I just finished doing the technical edits for the book Beginning DirectX 11. With any luck the book will be printed and ready for GDC this year. The writing for this edition was passed to Allen Sherrod. With all of my projects going on, I didn’t have the time to take on the book update as well. Allen has done a wonderful job and I’m looking forward to seeing the completed product on bookstore shelves.

I’ve been playing with the Xbox Kinect lately. I picked one up on launch day and have been playing Kinect Adventures every few days. My son fell in love with Kinectimals and the rest of my family has been trying out Dance Central.

This is the way games of the future were meant to be played. The Jetsons finally got something right.

Microsoft announced a new version of the Xbox360 today at E3. It’s black, shiny and apparently much smaller than the standard Xbox. While I like the shape of the new design, the shiny black leaves me a bit hesitant. First, it’s shiny, which means finger prints. I bought a monitor a few months back that was shiny black and didn’t think too much of it at the time. Now everytime I sit down to use it, the fingerprints and smudges drive me crazy. I’m very reluctant to buy any other shiny device.
Now, if I didn’t have an Xbox360 at all, I would definitely be tempted to pick one up though. Much larger (250GB) hard drive, wireless N networking, plus all the other goodies we already have. I’ll have to think about upgrading…

I’ve been working on an iPad application for the past few weeks and I think I see how it’s all really going to work out. Hopefully I should have all the code done in the next two weeks and get it shipped off to Apple. Then it’s back to programming for the Sony PSP. That’s the codebase I really want to get back to.