Category Archives: Windows
How to Get the Windows 8 Consumer Preview Right Now
Microsoft just launched the consumer preview of Windows 8. That means anyone who wants to check out the latest version of Microsoft’s new… Continue reading
Wave at Your PC: Kinect for Windows Now Available
As Steve Ballmer promised in January, Microsoft has released version 1.0 of the Kinect for the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK).
Improvem… Continue reading
Windows 8 Developer Preview Launches Tuesday [PICS]
Can’t wait to get your hands on Windows 8? You can get it tonight — as long as you’re willing to suffer through countless bugs… Continue reading
BuildMobile: The Future of WebOS
Not very long ago when we were planning the launch of our humble magazine BuildMobile, which you are reading right now, the content strategy included coverage of the nebulous WebOS mobile operating system. Come launch time, there wasn’t enough traction to include it in our platform categories, but we were hopeful for the future. WebOS in 60 Seconds WebOS is a mobile operating system based on the Linux Kernal Initially developed by Palm and first released in January 2009 Acquired by Hewlett-Packard in April 2010 for US$1.2b WebOS uses a “card” UI with a left-to-right flick for app swithcing, flick up for “off” The WebOS broswer, called simply “Web” is based on the WebKit layout engine WebOS “Synergy” feature integrates information from many cloud services into a single list Devices include the Pre , the Pixi and the Veer phones, then the HP TouchPad HP announced in March 2011 that WebOS would run within Windows by the end of 2011 On 18th August 2011 HP announced it would discontinue operations for WebOS devices Potentially even more HP TouchPads will be made and sold at a loss Web Standards based Native Apps A feature that was full of promise, and partly responsible for the underdog adoration WebOS attracted from developers worldwide, is that web technologies like HTML, CSS and Javascript are first class tools for developing native apps for the platform, with full access to hardware APIs like the camera. Continue reading
BuildMobile: Navigating with Data in Windows Phone
In my previous post you saw how to navigate forward to a new page and then back either via the hardware back button or by calling the GoBack method. Quite often you’ll want to pass some data between pages, for example if a user selects a customer from a list you can pass the customer id or name through to the customer details page. This post will not only cover how to do this, it will also highlight the sequence of events that are raised during the navigation process. For the purpose of this post we’ll be using a simple example application that has two pages, CustomerListPage and CustomerDetailsPage. Continue reading
BuildMobile: Windows Phone 7 Navigation
What’s interesting about the development platform for Windows Phone is that it is based on Silverlight, which, as most of us are aware, was first and foremost a web technology. As such Silverlight supports a navigation model that maps well to the way browsers work with the ability to navigate forward to new pages and back to previous pages. In this post you’ll learn how to carry out navigation tasks within your Windows Phone application. When you create a new application in Visual Studio or Expression Blend your project will contain a number of files which define a basic Windows Phone application, see Figure 1 Continue reading
BuildMobile: WP7 Push Notifications Part 2
So far we’ve looked at the importance of notifications on the Windows Phone platform along with the different types of notifications that are available to your application. In this post we’re going to go through setting up your application to receive notifications and how to actually send notifications. The first step in configuring your application to receive notifications is to register with the Microsoft hosted Push Notification Service. This is done by creating an instance of the HttpNotificationChannel class and calling the Open method Continue reading
BuildMobile: Push Notifications in Windows Phone
In my previous posts I’ve referred to the notification system that comes with Windows Phone, specifically in reference to updating the Live Tiles on the Start screen. We’re going to jump in and take a closer look at how the push notification system works and the types of notifications that are available to you. Firstly, there are three types of notifications that your application can make use of: Toast Notification If you want to notify the user of an important event within your application you can send a Toast Notification. This notification is made up of two pieces of text that appear as an overlay across whatever application the user is currently in, as shown in Figure 1. Continue reading
Spy Shots: Windows 8 With a Ribbon Interface? [GALLERY]
Microsoft is experimenting with a ribbon interface for parts of Windows 8, and we have a gallery of leaked screenshots showing examples of an ea… Continue reading