Operating with image files in a Windows Phone 7 application

Images Add to the Experience

Adding images to something that you are working on in the Windows 7 phone can be a great way to appeal to people in a more full way. This is to say that many users of your programs and services will expect to see images contained within. 

Humans are a visual species, and it is always nice when the tools that we use provide us with the images that we have come to expect from the services that we use. 

Android ListView – Fixing Missing/Blank Dividers

Working With ListViews in Android Development

Putting up a list of elements that people can see and work with is a very common tactic when working on mobile applications. 

It is something that developers are called upon to do all the time, and it is a good thing we have them working on these things because otherwise the apps that we all use on a regular basis simply wouldn't hold up to the workout that we put them through when using them. That is to say that they wouldn't look nearly as good as we are used to them looking at this point. 

Build an RSS Reader for Windows Phone 7

In this lesson, I will create a simple RSS(Really Simple Syndication) Reader for Windows Phone 7. I will use Linq-To-XML for reading an RSS feed. The user interface will contain a Textbox to enter an URL of an RSS Feed and a ListBox element to display results.

Source code

Additional information

1. Creating a new project

First of all, you need to create a new project. To do so open Visual Studio 2010 -> File -> New Project -> select Windows Phone Application there as it is shown in the picture below.

5-minute Observable.FromAsyncPattern sample for Windows Phone 7

If you are looking to create code that models the observable.fromAsyncPattern, you can get started with some basic key types. You’ll need to be able to develop your own implementations from IObserver or IObservable.

Here you can develop the sequences you want with the data that you want. Learn the basic elements of observable sequences, how to get values into them, and how to select the values you want from them. 

Real email accounts inside the Windows Phone emulator

You can now get email accounts with the Windows Phone Emulator. With this Mail app, you can have all your email accounts in one place. You don’t have to access your emails to different websites or apps.

While you couldn't do this easily in the past, you can use the Windows Phone Emulate to do this. Windows Phone Emulator is a tool that comes with various features for development. For instance, documentation, emulator images, tools for Visual Studio, and obtaining a sample code.

Using application settings in Windows Phone 7 apps

Many applications have user input that should be somehow preserved in order to be restored when the application starts again. This includes preferences, URLs, general information, and whatnot. As in any other .NET application, a Windows Phone 7 application supports application settings.

Although the concept is similar, the way it is implemented is a bit different compared to regular console applications, for example. The way you are used to access them is through Properties.Settings.Default or through the Application Properties dialog. Both of these options are not available in a Windows Phone 7 application.

Instead, you should use IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings, which is a member of the System.IO.IsolatedStorage namespace. The application settings are stored in a local application-scoped file that can, in fact, be created via IsolatedStorageFile.GetUserStoreForApplication().CreateFile(path)

How to run multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator

It’s not that difficult to run multiple instances of a Windows Phone 7 emulator, or any other mobile emulator for that matter, when you’re doing testing, development, or having some DIY fun! 

You can run multiple instances of the Windows Phone 7 emulator by generating unique GUIDs for each instance that you need to run. You’ll also need to pass a VMID in order to get these multiple instances working. You can also run multiple instances of later versions of Windows phones like Windows Mobile 10. 

Another Way of Passing Values Between Windows Phone 7 Pages

A View of Different Pages

If you are a Windows 7 phone owner, you may have noticed that your phone has different pages that you can engage with. This is intentional, of course, and allows for users of this phone to get access to exactly the information that they want at any time. 

Developers look at this as somewhat of a challenge. They need to figure out how they can keep certain bits of information from page to page while transferring other bits, and it is all about what they think their users will need to see from page to page. 

The Definitive Guide to Developing Portable Tizen Apps

Abstract

This article complements the online lecture series delivered at the annual Tizen Developer Conference and elsewhere. Titled “JavaScripting Tizen Web Apps” and “Tizen Application Portability,” these lectures serve to guide developers interested in Tizen and the benefits of portable development strategies. 

An analysis of the available Tizen API begins with the consideration of standards and portable web technologies. The Tizen architecture is reviewed, and contrasting its web and native frameworks, leads to an inspection of Tizen’s deployment approach and how it affects web logic and content of both server-based and locally installed apps. 

Using Db4o in an Android Application

Db4o is an object database, i.e., forget about the mapping of tables in a relational database model. If you're a developer, that translates into savings in time invested in your application and volume of code. Db4o's great potential is that you can reuse your [plain, non-mapped] objects by saving and retrieving them as many times as you want. You can persist complex objects or design patterns with nested collections or other complex objects at any level of complexity in your hierarchy. You're not limited to flat objects with primitive types to get reasonable performance.

With db4o you can also benefit from native queries which bring you closer to the language and combine optimized execution with simplicity even for complex queries. Db4o is open source and can be downloaded here.

Android App to Monitor Hudson – Part II Configurations

Last week, demonstrated building and Android application that queried Hudson remote api through REST calls, which returned back JSON objects; in Android App to Monitor Hudson Rest API. The application was very basic, in that all that could be done was launch it and there were no configurations, or customization to make the application more user friendly. This week the application will be enhanced to use menus and add additional screens or activities to allow a user to configure the application to point to a Hudson remote server of their choosing. The application will also save the configuration state so the user doesn't have to re-enter the information after the application has shutdown.

The first step in customizing the application will be to get rid of the default android icon, and place a customised icon. Android supports .jpg, .gif, .png, and .bmp image formats. To customize the default icon, simply open the res/drawable folder and put the image in this folder. The image should be a 48x48 size .PNG image.

