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Contents tagged with Windows Phone

  • How to create cool lock-screen backgrounds for Windows Phone 8

    Tags: Windows Phone,UX

    apr 12 2013 08:34 by Johan Lindfors 0 Comments

    In this post there's no code whatsoever, it's just a simple but nice feature of Windows Phone 8 that I think create some great first impressions of the awesomeness of Windows Phone. It's all about creating a wide image that then is used as background for both the ordinary lock-screen as well as the Kids Corner lock-screen. It will give a nice transition when swiping to the Kids Corner.

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  • Designing a login screen as you like it to be!

    Tags: Windows Phone,UX,XAML

    feb 07 2013 15:02 by Johan Lindfors 0 Comments

    loginSo here is a very basic and very "vanilla" looking login screen which could be leveraged for any Windows Phone application with some customization of logos and possibly colors as well. But there is a major issue with the proposed design and I wonder if you can spot it without me explaining? Can you spot it?

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  • A potential bug in Windows Phone that impacts icons with transparent PNG’s

    Tags: Windows Phone,UX,Design

    aug 04 2012 13:04 by Johan Lindfors 0 Comments

    A minor but yet irritating bug in Windows Phone (which Microsoft also could have fixed very easy in my opinion) is apparent when getting notified about updates to applications in the Marketplace hub. When navigating to the list of available updates you might see something like the screenshot below (sorry for the Swedish UI elements):

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  • Supporting light and dark theme with dynamic background images

    Tags: Windows Phone,UX,Design

    may 13 2012 19:14 by Johan Lindfors 1 Comments

    I'm still a bit surprised in finding applications on Windows Phone 7 that doesn't take into consideration that the user might have either the dark or light theme enabled based on personal preferences. If your app is only supposed to work in one theme, then using Jeff Wilcox tool Phone Theme Manager helps a lot (it's also available on NuGet, simply install with "install-package PhoneThemeManager"). But what if your app also want to leverage a background image that might be downloaded from the internet or specified by the user. Since images might be very light or dark this might impact the user experience with the foreground color blending into the image, but there are a couple of solutions to that as well. Here is one very simple one:

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  • Automatic versioning in Windows Phone

    Tags: Windows Phone

    may 08 2012 07:11 by Johan Lindfors 1 Comments

    This will be a fairly short but hopefully informative post. In all of my Windows Phone projects, I always try to get the client/users as included in the testing as possible. When doing that it's also very useful to know that they are using the latest bits of the project or at least understand which version they were using when they report bugs and change requests. I found a couple of resources online that I use to have an automatic versioning of my Windows Phone projects and here it goes:

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  • Bing Maps with custom pushpin and popup interaction

    Tags: Windows Phone,UX,Bing Maps

    apr 30 2012 10:57 by Johan Lindfors 0 Comments

    When creating a solution which requires a map it's pretty common to also display pushpins that inform the user of locations. This is very easy to accomplish in Windows Phone, but when you also want to respond to the user tapping one of these pushpins and display maybe a popup, then it becomes a bit more difficult. Here is an approach that I find both easy to implement and understand.

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  • How to bypass the local http caching mechanism

    Tags: Windows Phone

    apr 30 2012 09:05 by Johan Lindfors 2 Comments

    When developing Windows Phone solutions, I've become quite fond of using the HttpWebRequest class to fetch information from the web, either if it's in XML or in JSON. I've also had the requirement to pull data down very often (as often as every 15 seconds) from the same URL and then stumbled into some issues. It seems like the Windows Phone platform is examining the URL you request and if you try to fetch data from the same URL as previous it will simply reply with a locally cached respones with the same data as earlier. This is probably not what you want and the solution is the following:

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  • Communication from ViewModel to View

    Tags: Windows Phone,MVVM

    apr 27 2012 08:35 by Johan Lindfors 1 Comments

    When leveraging the MVVM pattern there's always the discussion regarding whether or not the ViewModel should be aware of the presence of the view, and in that case how much. This comes quite apparent when trying to make the UI/view respond to state-changes in the ViewModel and especially if it's not possible to leverage data binding to do so. Most Windows Phone developers already know that the ApplicationBar is one of the elements that doesn't support data binding directly in the platform. There's a couple of additional framework and/or technologies that you can leverage to actually get this support but I have myself found it to be much easier to just write some code.

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