Hello NoDo!

First – I received the update-to-allow-the-update.  This took about 10 minutes and I was at version 7.0.7008.

Then as soon as I installed that I hooked my device back up through Zune after seeing another update was available.  The process started again, after about 30 minutes of backing up my 16GB HD7 w/ about 3GB free and about 10 minutes of an actual install I was greated with Version 7.0.7390.0

Happy Updating!

-twb

Materials for Orlando Code Camp WFA Presentation

Click here for the materials for my Windows Phone 7 + Azure + Facebook = WFA (or Work From Anywhere)

- twb

Introducing Software Logistics Free ContactSwap App for Windows Phone 7

My latest addition to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace was just approved, it’s called ContactSwap and it does just that.

ContactSwap allows you to add information about yourself in the form of a profile, you can even add more then one profile to control the information you give out.  Once you’ve added your profile, you are ready to go.

When you meet someone with Windows Phone 7 that you wish to exchange contacts with, all you need to do is start the app press the swap button and have the other person do the same.  Through the magic of the internet and location services your two phones will make the others contact information available to be saved as a contact on the others phone.  It really is just that simple.  For your security, you can add a 4 digit pin that can be used so only the person you intended on getting the contact can open it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

-twb

Bing Mobile HTML 5.0 Release and the Tale of 3 Devices

This morning when checking out the news feeds, I came across this article on how Microsoft released a Bing HTML 5.0 mobile client but Windows Phone 7 can’t use it since it doesn’t support HTML 5.0.  Well that certainly is true for the current version of WP7.

Let’s peal a layer off of that onion and ask the question is HTML 5.0 right for doing mobile sites?  

Just a point of order here, when we are talking about HTML 5.0 on the iPhone and Android, what we are really talking about is WebKit’s implementation of the soon to be standard, but I digress….

So here goes, here are pretty much three of the hottest devices right.  The righteous iPhone 4 on the left.  The high-end Android Nexus S on the right and finally the Windows Phone 7 HD7  in the middle. First off, let’s open up the browser on our devices and navigate to www.bing.com. it won’t look the same as on the Android and iPhone. Nope, it’s not running the HTML 5.0 version.

Ignoring the fact of the display size (Android has equal size screens) let’s take a look at what we see.  First off, the android rendering of the screen on the Android device only shows the top 1/4 of the Bing home page, ok, maybe there are some settings somewhere that I can change to send a different user agent string and get a better rendering, but hey I always keep coming back to my mom and how she would use a phone.

Phone Rings: 
Mom – my XYZ web page in the browser doesn’t look right.
Kevin – Oh that’s because you are…umm…let me see how to explain this…have your browser settings configured to render desktop pages rather than mobile ones.  Ok, here is what you have to do…first….
Mom – Never mind, I’ll just go back to my PC.

Now that we got past that, I guess it comes down to the look, and how the menus work.  On the iPhone I have a Metro style UI where I can move the menu up and down and click on an item.  On the HD7, I have a static list of the left where I can click on a link.  On the Android version if I play with it long enough I can get the same type of menu as on the iPhone.  Maybe you like the iPhone and Android (well if it rendered properly) version but it’s not like “OMG, the iPhone and Android are just fricken incredible and WP7 Sucks!”

So now let’s look at what happens when I actually do a search, I’m going to search for Pizza.

 

Ok the iPhone and Android render pretty the same thing. One point for HTML 5.0. Now we are getting somewhere. We have two WebKit browsers rendering the the search results in pretty much the same way, whoo-hoo! This is a major step forward right? (now think sarcasm). Again do you like the Android and iPhone versions or the WP7 version look better…personally I dunno, I guess the iPhone and Android have maps but I’ll contend that’s more a factor of just being newer than being HTML 5.0.

So in summary…cool Microsoft adopted HTML 5.0 for iPhone and Android versions, and now all is right with the world and everyone likes them again?  Nope they get the press saying…Microsoft bad because the new site won’t run on their flagship phone product.  Also this begs the question of what did HTML 5.0 really do for the site?  Let’s face it other than curing cancer, certain folks will have a predefined bias against anything Microsoft does.  Let’s leave the psychology of that discussion to a different day.

Enter native version of the Bing Application

For each of the platforms there is a native Bing application, for Android there is only some sort of version for the Far East only…go figure Android users don’t like bing, shocker there eh?  I did however find an application called NoBing…shocker again eh?

For Android and iPhone, these can be found in the marketplace.  For Windows Phone 7, launching it is as simple as pressing the hardware search key.  Now I’ve searched for Pizza again and retrieved the following results (yes the Android version is in some sort of Japanese or Chinese…no comment)

I’m not going to go into the details of the UX of the native applications compared to he HTML version, but try it for your self if you have one of these devices.  It’s not that difficult to figure out if the native version or the HTML version provides an over all better experience.

Being a mobile developer, one that focuses on cross platform development, I can’t certainly say that using a web approach for some applications makes sense.  Primarily if the application is small, and primarily read only.  Also, I think one thing isn’t mentioned very much, but it’s important to reiterate.  Both the iPhone and Android use flavors of web kit.  If you’ve done anything with targeting these mobile platforms, you know that they are extremely close but not identical.  Also it’s important to realize that different versions of both iOS and Android have different builds of web kit.  If you are pushing the technology, you’ll quickly find that the different versions evolve and things just break.  It will be very interesting to see the version of IE in WP7 VNext and see how the compatibility works between existing WebKit…er…I mean HTML 5.0 based sites and Microsoft’s implementation.  If history is any predictor, if it runs good on WebKit and Microsoft follows the standard to the letter and it doesn’t run good on WP7, I’ll give you one guess on which implementation will get more bad press.

