Xbox 360 - Take 2
I really missed my Xbox 360 that I had to leave behind in Hungary. Alas not only its power supply wouldn't work on 110V, even the DVD drive and the game discs were region coded, so it was not worth carrying it over here. Not that I had enough space for it in my suitcase… I brought 3 games that I couldn't even use yet, as I bought them in the USA before I knew about the regions, so all I had was my achievements on my Windows Live account. But now the wait is over – I bought a new unit and it was a really sweet deal: a new revision of the Xbox hardware with Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3 theme, 320GB hard disk (instead of 250GB or none), two themed controllers (instead of one) and the MW3 game ($60 value) altogether for $350. Compared to the old one, the DVD easily could be described as silent, the cooling is hardly audible and the hard disk space is just incomparable to my old 20GB disk where the usable space was about 13GB. I need it only to install game discs on it for faster (and silent) reading and to store game content, so I guess I won't run out of space anytime soon. I ordered some games too that I wanted, so my current library is like this… CoD MW3, Forza Motorsport 4, NFS Hot Pursuit, Assassin's Creed, Tropico 4, GTA 4, Mirror's Edge. I've got some other games in the pipeline but first I'd like to get bored with the ones I have.
My other gaming platforms are the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DSi, where I mostly play with platformers, currently I'm trying to beat Rayman Origins which is friggin' amazing!
Doesn't it bother you that Wii U is almost here and a new Xbox is to be expected in 2013? Nope. I don't think I would buy the Wii U anytime soon, there are (and perhaps will be) plenty of games for the old device that I'd like to play with. As for the Xbox, it's like 2 years from now, initially it will be much more expensive than later and for quite some time it will lack games that could really make the hardware sweat. I've got so many games I want to play with, and much more will be released before it reaches the end of its life cycle… So, nope, don't care about depreciation that much. It would be too mean to bring up Android here so I won't do so. :-)
WP7 Marketplace Submission Procedure
If you're an active Windows Phone developer, or you're thinking about joining, you may have thought about what's happening to your application once you submit it to the Marketplace. This is the scenario of my latest app update, your mileage may vary but this is what you can expect in general.
1. You upload your application to the App Hub. Their system processes your XAP file and looks for obvious problems. If there is an issue, you will be notified about it and you have to upload a new XAP file that has been fixed to continue the submission.
2. Once the XAP is verified, they repackage it and you can enter various metadata on each of the supported languages of your app, such as short and long descriptions, keywords, images in various sizes and up to 8 screenshots. It's best to have these all prepared before you start submitting your app. If you actually use special features like network connectivity, device information or phone user identity request, access GPS data etc, these will be detected in your application's code and displayed on the profile page of your application on the Marketplace. For some of these there will be an extra confirmation page displayed to the customer.
3. When you filled the metadata and selected the price and the countries where your app will be available, you're done, the app is "signed and encrypted". Now you just have to wait, a lot, to have it certified.
4. Unless you submitted it really early, the app will be tested the next day by manual labor in Microsoft's User Interface Lab in Norristown, Pennsylvania. They test it with a variety of devices (like the
5. About two days later, if everything was okay during their tests, they run another test by installing the app over wifi directly from the marketplace storage, then the application will get certified and you will receive an email with a title like this: Congratulations! AppName has successfully passed certification for Windows Phone Marketplace. Now you can publish the app, unless you selected automatic publishing on getting certified.
6. The marketplace content gets refreshed once a day, at 2am in US Eastern Time. If you got your congratulations email (and published the app) before that, it will appear in the marketplace soon. Otherwise you will have to wait yet another day to get it published.
You won't see download and crash statistics showing up on the App Hub for quite some days, but don't worry, it doesn't mean that nobody cares about your app. This information gets processed with a delay of 6 days, refreshed at 8pm in US Eastern Time. User ratings appear quicker, in about an hour or so. On the App Hub you can view these only by selecting single countries to see if there is anything to see there, it's awful. You may use AppTracker instead to follow your applications and see all the user ratings and reactions.
Hungarian Dictionary
Yay, I've been published! No it's not a book, it's my first Windows Phone application that went live on the Marketplace. That's one giant leap for me, one small step for mankind. :-) It's an English-Hungarian and German-Hungarian dictionary which works from a locally stored database. Select the dictionary type you need, then just start typing your word and it will filter the results for you on the fly. Tap on a word to see its translations in detail, you can even add it to your favorites. Check out the screenshots as they pretty much speak for themselves (although they are hard to hear in this size) then I will tell you about the challenges I had with this project.
