What effect do you have on the world?

Do you affect it consistently and positively? Do you affect it efficiently? Do you affect the world at large? How about your small world – your family and your work team? How about the customers that buy the widgets you make?

I know very few (and I don't know them for long) that don't have any desire to have an effect. It's a core desire. It's a healthy desire.

I've composed a list of just 5 (of the enumerable) ways that you might consider to increase your effect on the world.

Number 1. Minimize and refine your scope

Your scope is the definition and extent of what you are committed to doing.

It's critical that you define your scope. If it's not defined then you won't know if you're minimizing it. If you don't minimize it then you won't even be able to fulfill it. If you don't fulfill it then you'll be stressed out and those around you will be disappointed.

Defining and then minimizing your scope is going to take some deliberation on your part. If you haven't spent some time thinking about it, then you won't be ready for the moment when it comes – the moment where someone asks you to adopt an obligation. In fact, some people are so out of tune with their scope that they don't even think before saying yes to commitments – they also don't usually follow through with them. If you have given some good thought to it, however, you will be ready with an appropriate yes or no.

When you're defining your scope, don't think about just one facet of your life such as your job, your family, or your recreational activities, but rather consider the whole of it. Everything that you are obligated (whether by election or not) to do is not only going to take minutes or hours out of your day, but it's going to weigh on your mind while you're trying to sleep.

I'll tell you how I do this practically. I use OneNote to maintain a list of the various roles I play – roles such as human, husband, father, employee, and church member. Within each role, I list the responsibilities it implies. I have a huge, two-column table of these roles and responsibilities that each fulfill the following sentence: As a {role}, I am responsible to {responsibility}.

Here's a sampling…

• As a human, I am responsible to brush my teeth every morning and evening
• As a husband, I am responsible to take my wife on dates
• As a father, I am responsible to spend good time each day engaged with my son
• As an employee, I am responsible to complete monthly status reports

The list could get indefinitely large, so I try to keep it focused on things that actually take minutes and hours out of my day. This responsibility list is similar to a task list, except the responsibilities are more ongoing and are more proactive than reactive.

Once you have that list, be careful about letting anything be added to it. Saying no to someone when they ask you to take on something that's outside of your scope is not nearly as rude as saying yes and then being overextended and either incapable of fulfilling the role at all or even being less than fully effective at it.

After creating this list for the first time, you may come to realize that you have too many responsibilities, and it might be time to have some conversations with people around you. Think about how you would feel if someone came to you and said "Hey, I'm trying to organize my life and time better and I don't think I've done a great job with responsibility X to you. I would be realistic and opt out of the commitment instead of continuing to disappoint you." In all likelihood, that would be well received and even respected. Don't try saying that to your spouse though. :)

Number 2. One task list, one calendar, one file store

If you maintain task lists here and there, you're asking for trouble. Just like a computer system has to do a little bit of busy work to switch from one thread to another, our brains have to do a little work to recollect where all we have things recorded and from which list to retrieve them.

A single task list accessible from your phone, your tablet, and your primary workstation (if that's not your tablet :) is not too much to ask these days. Drop a new OneNote notebook in your SkyDrive and add it on all of your devices. Then create a single, top-level page in the notebook for your tasks. In my opinion, this is better than trying to use a task app because there are fewer controls and restrictions around task entry and maintenance. It's also better than a paper system because it's everywhere at once.

Multiple calendars is normally a very bad idea. These days, however, we can maintain multiple calendars and overlay them to get the one view we need to see our whole week. Each Sunday evening my wife and I sit on the couch and look at the next two weeks. My work calendar, my personal calendar, her calendar, and perhaps a couple more are all visible in one view. That's important.

Also on the topic of calendars… be careful with your reminders. Too many reminders may encourage you to dismiss them and completely lose their intended effect. Only set reminders when needed and avoid the habit of mindlessly dismissing them. If they're trivial enough to dismiss without a thought they are likely trivial enough to have omitted in the first place.

File stores are where I see a lot of people get disorganized. Do you have files on your laptop, your office PC, your media center PC, on a myriad of external hard drives here and there, some in the cloud, and then a Carbonite account that's backing up some subset of all of that? Well, stop it. That's confusing.

Instead, on each device, install the SkyDrive desktop app and configure your libraries so that all of your documents are saved to your SkyDrive. If you have to and if you can, pay for a bit of extra storage on SkyDrive.

