Welcome

My name is Nikolai.  I've worked for Microsoft and Google and that was super interesting and all, but this is a website I will use to talk about silly projects.
Location: Sammamish, WA, USA

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Draw Free!

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My most successful side project happened when Windows Phone 7 came out.  WP7 was actually pretty good, and I wanted to get in on the ground floor of its app market.  So I did, with an evolution of the drawing apps that I'd done for the Zune HD. I called it Draw Free! (well, the first version was called Draw! but that was back when I had an illusion that people might want to pay for it), and it had a pretty sweet interface that could adapt to different ages of user.  It was all written in Silverlight with all drawing (stamping, alpha blending, image processing) done on the CPU in C#. With Windows 8 I rewrote it in XAML and using SharpDX, which allowed me to use shaders (!!!).  This version was eventually ported back to Windows Phone, and is in fact still available .  On Windows 10, search in the Store for "draw free". You like how I kept the rainbow house theme across every version I made? Honestly it's a good app, and over the years has just abov...
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Ultima 7 Maps

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Back in 2007 or so I was working at Microsoft on Bing Maps, and I decided to make an ajax map of Ultima 7 The Black Gate, and Serpent Isle.  I used Exult to output the game's raw map imagery, chopped it into tiles, loaded them onto AWS, and made a website.  It got noticed by a few enthusiast and even mapping sites, but after some hosting hiccups I took it down (and some people even noticed that). All that's left online is a couple low-res images in a post about it. At that time, Bing Maps had a 3D control (that I also wrote a lot of) called Virtual Earth 3D, so you could sort of fly around Britannia on a globe.
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Zune HD Apps

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When I got a Zune HD, I noticed that all the other parents could distract their kids with apps on their iPhones.  No in a fit of pique, I wrote several apps for the Zune HD.  They got picked up by an enthusiast site and as I recall it got several thousand downloads.  So, like, 10% of Zune users?  Har, har, har...  Yes the comedy was all gold back then.
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