In The Hand LtdAs 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
If you want to determine the space used for a particular folder in Isolated Storage you have to work recursively through the files in the folder (and sub-folders) and determine their sizes. In the Windows API the StorageFolder gives the indication that you can get the BasicProperties for a folder and use this to get […]
Microsoft have today announced Windows Phone App Studio Beta (https://apps.windowsstore.com/default.htm). This is a web based tool which allows you to build your own app by putting together data sources and customising the look and feel. The instructions list just four basic steps and there is a library of templates to start from. This might not […]
My previous couple of posts have been related to the Sharing functionality provided by the Charming libraries. This one looks at a smaller (but no less exciting) component. For Windows Phone development if you want to retrieve the app information at runtime you have to read the WMAppManifest.xml file included in the package. In Windows […]
The Charming libraries for Windows Phone are a set of (currently) six components for Windows Phone development with the mission of providing more code consistency with Windows 8. Following on from the NFC component, this post will cover its cousin the Share component. Windows Phone provides a number of classes in the Windows.ApplicationModel.DataTransfer namespace but […]
In The Hand Ltd 