If you're like me, however, all of the data that makes up your digital life and past don't fit in SkyDrive (unless you're willing to pay for the 500GB option). So here's the solution…

On one PC (perhaps your office PC at home or even a NAS drive if you'd prefer) store the whole shebang – the entire superset of files you own. Back that one PC up to Carbonite (or whatever online backup service you prefer). On that PC, keep the files that don't need to be available on other PCs in the normal document storage locations (c:\users\{profile name}\documents, c:\users\{profile name}\pictures, etc) and the rest in the SkyDrive folders (c:\users\{profile name}\SkyDrive\documents, etc.).

With this system, you can easily log in to that one PC and move a file from the SkyDrive location to the regular document store to effectively archive it and determine that it will no longer be copied to the cloud and synced to your other PCs.

Number 3. Collaborate

Don't go it alone. You can be more personally effective if you incorporate diverse perspectives from other people. It sounds like the contents of a course you might take starting a new job, but it's also true – diversity is an asset.

One thing you can do practically to co-labor with someone is to run your task list and calendar by them. Ask them to listen to you explain what it is you are trying to accomplish (generally speaking) and then show them your list and your calendar and ask them if it looks like it lines up. You're sure to get some wonderful and useful perspective on what you're spending your hours on.

When they're done talking, add some of their considerations to the task list itself. For example…

• Consider implementing a consistent wake up time
• Consider finding a Meetup where I can find others that are doing similar things
• Consider cutting the one-on-one meetings out to spread my effectiveness

Notice, that they are perhaps all considerations at first. You can decide if and when you want to implement them as you have time.

In your collaboration, don't neglect the face to face.

It's tempting in this digital world to believe that we can do everything in front of a terminal. We can't.

Sure we can order groceries and find freelance work and buy stocks and transfer money and sell houses and start businesses. We can do all of that with just screen and keyboard. But the really important things in life still happen in the context of relationships. Don't forget to spend time on the phone or better yet over coffee getting real work done.

How many people do you know that spend all of their time in front of their heartless computer terminal and get incredibly good at things, but are all but incapable of applying their work to the real work because they aren't in touch with the real world? Don't be that guy.

Number 4. Keep your balance

A healthy investment portfolio has a little of this and a little of that. Concentration might be good for a swing trade when you see a trend that's going to happen in a day or two, but if you want your portfolio to cross the oceans of time and weather all of the storms along the way, you're better off diversifying it.

Likewise, if you spend all of your time doing one kind of software development, taking one kind of photograph, executing the same phase of a business deal, or adding the same adding the same door handle to the same door on the same factory floor, you're going to type cast yourself. You're also, if you're anything like me, going to bore yourself to insanity. Learn something altogether new. I'm not just talking Visual Basic developers learning Erlang. I'm talking about Visual Basic developers learning Portuguese. I'm talking about librarians earning their Class A skydiving certificate. I'm talking about stay-at-home moms taking a welding class at the local community college.

In days of old (very old), man couldn't afford to be a specialist. He had to be a hunter, a farmer, Mr. Fixit, dad, and everything else.

I am a big believer in a theory that I call general inspiration. By that I mean that an author can go to a symphony and be inspired in his book writing. Likewise, a flamenco guitarist can inspire me to draw. If this theory is true (which is likely considering I devised it :), then all of the ventures you take from whatever your definition of normal is are less likely to distract and more likely to enhance it.

Number 5. Clean

It sounds like a mere matter of preference, but I submit that if you clean and organize your home, your car, your workstation – if you clean and organize your life, you'll be more effective.

Everything we do from dawn to dusk is about organization.

The guy that restores old cars – he is essentially organizing the parts to work and look good.

The guy that writes software – he is putting bits in a certain order so they are sensible and add value.

All of the tangible things around us want to default to their most base and chaotic state. We spend our 4 score on earth just trying to make sense of some of it. For some of our organizing, we get paid, but for much of it, we're not. We are just designed to put things in right order.

So spend some time going through that stack of papers on your desk (that quite frankly, you're never even going to look at anyway, right?).

Pull all the shirts out of the closet that are destined to collect dust, depart fashion, and finally visit Goodwill.