How I Built a Basic Salesforce Mobile App with Lightning App Builder

In the fall of 2018, I decided to replace an application my mother-in-law was using for her real estate business. I decided to replace the application with an Angular client and Spring Boot service running inside of AWS. The biggest lesson I learned was that I felt like I spent more time trying to understand AWS and less time making enhancements to her application.

That all changed when spring 2020 arrived…

Building Apps That Avoid In-App Taxes: There Are Several Workable Options

Freedom has always been the cornerstone of technology. And yet, there is no freedom without options. For example, users should have a choice in how they pay for digital goods offered in-app. Although the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the battle between Epic Games and Apple was mixed, the judges ruled Apple cannot stop developers from directing users to other methods of payment in their apps. That’s good news for app developers looking for alternatives.

There are many different options for hosting payments — in-app or on the web, developing an actual web app that would not require mandatory taxes, a hybrid of in-app and outside the app, and so on. The options are ever-changing, so it can be difficult to keep up. 

HarmonyOS Device Location, Geocoding, and Reverse Geocoding Capabilities

Introduction

People take their mobile devices wherever they go. Mobile devices have become a necessity in people's daily routines, whether it be for looking at the weather forecast, browsing news, hailing a taxi, navigating, or recording data from a workout. All of these activities are associated with location services on mobile devices.

With the location awareness capability offered by HarmonyOS, mobile devices will be able to obtain real-time, accurate location data. Building location-awareness into your application can also lead to a better contextual experience for application users.

An Analysis of Near-Field Communication

Introduction

From telegraphs to online video calls and from fax machines to emails, the communication means have evolved exceptionally. Now the world has shifted from wired networks to wireless transmission, the internet being the most significant model. 

Nowadays people do not want to wait for replies; messages are sent and received in milliseconds. Modern messaging apps are an example of it. Transferring large files was a problem for businesses in the past, as it could take hours to load. Currently, centralized cloud storage is giving easy access to data anywhere in no time. 

Android Third Party Libraries and SDK’s

Over past few years, the age of mobile development become an fiercely-competitive world of serious money making business. Android developers network is growing rapidly. As the network grows, there are many open source libraries available. Although using someone written code is not be recommended always, but sometimes it helps in getting the application quicker to market.

Below are some of the popular android third party libraries. If you find some library is missing from your favourite list, or discovered a new one. Please comment below and I will have them listed.


 

1. User Interface Libraries

Library Purpose
ActionBarSherlock ActionBarSherlock is an extension of the support library designed to facilitate the use of the action bar design pattern across all versions of Android with a single API. ActionBarSherlock was widely used before Google introduced AppCompact.
ActionBar PullToRefresh ActionBar PullToRefresh provides an easy way to add a modern version of the pull-to-refresh interaction to your application.
Android PullToRefresh This project aims to provide a reusable Pull to Refresh widget for Android. It was originally based on Johan Nilsson's library (mainly for graphics, strings and animations), but these have been replaced since.
View Pager Indicator Paging indicator widgets compatible with the ViewPager from the Android Support Library and ActionBarSherlock.
Nine Old Android Android library for using the Honeycomb (Android 3.0) animation API on all versions of the platform back to 1.0! Animation prior to Honeycomb was very limited in what it could accomplish so in Android 3.x a new API was written.
A Chart Engine AChartEngine is a charting library for Android applications. It currently supports all major and widely used chart types.


2. Android Networking Libraries

Library Purpose
okHttp HTTP is the way modern applications network. It’s how we exchange data & media. Doing HTTP efficiently makes your stuff load faster and saves bandwidth.
Volley Volley is an HTTP library that makes networking for Android apps easier and most importantly, faster. Volley is available through the open AOSP repository.
Android Asynchronous Http Client An asynchronous callback-based Http client for Android built on top of Apache’s HttpClient libraries. All requests are made outside of your app’s main UI thread, but any callback logic will be executed on the same thread as the callback was created using Android’s Handler message passing.
Google GSON Gson is a Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation. It can also be used to convert a JSON string to an equivalent Java object. Gson can work with arbitrary Java objects including pre-existing objects that you do not have source-code of.
Retrofit Retrofit is a type-safe REST client for Android and Java. This uses annotation to describe HTTP server calls. This is an elegant solution for managing REST API calls in in android application.


3. Image Downloading And Caching Libraries

Library Purpose
Picasso A powerful image downloading and caching library for Android.
Universal Image Loader UIL aims to provide a powerful, flexible and highly customizable instrument for image loading, caching and displaying. It provides a lot of configuration options and good control over the image loading and caching process.


4. Database Helper Libraries

Library Purpose
ActiveAndroid ActiveAndroid is an active record style ORM (object relational mapper). It allows you to save and retrieve SQLite database records without ever writing a single SQL statement. Each database record is wrapped neatly into a class with methods like save() and delete().
ORM Lite Object Relational Mapping Lite (ORM Lite) provides some simple, lightweight functionality for persisting Java objects to SQL databases while avoiding the complexity and overhead of more standard ORM packages.
Green DOA GreenDAO is an open source project to help Android developers working with data stored in SQLite. GreenDAO does all the SQLite helper work for you. It maps Java objects to database tables (often called ORM). This way you can store, update, delete, and query for Java objects using a simple object oriented API.

Awareness API: What Is It and How It May Help?

Every year our life and daily routine are more and more closely connected with mobile phones. Modern life is extremely dynamic and that’s why mobile apps should match the users’ activity. Awareness API exists just for that purpose.

What Is This API?

Google Awareness API allows us to monitor user activity. The API allows us to get data related to the user's: