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Draw Free! does not collect or publish any personal information, or directly collect information in any way.

If you would like to report any violations of this policy, please contact draw@faaland.com

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Draw Free!

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...

Ultima 7 Maps

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.

Slideshow + Faaland Clock

I wanted to more often see all of the photos that my wife and I take, so I set both of our phones to automatically upload to the same OneDrive. I bought a computer on a stick and attached it to a TV in our family room. On the computer I wrote a slideshow app that would pull down photos from the cloud and display them. A challenge is that I hate fan noise, and this was going to be running all the time. The computer I bought was a Compute Stick from Intel, and I thought I was buying one with passive cooling, but when I plugged it in to my horror it had a small fan! I could return it. But instead I mounted it inside the wall, and set about writing a 4K 60fps dynamic slideshow that used so little CPU/GPU that the fan hardly ever kicks on. I am kinda proud of that. I also got to add fun features, like showing album art for whatever was playing on Spotify, but the best one is the Faaland (Weasley) clock. On every family member's phone I set u...