hopefully come later). I thought up the idea behind this project about a year ago but haven’t done anything about it until now.

The idea behind ‘NetworkClipboard’ is to provide a way to simply ‘Copy and Paste’ things (such as a link or email address) from one PC on a network to another. Basically I’ve wanted to copy stuff from my PC to my Laptop, such as a link, and had to save them to a .txt file and copy it across to a folder. So I thought it would be good if… and so this idea came about.

As of yet I haven’t achieved a great deal, I have just had a brief look into a few aspects of the idea and tried some sample bits of code to test some functionalities that I will need. I plan to have something working, and worth using, very soon and will update here with more information as and when I do.