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Category: Mobile Development

Adding Tactile Feedback to your app the easy way

by mark.mymonster.nl

About a week ago there was a very good article with tips to make your wp7 app a killer app. Tip 24 was about tactile feedback. Tactile feedback can be something like 30 milliseconds running the VibrateController. That’s very easy, just like this:

VibrateController vibrateController = VibrateController.Default;
vibrateController.Start(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 30));

Because I just want to call one method instead of two lines of code, I created a small static method.

public static void GiveTactileFeedback()
{
    VibrateController vibrateController = VibrateController.Default;
    vibrateController.Start(new TimeSpan(0, 0, 0, 0, 30));
}

Alright, but now I had to add this method call to every Button Click, ListBox SelectionChanged, and ApplicationBar menu or button use. Probably there are some more places where I want to give a little bit of feedback. So I’m thinking about a solution, a generic solution. I remember how easy it was to apply the TiltEffect. So my mind was going the direction of a similar solution. So I started with some Attached Dependency Properties, the same mechanism that’s used to implement the TiltEffect. So enable it for example in the root of your Phone Page and only suppress the effect if you don’t want to apply it a special occasion.

 

windows phone application bar icons

by pedrolamas.com

The Windows Phone 7 development team added a set of 32 icons to the SDK to be used on the Application Bar by developers of external applications.

This  number seemed quite low to get things done, even more after seeing the other icons spread across the native Windows Phone 7 applications (like the “send” icon on the messages, the “attach” icon on the mail app, etc.)

Thus, I now present you a collection of 132 extra icons in comparison to the 32 that comes on the SDK (please click on the image below to get a full size visualization of the collection)

Windows Phone HubTile in depth| Part3: Freezing and Unfreezing tiles

by WindowsPhoneGeek

This is the third article about the new HubTile control from the latest release of Windows Phone Toolkit – August 2011 (7.1 SDK). This time I am going to talk about freezing and unfreezing tiles. It is a good practice, from performance point of view, to freeze the animation of your tiles whenever they are not visible.

NOTE:  For more information about data binding, the key properties, methods, events and the main features of the Windows Phone HubTile control you can take a look at my previous posts:

 

Loading data during WP7 Page navigation – the slow, the fast and the incremental

by Andreas Hammar

To show data to the user you have to load data and bind data – but which one is the slow part? Answer: It depends on the nature of your data and the complexity of your UI. This post will show you that data can be loaded on the UI thread or the background thread, and data can be bound all at once or a few items at a time. These data handling techniques can be used together to create one of the most important concepts in Windows Phone 7 – perceived performance. Full source with demo app showing the scenarios can be found at the bottom.

 

Windows Phone HubTile in depth| Part2: Data Binding

by WindowsPhoneGeek

This is the second article about the new HubTile control from the latest release of Windows Phone Toolkit – August 2011 (7.1 SDK). This time I am going to talk about data binding and using HubTile in more complex scenarios.

NOTE:  In Part1 we talked about key properties, methods, events and the main features of the Windows Phone HubTile control. You can take a look at it for reference.

 

Windows Phone HubTile in depth| Part1: key concepts and API

by WindowsPhoneGeek

Recently a new version of the Windows Phone Toolkit was released: Windows Phone Toolkit – August 2011 (7.1 SDK) . Previously we covered all toolkit components in our 21 WP7 Toolkit in Depth articles covering all controls so it is time to continue this series with a few more posts related to the new components that come with Windows Phone Toolkit – August 2011 (7.1 SDK) .

We’ll start with two posts that cover all about the Windows Phone HubTile control in details. In Part1 I am going to talk about key properties, methods, events and the main features of the Windows Phone HubTile control.

 

Windows Phone Marketplace Test Kit

source: MSDN

The Windows Phone Marketplace Test Kit provides a suite of automated, monitored, and manual tests to help make sure that your applications are accepted in the Marketplace the first time you submit them. The test kit enables you to identify and fix issues prior to Marketplace submission, which saves time in the submission process. You can use the test kit to evaluate applications that target Windows Phone OS 7.1 or later.