Consolidate all of your external hard drives and old DVD-ROM disks and finally make sense out of all of the data in your life. If it doesn't belong in your life any more than hold down Shift when you hit Delete. If it does, then by all means, put it in the right place!

Make a list of all of the things you and your spouse have been meaning to talk about and carve out time to talk about them. Maintaining your marriage is infinitely more important than maintaining your Blueray collection.

By doing all of these things, you may seem to be stealing time from your primary function. You'll likely find, however, invigorated and inspired to execute all the more effectively.

I've worked with Children of the Nations (COTNI) in the past and they are a very cool organization.

At one point, my wife and I and some friends volunteered for their Meal Marathon – an extremely grassroots effort to get food to hungry kids. The program wasn't a hundred layers of abstraction away from the actual goal – feeding hungry kids. Instead it was a simple matter of putting food in bags, putting bags in boxes, putting boxes in a shipping container, and shipping the container to Sierra Leone and the Dominican Republic. So simple… so helpful.

Right now and until June 12, COTNI needs donations of the following items…

• School backpacks
• School SmilePacks
• Hygiene SmilePacks
• Solar-powered flashlghts
• Soccer cleats (any size)
• Baseball cleats (any size)
• Soccer balls
• Soccer ball pumps
• Baseballs
• Baseball gloves

If you live anywhere near Silverdale, WA and would like to help get these items to the kids that need them, please go to https://cotni.org/get-involved/locally/donate-resources and get more information.

If you're a student at UW, then I've got a cool opportunity to throw your way.

Come to the Microsoft Appathon @ UW, learning to build apps, eat free food, win cool prizes, and get $100 per app on top of it all!

We'll be giving away a Surface and some Xbox hardware, and who know... we may even have a good time too.

Instead of just a single event, we're also going to hold two mini-events to give you an opportunity to get your system set up and ready for developing Windows 8 apps. Below are the event dates and registration links. I'll see you there!

Mini-event - Tuesday, May 7: http://aka.ms/uwmini1

Mini-event - Friday, May 10: http://aka.ms/uwmini2

Main event - Saturday, May 11: http://aka.ms/uwappathon

One of my favorite steps in the app development lifecycle is the creation of the artwork. I'm not stellar at creating original artwork, but I definitely recognize when things look just right, and sometimes I stumble upon it. I must also have a little bit of marketing in me, because it's my constant effort to brand things.

The artwork and branding is important, because an app developer must live in a constant state of capturing the user amid so much noise. An app needs to say "here's precisely what I do and how it adds value to your life". It takes a lot of design thought and effort to cut through the noise and reach your audience.

Good messages to communicate are: clean, simple, creative, elegant, and fluid.

I'd like to walk you through my process of creating artwork for an app called Everyview. Everyview is webcam viewer that attempts to implement well the design principles of Windows 8. It's intended to feel like a breath of fresh air. There are plenty of apps for viewing web cams and it's nothing that can't be done in the browser too, but it's seldom a consolidated and elegant experience. As of this writing, Everyview is not yet published to the Windows Store, but by the time you read it, it may be. Try searching for Everyview.

My artwork for Everyview started with the creation of a symbol. The symbol had to represent every image that could possibly come through the eye of a camera and so I simply chose to represent the eye of a camera. I didn't want to make the app subject to aging by choosing a specific camera though, and I didn't want to specify a still camera or a video camera. So I created a camera lens. The icon doesn't determine absolutely that you're looking down the barrel of a DSLR, an amateur video camera, a high-end video camera, or any other specific model. It's an agnostic character of a camera.

Looking into the eye of a camera invokes a bit of a "live" feeling, as if you're on the air. I chose not to embellish the icon with a lot of gradients and or other attempts to make it look more realistic. As long as it says "camera" to the user, that's enough. I did, however, ad a lens glare that identifies it without doubt as a camera lens.

Let me show you how I created this image.

I used CorelDRAW because… well, because I always use CorelDRAW. Use your graphics package of choice, but don't restrict yourself to a bitmap editor. Creating images in a vector-based graphics package has serious benefits and will make exporting to the various required app graphic sizes a breeze. Creating images in a bitmap package will inevitable find you needing a size larger than what you designed for. I recorded a primer on using CorelDRAW and you can access it at http://aka.ms/coreldrawprimer.

