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.
People
Last Thursday night saw a tense battle for the podium at the inaugural Scott Logic Newcastle grand prix. The race was held south of the river at Karting North East in Sunderland, but most people didn't let that, or the afternoon of torrential rain put them off!
Tech
This blog post describes how to implement a conversation / messaging style application with Windows Phone 7. It covers how to style the speech bubbles and the scrolling of the conversation list view when the phone keyboard is shown.
People
The inaugural Scott Logic pool competition took place last night, kicking off with 12 brave entrants comprising 6 developers, 5 new graduates and our intern Dean. It was a marathon session in a league format; a total of 66 games played across 4 tables in 3 hours.
Tech
For reasons best ignored I recently investigated the different ways in which static initialisation code can be run in Flex.
Tech
The Windows Phone 7 Panorama control is widely used in applications and to many has come to symbolise the Metro Design Language.
Tech
This blog post looks at how to to create a conversation view, mimicking the SMS messaging interface within Windows Phone 7. This post shows how we can select different DataTemplate for each item in an ItemsControl to achieve this effect.
Tech
Yesterday I received the exciting news that I will be speaking at the fantastic Flash On The Beach conference in Brighton this September. As Europe's biggest annual Flash conference it brings together leading minds from all over the industry and focuses on design and development in equal share.