In The Hand Ltd

Latest Posts

  • Bluetooth HID on Windows Phones

    Microsoft have already announced that Bluetooth HID (keyboard) support is finally coming in Windows 10, but it was quietly added in Windows Phone 8.1 GDR2. The problem is this update won’t be circulated to most phones. It is however present… Continue reading

  • Charming Updates

    I’ve made a couple of steps forward with the Charming project: 1. I’ve added a new library for Windows Phone 8.0 and 8.1 Silverlight to provide a “Universal Apps” style ResourceLoader for Silverlight (.resx) resources. It currently supports the default… Continue reading

  • Determine if running on Windows Phone from a UAP application

    There is new metadata query support in Windows 10 to allow your code to react at runtime based on which APIs are available. For example if running on a phone device you may want to start a call, and offer… Continue reading

  • Background GPS in a Windows Phone 8.1 Windows Runtime App

    In Silverlight 8.0 there was a capability to run an application for a period of time after the user switched away to perform continuous GPS tracking for up to a few hours. With the switch to the Windows Runtime there… Continue reading

  • Moving Forwards: Geolocation

    Recently I open-sourced a number of Compact Framework projects and when I was working on re-writing an application which used them as a Windows Runtime app I started to think about how much of the code might be useful for app… Continue reading

  • WinRT Background Task Processes

    I’ve been working on a Windows Phone 8.1 project which has several background tasks. One of these uses the device’s sensors – using a DeviceUseTrigger. This is different to how a regular periodic task works because the task implementation creates a… Continue reading

  • Get battery level on Windows and iOS

    In Windows Phone 8.1 a new API was added to both retrieve the current battery level as a percent of fully charged and also handle an event fired when the value changed. Sadly this API is not common across this… Continue reading

  • Binary incompatibility in Silverlight for Windows Embedded in May 2014 Update Onwards

    Last Year Michel blogged about a binary incompatibility introduced in the May 2014 update of Compact 7 which broke existing Silverlight for Windows Embedded code including pre-compiled system apps. https://guruce.com/blogpost/windows-embedded-compact-may-2014-update-35-breaks-binary-compatibility-of-silverlight The XAML In The Hand library was also affected. It… Continue reading

  • Calendar Import Now Universal

    In order to extend the app onto Windows devices I’ve re-written the Calendar Import app as a Universal app with separate UI and features for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. Both apps add the new feature of browsing for… Continue reading

  • Microsoft Band Initial Thoughts

    I received my Band today and have just started setting it up, loading in my Starbucks card and tweaking settings. One thing which is interesting is that the phone doesn’t use GATT Bluetooth LE to expose functionality unlike some other… Continue reading