Windows Phone developers have received an email about the upcoming changes to make mobile operator billing available in more countries. In particular markets from March 2014 this means that there will be an additional deduction from your revenue for these specific markets when mobile billing is used (not for continued credit/debit card purchases). The markets […]
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Nokia DT-601 Review
As part of the New Year tidy up I decided to add a wireless charging pad to my desk so that I can easily top up devices without too many trailing wires. I saw the new second generation DT-601 and thought it looked perfect – smaller than the original pad and with a USB interface […]
In the latest update to the Windows Phone Tasks app I’ve added in some API features for other apps to hook into. This is facilitated by Windows Phone 8’s support for custom Uri schemes – the app supports the tasks: scheme and allows you to do a couple of useful things with it. You can […]
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Linking to your other apps
Using the Windows Phone SDK the only method to return a list of your other published apps (e.g. for your About page) is to use the MarketplaceSearchTask and specify your company name in the search criteria. The problem with this is that it doesn’t return the actual publisher list but does a keyword search so […]
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Translating Windows Phone Features
There are a number of steps when translating a Windows Phone app. Hopefully you are using the Microsoft Multilingual App Toolkit (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/bg127574) which supports the standard XLIFF format. Often you will start with your own language string resources and then add other languages, possibly first with machine translation and then passing them to a native speaker to […]
In Windows Phone we have a number of Launchers and Choosers for interacting with system features. For the most part the approach used in Windows Store is to use special URI schemes to achieve the same end result and launch platform features. I’ve collated together a list below of some known ones. Some like maps […]
The Windows Simulator is a deployment target for Visual Studio which allows you to run your Windows Store apps in a simulated device. This allows you to test touch interaction and different screen sizes and orientations on your development machine. The way this works is that it creates a Remote Desktop session into your PC. […]
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Charming Storage for Windows Phone
A tweet by @martinsuchan earlier reminded me of an issue I faced porting some code from Windows Phone to Windows Store. Moving from the Isolated Storage API to the new Windows.Storage namespace there was nothing built-in to determine if a file/folder exists prior to Windows 8.1. This meant the only supported option was to try […]
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Windows Phone: App Accent Color
The last post showed how to get the current app’s tile colour in Windows 8. What about Windows Phone? There isn’t the concept of a tile colour – you provide a full image for your app icon and tiles and this can be whatever colour you choose or transparent in which case the user’s accent […]
When you define your package manifest for a Windows Store app you can specify the background colour used for your tile. Chances are this is a brand colour which you want to use throughout your app. You could specify it twice – once in the manifest and once in a XAML resource. However imagine the […]
In The Hand Ltd 