First of all, I got my phone a few weeks ago and I haven't had any experience with the OS before. Let alone writing an application in Silverlight which was new to me, however it's not all that different from what I'm working with on a daily basis: ASP.NET and Windows.Forms but still, it needed some adjustment. I started with watching the superb WP7 Jump Start videos of Rob Miles and Andy Wigley, they are very cool chaps and I can say, very efficient teachers.
I was thinking what I should do as a learning project and this dictionary just felt right for this platform from every angle. I've created its predecessor in 2009 for Windows Mobile 5.0, it was a dinky little PDA application for my own use, but the most important part of it, the dictionary database files were done so I didn't need to put energy into that, I could start with basically rewriting the dictionary handler class to make it a bit more efficient and use internal caching for the search as you type method I was about to build into this new app.
Then I had to bite the silver bullet with creating a user friendly GUI that embraces the Metro design language, respecting the user's theme settings of dark / light background and chosen accent color, but still look good and having visible graphic buttons in each case. First I was thinking of using a panoramic layout but as it turned out the pivot layout is a better choice for the app's needs.
I ran into some problems and bugs, too... Silverlight has a ListBox control which was a great choice for the job of displaying search results, first it was all fine and dandy, especially in the emulator. But running the first version on my actual device revealed that my dictionary searching is blazing fast, but then the system keeps waiting for the ListBox control's shockingly slow rendering to finish. Alright, starting over, let's create my own ListBox control that actually works with more than 5 list items... Frankly I expected a bit better performance from the standard one. Then I had to deal with the shortcomings of my solution, two dynamically generated TextBlock controls in a StackPanel for each word, with click detection, hosting the whole bunch in a ScrollViewer... At least it's way faster. Obviously, pivot panning and list scrolling shouldn't register as unintended item selection. And it shouldn't be scrollable if there is no need to scroll due to the small number of items displayed. This issue might be solved in Mango, the emulator doesn't scroll, but on the current OS release it sure does. Anyway, it was great fun to work out all these issues.
I was almost ready when I decided that beside the Search, Translations and About pages I will add a Favorites & History handler page. I'm glad I did, it turned out to be a very cool feature, but my application already handled the Deactivated - Activated states and it kept crashing away when I tried to come back to the Favorites page from Tombstoning. Only one 3rd party application can run in the same time, when the app is not active due to running some other program that takes the screen away, my app practically gets killed (this is called Tombstoning), then it will get reloaded if you get back to it. It could reactivate on the other pages, but not on Favorites. It's becoming a known error, with 3 pivot pages it's perfect, but if you have 4 (or more) then on the third page reactivation will be fatal if you try to select your active pivot page in the OnNavigatedTo event handler, where it would be perfect because you couldn't see the first page popping in for a moment. Bit daft... Hopefully it will get fixed someday.
At this point I already had localized text on the user interface, showing Hungarian text if that's the selected system language, it will be supported by Mango so I can prepare for it. But there is a way to localize the application title and tile title too, so in order to make the app as good as it could be, I solved this issue, I even made a tool to help with this task in the future. And since I was there, I added the ability of selecting the user's own default language, even before the Hungarian language gets supported in the system.
Cherry on top of the sundae, I created the Windows Phone version of Moonbase, my class library of reusable functions helping out with often needed stuff like localization, file management in isolated storage, Style / Brush / Font selection, theme detection and whatnot. It will come handy in my next app.
Go and check out the app if you need such a thing, or just try it out for the fun of it; it's free!
 | Windows Phone Marketplace website |
If you're not familiar with Windows Phone, take a glimpse at its look and feel... Lovely, isn't it?
New Phone In The House
A couple of weeks ago, after a long debate, I got myself a new phone: an LG Optimus 7. I don't really need a smart phone, but being a fan of Microsoft technologies, I didn't want to wait any longer to jump on the Windows Phone 7 bandwagon. I'm really impressed so far and whatever I don't like in the system is most probably going to get fixed or improved in the Mango update coming this fall. I plan to write about the system a bit more elaborately, but I want to make this post a tribute to my previously used phones.
It won't be a long list. Since I never had too much money to waste, I have always tried to buy things I really need and would use happily for years to come. This is the 4th phone I had in over 11 years and given that it's only two weeks old, I think I've got a rather impressive track record here. I have friends who changed their phones several times a year; if we haven't seen each other for a while, they always showed up with a different phone. Sometimes even in a different car. Let me show you my lineup...
