Awesome jump from Felix Baumgartner the other day from the stratosphere. The best lines I heard about it were:

• By jumping from 120k feet, he proved that “Red Bull does NOT give you wings”
• With balls this big, it is a wonder he even fit in that capsule

What do we say? Well, welcome to Trelloland Felix!

Some people seem to have difficulties turning off Windows 8, believe it or not. Although most people just use the laptop lid and don’t care or the power button on their desktop, there are quite a few more ways to shut down Windows 8.

• Microsoft has provided the Shutdown and Restart buttons for Windows 8, under Settings in the Charms Bar. To show the Charms bar, press Win+C to open Charms and then click on Settings. Alternatively pressing Win+I will directly open the Settings.Once here, clicking on Power button will display options to Shutdown, Restart or Sleep the Windows 8 computer.
• While on your desktop, click on Alt+F4 to bring up the shutdown dialog box. This box will give you quick access to shutdown, restart, sleep, switch user and sign out from your Windows 8 computer.
• One quick way to shutdown or restart Windows 8 would be to use our freeware tool called HotShut. This light-weight portable tool, will sit quietly in your taskbar notification area and give you options to shutdown, restart lock and log off. You can also set it to start with Windows 8.
• And finally how could we forget this one which is popular with some. Press Ctrl+Alt+Del, and on the screen which appears, from the button which appears in the bottom right side, you will see the options to Shutdown, Restart and Sleep

But my personal favorite is using a simple shortcut. Right click on the desktop, and choose New Shortcut. In the file location, type “C:\Windows\System32\shutdown.exe -s -t 0”. Choose Change Icon and choose the shutdown icon (or any other you like). Click OK twice. Right click on it and choose “pin to start”. After you do that, when you want to shut down, hit start on the keyboard and click on the shutdown icon. Easy.

I never owned an iPod. My portable music needs were satisfied by various other players, like an iRiver and a Zune HD. The latest was the one that also proved very useful when I begun developing games for the then up-and-coming Windows Phone platform. The Zune HD is an amazing MP3 player. The software was fast, fluid and intuitive (not to mention it looked absolutely gorgeous). I still use it a lot, and I am sad that it has been discontinued as a product. I always believed that Microsoft should follow the iPhone-iPod paradigm, that of having an extra product that acts like a media player, but is also able to run all the software Windows Phone can, without being a phone itself. That would catapult the platform, since developers would potentially have many more users. Oh, and I would buy one :)

Anyway, back to the feature of the title. While developing my first game for XNA, Tetrada, which essentially became my first game for Windows Phone, and then got pulled from the Marketplace, I discovered that the Zune HD hardware had a unique and amazing feature. While its (gorgeous) touch screen was capacitive (as in “reacted to touch and not pressure”) it also had variable pressure sensitivity (although I do suspect that it was implemented in an “touch area variable” way more than actual pressure sensing). So it would react like any Windows Phone, iPhone or Android phone today to touch, but if you pushed further on the screen, the hardware (and of course software) would register this push depending how strong you pushed. This little feature is amazing and gives many possibilities to game developers. For example, imagine being able to control a racing game’s accelerator or brake pedals by pushing harder. Or control the power of the shot in a football game.

This pressure sensitivity already appeared in this week’s Microsoft announcement of the Surface tablet’s keyboard, so I guess I can still hope!

I would love it if this feature returned to Windows Phones, it would make games on the platform stick out in yet another way.