At the Game Developers Conference, Microsoft has been giving attendees a deeper look at the Windows Phone 7 Series platform, specifically as it relates to gaming. Already we’ve seen how games can be developed using Visual Studio to run on Windows PCs, the Xbox 360, and Windows Phones. 

Now, thanks to this video upload from the conference itself, we can learn more about push notifications on Windows Phone 7 Series devices. There are three kinds of push notifications available: raw, tile, and toast.

Raw notifications are when a cloud service notifies an application. If the app isn’t running the notification is discarded. The second type, tile notifications, are used when a user pins a tile to the Quick Launch menu (tiles are the new squares on the main screen). In this case, the cloud service will update that tile with an image URI. Finally, there are toast notifications which is when the cloud service send a title and a subtitle. You see toast notifications on the Xbox 360 today – it’s when a little pop-up appears to let you know one of your friends is online.

After giving an overview, the rest of the talk is devoted to explaining the technical aspects in more detail and providing examples of how developers can use these notifications with their games. The entire video is only a little over 6 minutes long, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re thinking about developing for the new Windows Phone.

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According to recent news posted on the Microsoft Research site, there’s a new build of the Kodu game creator now available and with the release there comes a lot of new features. Some of the more notable changes include improved mouse controls, a new hint system and an automatic update mechanism. There are also a number of bug fixes and minor improvements which will make the overall Kodu experience even better than before.

The full list of changes includes the following:

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Gist, the company behind the email mashup service of the same name, just updated their Outlook plugin. The new plugin now lets you see a contact’s profile information prior to sending them an email. To use this feature, you simply start creating a new message, and the profile info will display next to the email itself, in a sidebar pane. Specifically, the profile info shows things like name, title, company, and links to your contacts’ social network profiles on sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Other plugin features include the ability to get updates on your contacts and their companies within Outlook, a search feature for easily locating email, links, and attachments, and a drag-and-drop method for sharing news from your contacts via email or Twitter.

Click here to in you’re interested in trying the new Outlook plugin. Note that you’ll need to have signed up with Gist first before you can use it.

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Rob Margel recently discovered a great March theme for Windows 7 users at download.live.com which features shamrocks and other spring-related imagery. I thought I’d go check out the Windows 7 Personalization gallery to grab it and whatever else was new, too. However, for some reason, the Shamrock theme isn’t there. No matter, since Rob posted the direct link for the download. However, I was surprised to see the gallery had a ton of new themes since my last visit only a couple of months ago. There are now several regional themes like Canada, Australia, Czech Spring, China, Baltic Beaches, France, India, Hungary, Germany, Italy, and a dozen or so others. Plus, there are new animal themes like “dogs in summer,” “cats everywhere,” and “Year of the Tiger.”

But lately, I have to admit that I’ve found myself addicted to Smashing Magazine’s Windows 7 theme collections which they release monthly. They offer themes made up of artistic backgrounds that come packaged as two different options – those with an embedded calendar and those without. I like to grab those without the calendar myself so I can reuse them later on when I’m ready for a change. You can grab the last collection here.

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HP just announced a partnership with home DVR system maker Tivo which allows MediaSmart Home Servers to connect with Tivo devices. The connection will be made by way of a free WHS add-in that lets you manage your recordings via the WHS console. The benefit for Tivo users is obvious: you can now record all the shows and movies you want without worrying about running out of space. Well, I suppose that you could, in theory, run out of room, but since the servers come with either 1 TB or 1.5 TB hard drives plus 3 available expansion bays, it would certainly take some time before you’re maxed out.

In addition to the extra storage, MediaSmart owners can watch the recorded shows on either a PC, Mac or TV by way of the Home Server’s remote streaming option.   