Summary

So from a mobile perspective, what can you take away from this?  Again this is from a mobile expert where the majority of my experience is.

• HTML 5.0 (or for right now WebKit) isn’t the end-all-be-all for everything.  The day of write once run everywhere isn’t just around the corner.
• If you need to build a small mobile application that only targets the iPhone and Android, sure you can look at HTML 5.0, but can we please start calling it WebKit?  Also be creative, use some sort of frameworks to abstract the specific “stuff” you can really do some great things with this.
• For a large mobile application and this one is…hear me now, believe me later…it will take much less time, you will have a much better user experience, considerably fewer support issues and finally maintenance and finding resources to work on your application will be much easier if you go with individual native applications targeting the platforms rather than trying to write one application that runs every where (or at least targets WebKit).  Trust me on this one…been there…done that…got the t-shirt.  Please before telling me I’m wrong, have a very much non-trivial application in production before commenting about what you could do.

-twb

Windows Phone 7 Quick Tip #25 – Safely modify the colors of your application

If you remember from my Windows Phone 7 Quick Tip #11 – Metro I – Colors, I said:

If anywhere within your application you do something like this:

You are probably doing it wrong and better really be careful and check your application running in both light and dark themes.  Doing so makes it really easy to show screens like this to the user and fail certification:

Solution:

Well, here’s a simple quick tip that will allow you to very simply lock in the colors for your application and provide custom colors to make your application truly unique, but still stick with the metro them.

Step 1: Find a base theme to work with, you can find the standard themes in the following directory:

[PROGRAM-FILES]\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v7.0\Design

Step 2: Copy the file for the theme called ThemeResources.xaml into your project directory and add it to your project.

Step 3: Be sure to set the Build Action for your theme resource to “Resource”:

 

Step 4: Add that file as a resource dictionary as follows:

Step 5: On each of the root elements on your phone page change the background from:
    to

Step 6: At the top of ThemResources.xaml you can see where all the colors are defined, you can modify any of those colors and your application will pick them up and ignore any of the default colors that are defined for the light and dark themes for the phones settings.

Step 7 (optional): Hide the top status bar. 

If you don’t do this, the status bar will following the theme as set on the device and your page might not look good as in the following example:

Bonus Quick Tip!

Use an image as the background for all your pages:

Step 1: Create an image, in our case we are just using a simple PNG that has a size of 480x800 with a red gradient with some text on it:

Step 2: Add the graphic to your project and set it’s Build Action = Content

Step 3: Within ThemResources.xaml find the following line:
and replace it with:

Now go run your application and your page background should be the image you added to the project!

Summary

Following this simple quick tip will allow you to create a Windows Phone 7 application that has a customized look and feel with your colors in a way that is easily managed and maintained.

-twb

Where has The Wolf Bytes Been?

For the past few months I’ve been extremely busy on a number of items but hope to start putting out content again on Windows Phone 7 relatively soon.  There’s lots of exciting stuff going on!

So far 2011 has been a very busy year.  To give you an idea:

• I finished up my portion of Sams Teach Yourself Windows Phone 7 Application Development in 24 Hours.
• Completed about 8 hours of Windows Phone 7 training videos on Windows Phone 7 for the Live Lessons series (hopefully be out in Q2 of 2011)
• Reworked the facebook site of My Dog Rocks!
• Reworked the User Interface for the Windows Phone 7 version of My Dog Rocks (soon to be released)
• Travelled to Minneapolis, then Microsoft for a week at the 2011 MVP Summit and a Windows Phone 7 SDR (Software Design Review)
• Spoke at South Florida Code camp, gave my “Work From Anywhere” talk.
• Spoke at Sarasota .NET User Group, with the same “Work From Anywhere” talk.
• Completely re organized my office and added a nice 21.5 inch 1920x1080 multi-touch desktop monitor.
• Built the Windows Phone 7 Contact Swap application
• Involved with a Windows Mobile engagement that I expected to take between 20-40 hours and ended up taking about 140 hours.
• Spent a good chunk of time that was supposed to be a vacation up at our Hudson place that ended up being more work than vacation.
• Got Beth a Windows Phone 7!
• Got my Mom a Windows Phone 7!

Oh – and that’s all on top of my usual consulting related activities.

Anyway, sorry for the silence on the blog, and I’ll be sure to make up for it over the next few months with some additional Windows Phone 7 Quick Tips!

-twb

Stuck Downloads in WP7 Marketplace

When on the road I purchased a few apps that were greater than 20MB on my HD7. As it is supposed to do, it said “Attention Required” “Connect via WiFi or PC Connection and try again”. I tried to do this, but they still wouldn’t install, I was at a point where I had about 5 apps on my download menu.

Then I thought – “Tap and Hold”, after doing this on the stuck downloads, I got a menu that said Retry/Delete. After pressing the retry menu option while the device was on WiFi, I was able to successfully download and install all the apps.

Hope this saves someone a little aggravation!

-twb