Steve Starck's Blog

King James Bible now available in the WindowsPhone7 App Marketplace

CrazySharck4 — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:24:00 GMT

I've been so busy over the past few weeks working on good stuff for future releases of Windows Phone that I haven't had the opportunity to really mention that I've published my King James Bible program in the Windows Phone 7 app marketplace -- not just once but twice.

Version 1.1 which is available now includes the ability to change the color used for the Words of Jesus Christ; typically they would be in red, but I received some feedback from a friend that suggested not everyone can read red text easily. I added a settings page which allows you to choose between red, no color, and using whatever the accent color of the phone is.

I also provide you a way to reset your reading plan, because long about January 1st you'll probably want that capabiity (at least I know I will...)

Anyway, if you're interested, here is a link to it in the marketplace.

Using the LoopingSelector when the number of items changes

CrazySharck4 — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:50:00 GMT

I love having the sources to the WindowsPhone Toolkit (http://silverlight.codeplex.com/releases/view/52297) available, since you can not only learn how something works, you can also fix "issues". (I won't call them bugs, just unplanned features)

Case in point: I ran into an issue using the LoopingSelector to create the "Choose Book and Chapter" page in my Bible program for WindowsPhone 7.

The secondary (chapter) selector ranges from 1 to 150 depending upon the primary selector (book of the bible). But if the number of items in the secondary selector decreases, it seemed to "stick" there, so that if you go from a book with 6 chapters to a book with 4 chapters and back to a book with 6 chapters, you can't select chapters 5 or 6 anymore.

Turns out that the LoopingSelector isn't resetting it's scrolling amounts when it updates data.

If this is happening to you, try the following modification to LoopingSelector.UpdateData()

        private void UpdateData()

        {

            if (!IsReady)

            {

                return;

            }

 

            // Save all items

            _temporaryItemsPool = new Queue<LoopingSelectorItem>(_itemsPanel.Children.Count);

            foreach (LoopingSelectorItem item in _itemsPanel.Children)

            {

                if (item.GetState() == LoopingSelectorItem.State.Selected)

                {

                    item.SetState(LoopingSelectorItem.State.Normal, false);

                }

                _temporaryItemsPool.Enqueue(item);

                item.Remove();

            }

 

            _itemsPanel.Children.Clear();

            _panelStoryboard.Stop();

            _panningTransform.Y = 0;

 

            _minimumPanelScroll = float.MinValue;

            _maximumPanelScroll = float.MaxValue;

 

            Balance();

        }


That fixed it for me.
Update: I meant to update this awhile ago, but I've been informed that the next release of the toolkit will include this fix.

Bible Program for Windows Phone 7 screen shots.

CrazySharck4 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 17:27:00 GMT

Here's some screen shots of what the Bible program looks like right now. No, for those of you that want to know, I only have rights to publish the King James Version, since it's in the public domain. I'm not opposed to building it for other translations, but those are copyrighted and I haven't gotten the rights to publish them.

Here's portrait view:

The Book and Chapter picker:

Heres the application bar expanded:

The Daily Reading picker:

The Daily Reading Page:

Landscape View:

Test your application on a real device.

CrazySharck4 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:43:00 GMT

As part of my project to build a Bible program for Windows Phone 7, I tried out a few of the different things that folks working on the application platform created for folks:

Dave Relyea (DevDave) created the LoopingSector in the Windows Phone Toolkit (http://silverlight.codeplex.com/releases/view/52297) - which I used to create the "Choose Book and Chapter" dialog.
David Anson (Delay) produced a nifty rotation animation frame (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/delay/archive/2010/09/13/he-has-a-right-to-criticize-who-has-a-heart-to-help-two-fixes-for-dynamicorientationchanges-improve-the-experience-of-animating-and-fading-windows-phone-orientation-changes.)

Delay's "in your face" rotation animation is pretty cool, but while it always works well in the emulator, when I tried it on a device I ran into some issues with it with my somewhat complex page layout. On the device, I don't really see the animation, just the results.

I took a look at it and noticed that the animated "in your face" version basically animates a Boolean "progress" property, which then turns around and does a re-layout for each call. That's kinda hurts with my complex layout, so I suggested that a yet another approach might be to do much like what he does in the fade version - have it take a bitmap and animate the fade - but instead of (just) fading, have it take two bitmaps: one that is of one dimension, then the other of the other dimension, and then rotate and fade them both.

In fact, that seems to be what the messaging app on the phone does when it rotates. (No, I didn't look at the code, but that 300fps video I shot of it doesn't lie)

Moral of the story: Test your application on a real device -- you'll probably be surprised about the difference in peformance.

Windows Phone 7 Application

CrazySharck4 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 16:07:00 GMT

And as my first post, let me share one of the projects I’ve been working on in my spare time –

Windows Phone 7 is awesome, but I like to carry the Bible around on my phone. The application development platform for Windows Phone is super cool, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time working on a Bible program using the Windows Phone Developer Tools.

Update: Here's some screenshots of what I've got written so far:

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Greetings

CrazySharck4 — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 15:50:00 GMT

Welcome to my blog.

I’ve put off creating one for quite some time, but it seems that it’s about time I did so.

You don’t know me, so let me introduce myself.

I’ve been around Microsoft for 15 years now – my start date was 9/5/1995. During that time I’ve worked on some really cool products, such as Visual FoxPro (my first Ship It!), all of the Oracle Data Access technologies (ODBC Driver, OLE DB Provider, .NET Data Provider), and the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

For the past two years, I’ve been a developer working on the entertainment experiences for Windows Phone 7.

Hopefully, you’ll find something useful here.