Game developers attending GDC this week will get a first look at the latest version of the XNA toolkit – XNA Game Studio 4.0 – which provides the technology to create games for Xbox 360, Windows, and now, the Windows Phone 7 Series. Shawn Hargreaves posted on his blog about what’s new with this latest release:

• New platform
  • Windows Phone 7 Series
• New features
  • Integrates with Visual Studio 2010
  • Dynamic audio output
  • Microphone input
  • BasicEffect has four new siblings
    • SkinnedEffect
    • EnvironmentMapEffect
    • DualTextureEffect
    • AlphaTestEffect
• Improved portability and usability
  • Collapsed graphics caps into just two profile levels: Reach and HiDef
  • Many graphics API improvements
  • This involves some breaking API changes
  • Split Microsoft.Xna.Framework.dll into several assemblies, to make it more obvious which pieces are available on each platform

Michael Klucher also added a few answers to some people’s “burning questions,” noting “yes, we have hardware accelerated 3D API’s on Windows Phone 7 Series. Yes, we have Visual Studio 2010 integration with our toolset. We’ve even added buffered audio support to the Audio API’s that many of you have asked for.”

You can find out more about XNA news on the XNA Creators Club Online.

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Sobees’ desktop Twitter client, a native app built using .NET technology, has just been updated with a fresh design and built-in real-time search, reports TechCrunch. The updated application looks a lot like competitor TweetDeck with its columnar interface, but it offers a few differences.

Llike TweetDeck, Sobees supports Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn in addition to Twitter. However, unlike TweetDeck, Sobees lets you drag and drop columns in order to reorganize them in the client’s layout. You can also preview tweets, translate them, view threaded conversations, and preview Twitpics within the app.

Also new in this version is the addition of real-time search which lets you search OneRiot, Twitter, FriendFeed, and FacteryLabs all at once.

You can get the new client app from the Sobees website here:  http://www.sobees.com.

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I just came across a great tip for Posterous bloggers on the LifeRocks blog. If you’re among those who prefer Posterous’s simplified blogging platform over the more complex options from Moveable Type, Wordpress and the like, you’ll be happy to know that you can use Windows Live Writer to post to Posterous.

Now why would you want to do that considering that Posterous is already one of the easiest platforms to publish to? Well, maybe you want to send the same post to both your traditional blog or website and your Posterous blog at the same time. If you create the post in WLW, that’s possible. You would just write the post once, publish it to one site, then switch blogs to publish it a second time to the other site. Or maybe you just prefer WLW’s interface over anything else (I know I do!).

In order to support Posertous publishing, you’ll need to grab the Writerous plugin from Codeplex. Once installed, you access the new settings via Tools –> Options –> Writerous from WLW’s main menu. Here, you’ll have to provide your Posterous login info and site name (the latter if you maintain more than one Posterous blog). You can also configure your Posterous posts to autopost to Twitter and Facebook, too, by checking the box next to that option.

For more details on how to configure and use the plugin, check out the project’s page here.

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Bing is kicking off another photo contest where the winner gets to decorate the Bing.com homepage with their winning image. This time around, though, the contest is limited to students only. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, the winning photo will grace the homepage on April 22nd (Earth Day). To qualify, the students must be in the United States as this is a regional contest.

Besides the grand prize, the top winners from four age groups (ages 5-10, 11-13, 14-17 and 18+) will also win a trip to Microsoft where they get to participate in a Bing editorial meeting where they pick future homepage images. All winners will also receive equipment from HP and Canon. Specifically, HP will be providing the winners with HP Pavilion desktops and a monitor.

In addition to the contest participants, those voting on the images can win, too. From April 13th to the 19th, Bing will give a $5.00 GivingCard for DonorsChoose.org to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. This money can be spent on classroom projects (like math, science, art, reading) at local schools. In total, Bing will donate up to $100,000 a day to help schools across the U.S.

You can find out more about the contest, its requirements, and the submission information here: http://earthdayphotocontest.com.

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At the recent TED Conference, Gary Flake, a Technical Fellow and founder of Live Lab, demonstrated Pivot as can be seen in the video available here. This new technology, launched at last year’s PDC, lets you browse and manipulate images and data using Seadragon technology. It’s primarily meant to be a visualization tool for discovering patterns and insights by viewing datasets as thumbnail images. The visualization is done via the web using Silverlight, as opposed to using a software program installed on your computer’s hard drive.

In the demo, Flake showed how Pivot could be used to browse a magazine’s archives, Wikipedia, and even your own web browser’s search history. If you have five minutes to spare, the TED video is definitely worth a look.

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