Blog

I recently needed to create a prototype for a Windows Phone application and having recently discovered it I decided to use Indigo Studio to build it. The application is not particularly designed for Windows Phone however it has enough standard UI controls and customisations to make it easy to create phone mockups. They say a picture says a thousand words so why not have a look at a sample I created showing a few screens of an imaginary phone application.

http://indigo.infragistics.com/prototype/XX47K8P4

In posting that link I’ve just highlighted one of the great features – you can build a prototype and then share it (either on Infragistics servers or your own) via the web. The Silverlight magic then gives your clients a rich experience to understand the scope and user flow around the application. I intend to revisit this in a series of blog posts to discuss gotchas and tips for creating Windows Phone prototypes. Oh and one of the best features – it’s free!

In my previous post I discovered a limitation with using the Share… extension point in the Photos app. The good news is that from within your own app you can open .png files. For this you can use the PhotoChooserTask which has been available since Windows Phone 7. This presents the user with essentially the same UI as the Photos app and you can browse the Screeshots folder and select those .png files. The Completed event returns you a PhotoResult containing the raw stream and the filename which you can use to open the file. Because .png access is available this way it seems an odd decision that it is not supported from the Photos app itself. The moral of the story – provide multiple methods for your user to select files…

On Windows Phone 8 it is possible to register your app with the Share… extension point on the photo viewer. This allows your app to receive an image file and process it whether that is sending it to an online service or manipulating it on the device. I found recently an odd quirk with the feature. I setup the extension following the MSDN documentation. I wanted to test on my captured screenshots on the device so I went into the screenshots folder, selected an image and tapped share. While a range of system extensions were shown my custom app was not. I later discovered that it works in other albums. The reason as it turns out is that all screenshots are captured as .png files and camera images are .jpg and for whatever reason photo extras are not enabled for .png files. I searched online and there was a forum discussion but it is still awaiting a formal confirmation from Microsoft that this is expected behaviour.

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpdevelop/thread/095a3300-111e-46d8-968a-3af1036504b7

iCalendar files are based on the set of data exchange specifications which also includes vCards. You may come across them either in emails or from a website. For example some sites which sell travel tickets allow you to download your itinerary in an iCalendar file. While Windows Phone has always supported vCards for contact information it doesn’t recognise iCal files.

Since Windows Phone 8 introduced the ability to register for file associations this allowed me to use some old code I wrote back in the days of Pocket Outlook on Windows CE and Windows Mobile. My free iCalendar Import application has just become available in the Store for Windows Phone 8. You can download it from the link below. I’d welcome any feedback. There are some limitations on the supported event types – there is no way to insert recurring appointments into the user’s calendar so this supports single events only.

http://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=95287e45-05d7-4a63-aa82-619192cb1713