This is a question that came after during discussion with a colleague over some company worth over 20 trillion dollars – and we just couldn’t imagine how that much money would look like in cash. Just to get an idea of it, we calculated how many hundred dollar bills it would take to circle the…
To add speech recognition to our app we will be using the newly released version of the Windows Phone toolkit (release June 2013) – which adds a nice new control called SpeechTextBox (that does exactly what you think). You can get the latest build using NuGet or you can download the source from CodePlex. Once you’ve…
I’ve covered in a previous post how to create wide tiles for your Windows Phone 7 application. Now it’s time to bring them to life. The easiest way to do so is by using a ScheduledTaskAgent. To create one go ahead and add a new project to your solution and from the project templates list…
I’ve recently come across an article in the Nokia Developer Wiki about creating live tiles (including wide tile) for both Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 by writing a single piece of code that works in both versions of the OS. To do this you will need to use the MangoPollo library which you…
Decided that I’d share a really simple helper class that I often use in my Windows Phone apps. It’s called IsolatedStorageSettingsHelper and it only has three methods: This is not much, but that’s all I ever needed for my apps. Hope it will be of help. Code below.
This graphics glitch is a known bug in Firefox running on Windows 8. It appears to manifest only on machines that run on nVidia graphics cards and it is caused by the browser using hardware acceleration. The fix is simple – disable hardware acceleration from your browser’s settings menu. The strange colors will be gone…
Not long ago I’ve published my first app using the devcenter developer account and not the global publisher – and just a couple of days later (or should I say weeks) I started noticing crash reports for my app. Downloaded the stack trace data in hope that I could find out where the issue was…
There’s a series of 3 webinars coming up two weeks from now about HTML5 and jQuery and how you can take advantage of them in building apps across multiple browsers, platforms and devices. The three webinars will take place on 19, 20 and 12 of June at 11:00 AM EDT and will last for 1…
So today, while (by mistake) attempting to upgrade my Windows 7 to Windows 8 I ran into a compatibility check with 6 errors including one that states: Secure Boot isn’t compatible with your PC At first it gave me the creeps thinking that I won’t be able to install Windows 8 although the Consumer Preview…
Google has long neglected one of the most popular and best sold devices ever – but all that ignorance ends today as Google releases their first NES product: Google Maps 8bit for NES. The product has all of the features you got used to on the desktop version, including the street view: All this is…
What determined me to write this post and a few others was this page (works in Chrome and Safari only). Amazing what you can do by using only CSS. So, let’s take a look under the hood – the css for that effect looks like this: Kind of messy. But if we strip out the…
Textured gradient backgrounds are made by using gradients and noise images. For CSS gradients you can use a generator like this one. For noise images, again, you can use this noise generator. The trick for making textured backgrounds lays in combining the CSS background properties. Instead of using only gradients as a background or only…