Before I show you how I created that image, let me show you how I set up CorelDRAW for creating images for Windows 8. Choosing File | New in CorelDRAW by default will start you out with a document the size of a piece of paper. CorelDRAW is very good at creating artwork for print, but we're concerned here more with pixels than we are with inches, so let's change the defaults and save it for future use.

I created a preset called Win8 App that uses the base Windows resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels. I also chose a color mode of RGB since the results are to be rendered to a screen rather than a printer. When you're working with documents of a designated pixel width/height, the resolution I mostly irrelevant.

If you'd like a nice place to start, try downloading the template I created at http://codefoster.com/w8tiletemplate.

Now, with a new document, we can go about creating our camera lens graphic.

Creating the lens graphic

Create a series of concentric circles like so. You do this by creating the largest and then resizing it with the CTRL key held to resize about the object's center and hitting the right mouse button when you have your next circle to create a copy.

Use the second largest to trim the largest by clicking first the second largest and then holding shift and clicking the largest. Then hit the trim button on the toolbar. Then delete the second largest circle. Setting the fill color of all objects to black and removing the outline color should leave you with something like this…

That's nice and simple and we have only to create the lens glare, which is only slightly harder than what we've done so far.

Make another couple of circles inside the smallest. I like to give them a red outline (right click on red from the color palette) while I'm working so they're easily discerned.

When you draw an ellipse (in this case a circular ellipse) in CorelDRAW, you have an ellipse, which is different from a custom curve. Ellipses have the property that you can grab their little vertex using the shape tool and drag to reduce the ellipse to an arc. Use the shape tool (F10) to do just that and work your way to something like this…

And then use some trimming and intersecting to end up with this…

Designing the tiles

Now it's time to design yourself some tiles. At a minimum, you'll need a standard app tile (150 x 150), a small logo (30 x 30), a store logo (50 x 50), and a splash screen (620 x 300). Additionally, you can design a wide logo (310 x 150) and some additional promotional images in case the Store finds your app worthy of being featured. It's recommended that the wide logo only be used if you're going to implement a live tile.

Let's start with the main app tile. Here's what I came up with for that…

Obviously, the tile incorporates the symbol we just created, but I also add a stylized app title below that. I chose a fairly bold font, condensed it, used different colors for the words and even shoved them together and created a little notch. Little design choices like this are somewhat arbitrary, but will end up becoming your brand and how people recognize your app. Finally, I added a soft gradient behind the entire title. You have to be careful with gradients in modern apps, but a shallow, gray gradient here seems to add a sort of dreamy, modern, cloud feel to the app.

Next, I'll elaborate a bit on the standard logo design when creating the wide logo and the splash screen which I tend to make rather similar. Here's what I came up with.

Now with more horizontal space than vertical, we stretch the brand elements out left to right and I like to add a little subtitle that describes without a doubt what the purpose of the app is – it's a webcam viewer. Like the notched v in view, I notch the E with the camera lens and keep all of the graphics tight and bold.

The last step is the creation of the store and small logos.

The Store logo

The store logo is used for your apps dedicated detail page in the Windows Store. It's common practice to just shrink the app tile down from 150 pixels to 50 and call it good, but that's unfortunate because it's rare that the app's main tile will look so good at this size. Take a look at the Bing app's Store logo captured from its page in the Store…

You want this image to be even simpler than the main app tile, to use most of the 50 x 50 pixel space, and to have a transparent background.

For my Everyview app, I stuck to the basic, original symbol. In CorelDRAW if you want to render something out a certain size even if the elements inside don't quite fill up that size, you just create a bounding rectangle the size you want and then give it no fill and no outline. I have rendered this bounding box orange below for visibility only. To export this image, you simple set the bounding box's outline color to none (invisible), select the entire group (bounding box and symbol together), and then export (CTRL + E) it.

Here's how that would be rendered, however.

Notice a few things about this:

• The image has been rendered to pixels custom made for the export size chosen (it could be rendered absolutely huge and would still look great)
• The bounding box is not visible, yet it is responsible for the overall size and shape of the exported image
• The background is transparent (designated by the checkerboard pattern) but the lens glare is always white
• The transparency is 24-bit which means it has various levels of transparency around the edges to make it blend perfectly with the background
• There is a little bit of space around each edge of the symbol
• The symbol is large enough to capture all the quality we can in this restricted space

The small logo

The small logo is used to represent your app when the user semantically zooms out of their start screen. Try it and see.

