One of the key design decisions the design team made when creating Windows Phone was a focus on providing maximum battery life for the end user. And it seems a major contributor to short battery life is having applications running in the background. So it’s important to realize that apps you create for...

This is a quick follow up tip to the last one I posted about using Trial Mode with a PhoneGap application on Windows phone. As I mentioned in that article, having your application available for users to try without laying out any money is a great way to grab them as a customer. But successfully converting...

When you provide users a way to evaluate your application without any money up front, your app turns into the best advertising for itself. The user can check out your application in a limited feature mode, and when you have them hooked in to the benefits, they’re more likely to spring the cash to buy...

Windows Phone has a unique and very handy way of providing multiple entry points into your application. This is done through the use of one or more Live Tiles. The start screen on Windows Phone is comprised of tiles that represent many things – applications, people, websites, music, map locations, and...

This morning the PhoneGap community announced their version 1.3 release! This release is special because it’s the first one to include support for Windows Phone. And not just a little support, but all the main PhoneGap features. For those of you with PhoneGap experience or even just a heavy HTML5 background...

“So two applications walk into a bar…” One of the user interface constructs that’s unique to Windows Phone is the Application Bar. The App Bar (as we affectionately call it) gives users a standard place to find buttons for commonly used tasks within an application, and menus for lesser used but still...

In this tip, I’m going to show you how to send an SMS message from PhoneGap on Windows Phone using the SMSCompose member of the Microsoft.Phone.Tasks namespace. There are a lot of useful launchers and choosers in that namespace, and I’ll be writing about some in detail in a future blog post. I’m also...

(This post is part of my series PhoneGap on Windows Phone 7 tips .) When you are creating integration points between your PhoneGap HTML5 application and the Silverlight hosting application, there are a few ways you can go about crossing the gap (pun intended). This tip is an example of one of those techniques...

Today’s PhoneGap on Windows Phone 7 tip involves handling orientation changes. This means when a user rotates their phone from portrait to landscape, the content should rotate as well. Not only that, in some scenarios elements on the screen should reformat for readability and ease of interaction...

A few months ago, Microsoft a nnounced support for PhoneGap on Windows Phone Mango. This announcement seems to have flown under the radar, because it hits a (currently) small intersection, developers who know HTML5 and developers who want to target Windows Phone 7. However, the former subset is huge...