Today, Microsoft Australia has crowned its first Australian Windows Phone 7 “App Champion” to the developers of the “Nine Lettuce” word game for the “Dev vs Dev” competition that has been accepting submissions over the past four months.

A panel of five mobile experts from Microsoft, Telstra and the industry chose the wittily-named winner from a range of Australian-based applications judged on creativity, marketability, potential popularity and originality. They’ve certainly worked hard since the winning app along with the five runner-ups are all of very high caliber.

Runners up include Art Spot, a puzzle game; AU Newswire, an Australian news reader; Cell, an arcade game; MIX11, a conference guide; and Pocket Files, a DropBox client. Microsoft also makes honorable mentions to Hungry Bub; Pocket Money; Metro Match; AU FMRadio; Hallucinogen; and MyBikeMap.

The winner is offered the opportunity to attend the Microsoft MIX11 conference next week in Las Vegas (which I’ll also be attending). The runner-ups all receive a complementary HTC 7 Mozart device.

Credits to the Australian developer community for coming up with some great-looking and practical apps.

In an app-centric world, Windows 8 will be adopting the trend full-on with a Swiss Army Knife of new tricks. One of which is a new universal application deployment system called AppX which I’ve been recently been able to take a first look at.

Although Windows 8 will disrupt many components of applications, including how they are written (Immersive) and distributed (application store), AppX concerns only the deployment aspect of applications. More precisely, it’s a tight specification that describes how applications are packaged and installed.

Clearly inspired by XAPs for Silverlight, the critical aspect of AppX packages is an XML manifest file appropriately named the “AppXManifest.xml”. In this file, developers will have to specify many compulsory and optional attributes of their application, in fact, much more than what’s required from Windows Phone developers.

From a specifications document it’s revealed attributes include but are not limited to:

• Application identity – name, publisher, version
• Application architecture – processor architecture, type of application, framework required, operating system version
• Dependencies – name, publisher and minimum version of other required applications
• Capabilities – networking, file system and profile capabilities requested by the application
• OS extensions – associated filetypes and protocols, AutoPlay, “Charms”, notifications, splash screen
• Tile customization – logo, name, description and colors for the tile-based user interface

The extensive list of properties signifies the comprehensive scope of this system to be the ideal deployment strategy for “applications”, in all essence of the word. In fact, the AppX format is universal enough so it appears to work for everything from native Win32 applications to framework-based applications (WPF, Silverlight) and even *gasp* web applications. Games are also supported.

Not only will this help developers improve the application experience, but also for end-users. It’s undeniable AppX will tie into the Windows 8 application store to deliver a more consistent experience to download and install apps, including the ability to review the security-based capabilities the application will request.

As both a developer and end-user, this is exactly what Windows needs to streamline the application experience for the platform whose current laissez-faire strategy is no longer suitable for the times.

Moments ago, I tweeted that I noticed Microsoft’s Security Essentials website got a redesign and it reminded me of a corporate pharmaceutical website.

With the help of Wikipedia, I came across the website for Novartis, the world’s fifth pharmaceutical company by revenue. The similarities are uncanny. It turns out marketing drugs is not too different than anti-virus software.

Come to think of it, maybe they should give out pill-shaped USB drives loaded with the MSE installer. That would be kind of cool.

Update: This is a light-hearted post, not to be taken seriously.

Image credit: Rafael Rivera / withinwindows.com

Earlier today, Rafael Rivera and Paul Thurrott released the second batch of screenshots featuring unlocked features inside the latest build of Windows 8 to be leaked. It’s apparent now Microsoft is committed to bringing the Ribbon user experience (otherwise known as Windows Scenic) to the heart and soul of Windows, the Explorer.

Although its not fair to judge the Ribbon implementation in its current infancy state, two user interface elements are worth pointing out that hints at some exciting new file syncing and sharing features baked right into the operating system.

Since these functions appear to be dormant in this particular build, I can only speculate “Sync” would offer functionality similarly to Windows Live Mesh to synchronize folders across computers. On top of that, “Web sharing” might enable SkyDrive-like functionality to make their files and folders accessible through a web URL, for easy sharing with friends and family.

Of course both of these features are consistent with the overarching “Windows + Cloud” strategy that combines the best of local and cloud computing. Perhaps this is only the beginning of the Windows and Windows Live convergence.

Inspired by the Windows Phone 7 “NoDo” update trick making the rounds this week, Chris Walsh and I have come up with a way to get something even better, an early in-development version of the Mango update. Read and act quickly before Microsoft wises up.

The hack, albeit extremely simple in retrospect, involves overriding the update server which the phone checks to a Microsoft staging server (-int) used for testing. It just so happens the current one is hosting build 7510, an early build of the upcoming Mango release.

Of course not all the features work correctly. For example, Internet Explorer 9 does not work at all. On the other hand, SkyDrive and multitasking appear to work flawlessly. It’s also impossible to test the background download or audio services without any third-party app support.

The update is similar to the NoDo update so it will back up your phone allowing you to revert to NoDo if it’s too unstable for you.

Without a further ado, the directions. Enjoy.

1. Edit your HOSTS file under “%WinDir%\System32\Drivers\ETC\hosts“
2. Add an entry “updateservices.windowsphone-int.com updateservices.windowsphone.com“
3. Download USAIP and connect to any US-based VPN (ex. USAIP L2TP California)
4. Use username “demo” and password “demo”
5. Connect your Windows Phone 7 to the PC and start Zune
6. Disable WiFi on the phone
7. Open “phone” settings on the phone
8. Manually search for an update within Zune
9. After a few seconds (~15 seconds) disable data connection on the phone
10. Enjoy the sweet juicy fruits of your labour

At a public lecture hosted by Melbourne University’s Institute for a Broadband-Enabled Society this evening (which just received Microsoft funding), Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, Craig Mundie gave one of the first public demonstrations of Avatar Kinect after its initial debut at CES 2011.

During his talk on the topic of natural user interfaces called “More Like Us: Computing Transformed”, Craig summarized natural user interfaces as computing without the learning curve. Of course it wouldn’t be a talk about NUIs without mentioning the commercial success that is Kinect.

To help illustrate an example of a more natural telepresence experience for more than two people, Craig demonstrated the upcoming Avatar Kinect service with a staff from the university with a walkthrough of some of the stages and seating set ups as well.

Since it wasn’t final code, a few visual gags (ex. unnatural mouth expressions) got a few laughs, but for the most part it works as advertised.

Looking to the future, Craig suggested one day avatars could be photorealistic but raises questions about whether we would actually want them.

For example, in bandwidth-limited environments like mobile which could one day also have depth sensors built in alongside the camera, charactures present significant advantages as it only requires highly efficient voice and animation data streams.

Finally, Craig anticipates huge uptake of the Kinect Research Development Kit to be released in the “coming months”. Compared to the “Kinect hacks”, Craig comments it abstracts many of the higher level functions into libraries including the array microphone to encourage people to explore the wide applications of the technology. A separate commercial-oriented professional development kit is also on schedule soon after.

Update: Found a video of Craig’s Avatar Kinect demo recorded by Paul Tagell.