It has been almost a week since the Zune HD was launched and we are starting to see some basic apps and games being released showcasing it’s multi-touch and accelerometer as well an iPhone App ported to Zune HD – in less than 12 hours. These apps have all been developed using the new XNA 3.1 which, hopefully, is the start to a new wave of Zune App & Game development.
Here’s a breakdown of what’s out there now.
ZuneZune.org’s Application
First up, we have ZuneZune.org’s application demonstrating the accelerometer built into the Zune HD as he places it on an inclined desk and shows the inclination by the direction the number “5″ moves in. He also shows how Zune HD can detect four sources of touch input simultaneously, which is different from typically multi-touch devices that support 2.
Zune 3D model Viewer
As demonstrated in the video above, this app just displays 3D wire-frame models and responds to multi-touch for viewing the model at different angles and colors.
Zune Platformer Game ported to Zune HD
So this is basically the same platformer game that was available for earlier versions of Zune ported to Zune HD with touch and accelerometer support.
Allaboutcoding.com have a pretty nifty tutorial available on how to port it over using XNA 3.1.
Conclusion
So that’s it so far in our first look. It sure seems promising for Zune HD with these apps developed in a week to show what features we can expect. We now just hope that Microsoft will setup a way for third party developers to release applications and games through the Zune Marketplace as this would encourage devs to start working on projects for the device.
Whether we will see this soon or not – only time will tell.