I bought my first phone, the Nokia 3210 in 2000, along with a Vodafone prepaid SIM card. I think this model was a new development then, internal antennas seemed to be a big thing. I had no idea, never even used a mobile phone before but I liked its overall design. It was certainly more modern than what some of my colleagues had around that time, not to mention how badly beaten up those were. Yep, they worked in marketing and sales positions with company issued phones, programmers didn't get one. Not that I cared, I could afford it so I went for it and used it happily for nearly 4 years. It had very low resolution monochrome display, no internal memory to speak of and it was somewhat bulky, but still slimmer than most of the devices in that period. I still have it and it works prefectly, apart from a badly aged battery.
The Nokia 6610 came to me as a birthday gift from my friends in December 2003. I didn't plan to replace my 3210 but it was really sweet from them (and it had to be really expensive!) so I was glad to have it. It was one of the first phones that featured color display, a 128x128 pixels, 4096 colors one that journalists praised on. It was nice indeed, I uploaded a cute Jodie Foster picture as background and it was there until I replaced the whole phone. It didn't go bad, although in its last year I decided to replace its keyboard and shell because it was a bit worn, the paint came off here and there and some buttons didn't register well anymore. Otherwise it was working fine.
Then it happened... In January 2008 I literally fell in love with the Sony Ericsson K610i. I wanted it real bad, just for its looks, I still think it's the prettiest ordinary phone ever made; the finest example of sleek industrial design, like the sexy androids from Asimov novels. A thing of beauty; check it out for yourself from multiple angles. The screen is gorgeous and its capabilities easily put it into the class of smart phones, but these days we think of those as large multi touch screens and software platforms with application stores, so I classify it as an ordinary candybar phone. Honestly I still don't expect more from a phone and I still love it to bits, so it took me a while to convince myself to get a new one.
I can take care of my things so well that natural degradation doesn't really control my purchasing habits. However, during the years I got an iPod mini 6GB (2005) and a Mitac Mio P550 Windows Mobile 5.0 based PDA (2006), both good as new and they all have properties that are missing from the K610i. It can play music just as good as the iPod, but doing so really compromises battery life, plus I hate to use a headphone jack converter with it. The PDA has GPS navigation and can be programmed using the .Net Framework, but it's not always with me so its usability is limited. The K610i had a camera (a front facing one too, in fact) but the image quality is a joke. Almost all mobile cameras are a joke though so I don't hold it against the phone. As I don't take my Canon DSLR with me everywhere, it would come handy to have an OK compact camera built into the phone that I can use, should I spot a burning zombie.
So here we are, I took an attempt to merge my devices into a single one and I think I've chosen well. I was thinking of an HTC Trophy 7 originally for its looks, but the LG Optimus 7 was much cheaper with 16GB storage memory instead of 8GB. Then it turned out that even though the HTC looks a bit better, I love the LG's three hardware buttons, and its camera (or at least its internal settings) is like a thousand times better. Somebody at HTC must have called SharpenMore() in a loop and nobody seems to ever test what comes off the conveyor belt there.
The Optimus 7 is a good phone, I like using it on a daily basis. I kept the K610i as a secondary phone, I put the old Vodafone SIM card into it, that I had to abandon a couple of months ago. For some reason I lost the ability to send text messages to the USA, they seem to go out, Vodafone charges for them, but they never arrive. I waited many months for a fix. They have no idea what's wrong, it must be anything but them. I went to one of their shops to get a SIM card replacement; I instantly became quite popular there with my SIM from the year 2000, after 11 years of usage... Unfortunately the new card didn't fix the issue either, so after yet another useless round with their support center I gave up and bought a SIM from T-Mobile. Magically, that works.
Speech Recognition
I just watched a series of video tutorials about how to use the Kinect SDK, thinking about what I could use it for in a hobby project. In the audio section the guy plays with the Speech Platform API to get certain spoken words recognized with the microphone array and I thought it could be fun to play with this API, but I never even tried the built in speech recognition functions. I activated it on the microphone built into the webcam, opened Word and tried to make it type something for me... Like the word type. This is what I ended up dictating, getting more and more frustrated:
Type.. type.. type.. type.. type.. type.. tyyype.. screw you, type!
And this is what it put into the document:
High tying tie to high heat to high tide has to have the basic five tie issue is who you die.
For a non-native English speaker it's not a real confidence booster, is it? Or perhaps my computer just tries to tell me something... At least I didn't test with Cthulhu. :-)
