Blog

Our thoughts on technology and design

Tech
A few weeks back I wrote a blog post about how the recent announcement of PhoneGap support for Windows Phone 7 (WP7) which makes it possible to develop HTML5-based applications.
Tech
I have just received an email from Codeproject - my article on XAMLFinance, a cross platform Silverlight, WPF and WP7 application, has won Best C# and Best Overall article competitions for September.
Tech
Having spent a number of years studying Physics at university, I have had the importance of error bars well and truly drummed into me!
Tech
This blog post provides an implementation of IPagedCollectionView which allows paging of data from the server. An IPagedDataSource is introduced that allows any paged data source to be plugged in, with the standard controls such as DataPager making it easy to create paging applications.
Tech
In my last post back in June, I introduced a new data structure, the PatchWorkArray.
Tech
This blog post looks at the new concept of 'transitions' that WinRT, within Windows 8, introduces. This concept makes it very easy for you to create a fluid and interactive UI without going anywhere near storyboards!
Tech
Some time ago I wrote about plotting mathematical functions with Visiblox Charts, and Jesse responded by showing how to wrap a function in a data series to feed into a chart.
Tech
WInRT introduces a new interface for collection change notification, IObservableVector, which means ObservableCollection no longer works with this framework. In this blog post I will show how you can use ObservableCollection, via a simple adapter, within you WInRT applications.
Tech
In this blog post I look at the new application lifecycle model that Windows Phone 7.1 (Mango) introduces, and show how to handle the various lifecycle events in a simple MVVM application.
Tech
This article show the step-by-step development of a Windows Phone 7 HTML5 application using PhoneGap. It also looks at how viable this approach is for cross-platform mobile development.
UX Design
This article presents a critique of radar charts, a chart type commonly used to display multivariate data, higlighting how they are poorly designed to effectively communicate information in the underlying data, and presents a number of more effective alternatives.
Tech
I've just had an email land in my inbox from Microsoft's Mike Ormond, announcing that the Windows Phone 7 book that I contributed a couple of chapters to (Introduction and Tools), has finally been published!
Tech
I have just published a new article on codeproject which describes the development of XAMLFinance, a cross-platform application for the desktop (WPF), web (Silverlight) and phone (WP7).
Tech
With the Windows 8 preview release earlier this week, developers are now faced with a whole new and exciting Microsoft stack.
Tech
In this blog post I take a look at Windows 8 on the outside, from a user perspective; and on the inside, from a developer perspective to see how it will change the way we develop with Windows on tablets, smartphones and the desktop when it is released next year.
UX Design
Yesterday I spoke at the Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton as part of the Elevator Pitch session. I think the session went really well, with a great mixture of topics so (hopefully) everyone was suitably entertained.
Tech
Colin's post on Dart and the other fallout from Google's announcement across the web sparked a few thoughts in my mind.
Tech
Just a few weeks ago I wrote a blogpost "Can Microsoft 'fix' JavaScript and make HTML5 applications viable?", where I described some of the issues with JavaScript and how these could be solved by Microsoft if they wrote a C# to JavaScript compiler.
Tech
I was reading over one of the tutorials over at html5rocks.com (if you haven't had a look through them before I'd thoroughly recommend it!) and came across an article by Ilmari Heikkinen on creating a "kiosk-mode" for chromeexperiments.com.
Tech
Microsoft's recent change in stance over Silverlight, promoting HTML5 as "the only true cross-platform solution for everything", seems to have sidelined Silverlight as a niche framework.

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