You can use the exact same techniques to create the small logo as you did for the Store logo. The small logo (30 x 30 pixels) is even smaller than the store logo (50 x 50 pixels) so it becomes that much more important to be intentional about simplifying your image.

That's as far as I'll take this for now. Of course, you would continue your design effort into the app itself so that the entire effort is unified and consistent.

I'd like to point out one of the advantages to Microsoft design principles that ends up being highlighted by the content of this article. No part of the splash screen or the tiles or even the app itself are contributed to by Windows. The entire space falls under the responsibility of whoever wears the design hat in your organization (even if you are your organization and you wear all the hats!). The app tiles as well as the app's main design surface because a truly empty canvas and 100% of the pixels are there to deliver your brand, deliver your functionality, and delight your user.

Have fun with this. It's fun stuff for sure.

In case you haven't heard, Microsoft has an incentive going on right now where any app you create, you can get $100 for. That's not bad considering how easy it is to make an app. Well, not all apps are easy. Some apps take quite a substantial bit of time, but if you're just trying to get a good app into the Windows Store quickly (like say for $100!) there are some tricks you should know. There's a template at w8templates.codeplex.com, for instance, that you can customize with a few search terms and RSS feeds and in a matter of minutes, you've got a data and media rich app all about the topic of your choice.

I just made an app using this template. It's called The Sailing App. One of the tasks you'll have to complete if you go down this road is to create your own graphics for the app tiles, splash screen, etc. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm a big fan of CorelDRAW, so I made a template and I'm posting it here for you. By the way, if you'd like your very own free copy of CorelDRAW X6 Essentials, just join a ZERO260 event. We're giving them away.

Here's that template. Have fun!

App Tiles Template.cdr (39 kb)

I received a question that I'd like to turn into a blog post for the benefit of the masses. I've gotten this question a number of times in the past.

Is it possible to do push notifications to all users/only a specific user/only a specific set of users?

The answer to all three questions is yes.

Push notifications are performed by Microsoft's Windows Notification Service (WNS). It's a server in the cloud somewhere, so obviously if it's going to send a push notification to a user's device, it's going to have to have some identifying information. Specifically, it needs to know the unique device and the unique user. A device can be used by multiple users and users can use multiple devices, so the combination of the two is essential. This identification is handled by something called a channel URI.

Your app gets a channel URI from the Windows API. Your app says (usually right when your app starts) "Hey, Windows, can I have a new channel URI?" Windows comes back to the app with a channel URI that is good for 30 days. From that point on, you (the app developer) is responsible for storing that channel URI value and later retrieving it to communicate with that specific user/device.

So, to answer this question, we need to talk about the recommended strategy for managing these channel URIs. Fundamentally, you need to store the channel URI along with an optional association with the user (assuming you've authenticated the user and have an ID) and an optional association with the current device (assuming you've generated a device identifier). As long as you have stored this association, you'll be able to target your user, your user's device, or the combination thereof.

Here's how I recommend you do it (roughly).

The first time your app starts, you generate a device ID (a GUID) and store it in local storage (not roaming!). Look for this ID on each app start and don't regenerate it if one already exists.

Each time your app starts, request a new channel URI. They're good for 30 days, but you don't want to implement reuse logic when there's no reason. Fetching a new channel URI is an easy and cheap operation.

Each time your app starts, authenticate your user.

Store the channel, user, and device IDs in Azure Mobile Services (or another service if you're okay with not using the coolest backend service on the planet) in tables. For ultimate flexibility, create three independent tables and use foreign keys to keep the relationships. For ultimate ease where you can assume one user has one device and one channel (at a time), store them all in the users table.

You may, obviously, have other information in the users table about when they last logged in, where they live, what type of user they are, or whatever. You can filter the users table any which way you want and you then have a great list of channel URIs to do push notifications to. You can actually use Azure Mobile Services to do filter the table, loop the results, and perform the push very easily.

For a complete example on how to do this, download codeSHOW (codeshow.codeplex.com) and check out the WAMS push demo. You can see the code and run the app and see the results as well.

Happy notifying!

First of all, if you need any help getting your system configured to start developing Windows 8, just go to usdpe.ohours.org and set up an office hours appointment with a Microsoft Developer Evangelist near you. They'll walk you through the whole process.

Windows 8 development is not only a blast, but it can be very lucrative as well. I encourage you to dive in and work hard at learning. If you need any help along the way we'll be glad to help. Here's how to get started...

Get a Windows Store developer account

To put an app in the Windows Store (and start making money!!), you need to get a Windows Store developer account. The account costs money on an annual basis, but if you qualify for one of the programs I'm about to mention, you could get it for free.

If you're a student, you can get a Windows Store developer account for free by joining the DreamSpark program! Just go to http://www.dreamspark.com and sign up. If you need any help getting signed up for DreamSpark, email my colleague Sam Stokes at sam.stokes at microsoft.com from your school email account. He's an expert at that stuff.

If you are a new business with a BizSpark account or if you have an MSDN subscription, you too can get your Windows Store developer account for free. For BizSpark questions, email my colleague steve.seow at microsoft.com and he'll get you squared away.

If you don't qualify for any of these programs, then you'll need to pay for your developer account. They are $49 for private parties or $99 for companies. You can go here to get started.

For more in-depth information about the developer account visit Registering for a Windows Store developer account in the Dev Center.

Get Windows 8

To develop a Windows 8 app, you need to get Windows 8 and install it. Actually, if you are using some of the game engines, you could start developing before you get Windows 8, but eventually you'll need it for testing and submitting your finished product to the Windows Store so you can start making the big bucks.

You can buy Windows 8 online or in any computer store. If you qualify for one of the programs I mentioned (DreamSpark, BizSpark, or MSDN) then you can get a free license. If you want to try Windows 8 out for a while, you can always download a 90-day evaluation copy.

If you have a PC, you can install Windows 8 natively (recommended), you can boot to a VHD drive, or you can install it in a virtual machine. Install it natively if you can or boot to a VHD drive as a second choice. If you run it in a virtual machine, you might not get the same performance.

If you have a Mac, you can install Windows 8 using BootCamp (recommended) or virtually using Parallels (also good). There are other virtualization options, but these two are recommended. Note that Apple says that BootCamp doesn't support Windows 8, but I've seen it work, so I think you'll be okay.

Get the developer tools

Besides Windows 8, you also need to install the tools. At a minimum, you'll need the free Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows 8. There is a professional version of Visual Studio 2012 too that costs money but offers more features. The free version is enough to build an entire app, though. If you want to use a game engine for making a game for Windows 8, let me recommend Scirra Construct2. Contruct2 is an excellent tool and can really get you from 0-60 in no time flat!

There are a few other SDKs (for maps or advertisements or whatever) that you can download from the Windows Dev Center.

Get a graphics program

Finally, whether you're creating a business app or a video game, you're going to need to generate some graphics. You can use the graphics package of your choice, but if you don't have any experience with graphics yet, I recommend CorelDRAW. CorelDRAW is a vector-based graphics package, which makes it much easier to create new illustrations and app graphics. CorelDRAW costs money, so if you are looking for a free solution, then InkScape will get the job done too.

Are you stuck?! Don't forget you can set up office hours with a Microsoft Developer Evangelist for one-on-one help by visiting usdpe.ohours.org.

More

Beyond getting your machine all set up, you can try these links to get you entrenched in Windows 8 development...

Figure out which language stack to use to develop an app - XAML/C# or HTML/JavaScript

Download some sample code

Install the codeSHOW app

This is a place holder for content that I will provide for my sessions at Boise Code Camp on March 16. If you haven't yet registered for Boise Code Camp, visit boisecodecamp.com and get all over it.

It's been a long time coming, but I'm finally all transferred over to Azure Websites for codefoster.com. It feels good. It feels like the future. The management portal is excellent and I have all of my cloud stuff in one place now (and it's not in HP's cloud thing).

Hello. I wrote a little book (my first actually) called CSS for Windows 8 App Development published by Apress. It's available at aka.ms/cssbook. All of the code listings from the book are available in a Windows 8 app that I have created, and you can download all of the source code for this app at cssbookcode.codeplex.com. The code is not polished yet as the book is still in alpha, but it should build and run and you're welcome to take a look as early as you like. Thanks for reading my book. I wish you lots of fun and success in developing apps for Windows 8.