weimenglee
Latest Articles by weimenglee
Building Location Service Apps in Windows Phone 7
December 15, 2010, by weimenglee
In my previous article on Windows Phone 7 development, I showed how you can quickly get started using Visual Studio 2010 together with the Windows Phone Developer Tools. In this second article in the series, I will discuss a topic that is garnering a lot of interest in recent years -location services. Location services usually involve two key components - getting your location data and displaying your location on a map. Hence in this article, I will first show you how to display a map in your Windows Phone 7 application and then use the Location Service APIs to obtain your current position... Read More
Introduction to Windows Phone 7 Development
October 18, 2010, by weimenglee
By now, you should already have heard of Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 mobile OS. And while many developers are busy developing for Android and iPhone, Microsoft is hard at work, developing its killer mobile OS that could give the competitors a run for the money. Before you dismiss Microsoft as a serious contender in the mobile space, think again. The new OS is now a total rewrite of the older Windows Mobile platform, and sports many features that you have come to expect of a modern mobile operating system... Read More
SMS Bubble UI in iPhone Apps
June 14, 2010, by weimenglee
Users of iPhone are no stranger to the built-in SMS application that displays your messages using cute little bubbles (see Figure 1). However, this innovative UI feature is not exposed to the iPhone developers - you have to create it yourself if you want to have the same look-and-feel of the SMS application. Creating this UI - which I will call the Bubble UI, allow you to represent information in a conversational style. A good application of this is when you are creating a chat application. Messages exchanged between two persons can be shown in message bubbles... Read More
Using the PopoverView in iPad App Development
May 13, 2010, by weimenglee
In the previous article, we saw how to develop a new type of application known as the Split View-based application on the iPad. And one of the new views introduced for the iPad is the PopoverView, which you had a quick glimpse of it in action in the previous article. In this article, I will show you how you can use the PopoverView in your iPad application, not just in a Split View-based application. Getting Started with the PopoverView... Read More
Developing Split View Based Apps for the iPad
April 19, 2010, by weimenglee
The iPad runs on the same OS used by the iPhone and the iPod touch, which means that developers who are already familiar with iPhone programming are able to quickly write applications for the iPad. In fact, most (if not all) iPhone applications should run without any problem on the iPad, albeit in a smaller frame size, with an option to pixel-double. However, to really make full use of the large size screen afforded by the iPad, you would need to redesign your UI to take into account the extra screen space... Read More
Offline iPhone Web Apps
March 25, 2010, by weimenglee
One of the several features outlined in the HTML 5 specification is the support for Web applications that continue to work while they are offline. This feature is very useful for Web applications because a Web application can be loaded just once and then run offline without needing a persistent Internet connection, making it behave just like a locally installed native application. Dashcode supports the manifest attribute available in the HTML 5 specifications for offline web applications. And so in this article, you will learn how to write offline iPhone Web applications using Dashcode... Read More
Location in iPhone Web Apps
January 26, 2010, by weimenglee
One of the key limitations of developing Web applications for iPhone is that you are not allowed to access the hardware on the device via the Web browser. For example, you cannot access the camera on the iPhone; neither can you access the accelerometer. This seriously limits the kinds of applications you can develop on the iPhone. One notable exception, however, is the support for tracking the location of devices, through a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and cellular triangulation... Read More
Programming Apple Push Notification Services
January 12, 2010, by weimenglee
One of the key limitations of the iPhone is its constraint on running applications in the background. Because of this, applications cannot keep running in the background when the user switches to another application. So, applications that require a constant state of connectivity (such as social networking applications) will not be able to receive timely updates... Read More
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 4: Even More Views
October 29, 2009, by weimenglee
In this final installation of the Android Views series of articles, we shall continue our exploration of another category of views - Menu views, and some additional cool views. The views discussed include: Context Menu Options Menu AnalogClock DigitalClock WebView... Read More
Understanding User Interface in Android – Part 3: More Views
September 29, 2009, by weimenglee
In the previous article, you saw the various basic views such as the TextView, EditText, Button, and how you can use them in your Android applications. In this article, we shall continue our exploration of another three categories of views - Picker views, List views, and Display views. The views discussed include: TimePicker view DatePicker view ListView view Spinner view Gallery view ImageView ImageSwitcher view GridView view... Read More
