Hanselminutes

This is one of those days I feel so lucky. And fortunate.

It has been a privilege to create Hanselminutes podcasts app for Windows Phone 7. I was already half-way through with the app when I contacted Scott Hanselman (yes, the Scott Hanselman!) for his blessings and his permission to publish the app. He is a very busy person, and was quite surprised when I got his reply after 2-3 days. Yes, I did not expect him to reply to me so soon, as I knew he is a very busy person (yeah, I said that before!) and he is always traveling and speaking around the world.

Scott was gracious enough to give me a go. I send him screenshots and we went back and forth for a week. Then we finalized on what we wanted.

As a bonus, we have also included a section where you could go and read Scott's blog entries.

The app is now published and is available in the marketplace for download.


Scott's website: http://www.hanselman.com
Hanselminutes: http://www.hanselminutes.com

Thanks Scott, for giving me this opportunity!

MilesCalc update

MilesCalc needed some accuracy in locating the position. It has been updated and is available in the marketplace with the following modifications:

Distance Calculation
Replaced the simple DistanceTo() method on the Location object, with Harvesine formula, to calculate distance.

Battery Efficiency
The first version used to poll the position every second. That was both inefficient in locating the position and also using the battery unnecessarily. Now, I have changed to poll only every 20 meters.

High Accuracy
The GeoPositionWatcher has been set to High Accuracy. This might be an effect on the battery, but it would get the location more accurately.

You could download the update here.

Number of downloads (as of 06/22/2011): 111.

MilesCalc - An app which calculates miles

Many times, I remind myself to jot down the miles traveled on a particular day, so that I could get reimbursed. Then, as usual, I forget. Or I would be too lazy!

Then, the MilesCalc was born. (Needless to say, it is my 4th Windows Phone app).

MilesCalc - short for Miles Calculator. It does  exactly what it says - calculates the miles you traveled - at the click of two buttons - START and STOP. Yes, that simple.

Download the same here. And please place your marketplace reviews - good or bad.

Here are some screenshots of MilesCalc.

Numbers4Kids

On the lines of 4Kids series, we have published another app for kids to learn numbers - Numbers4Kids. Please try it out.

Re-designing Alphabets4Kids app

We have 2 apps in the marketplace, and the downloads are progressing. Good news.

But we think we could do a much better job in designing the  layout of the apps. We took Alphabets4Kids app as a guinea pig.

To make good movies, you need to watch good (and bad) movies. To write a good book, you need to read a lot. To create (I intentionally did not use the word "develop") a beautiful app, you need to look at other apps. So, I took time to read and wander around to see other apps. And that gave me a new perspective of designing apps. Windows Phone 7 gives a wonderful ecosystem which we could leverage and put in our creative brains together to come up with top-notch apps.

I went ahead and did (and re-did) a re-design of Alphabets4Kids. It is available in the marketplace now.





Below are some screenshots:

We think we could do a much better job on this.  We would be bringing new features for this app in near future.

Shapes4Kids - Helping kids learn various shapes

Alphabets4Kids was not our first app. There was another app we developed (Shapes4Kids), but failed the certification. We had sound added in that app, for each shape. My 7 year old daughter, Parvathy, helped us in recording the sounds. We have promised her a Happy Meal from McDonalds!:)

Our app failed the certification for two reasons:

1. Our app would stop any existing background audio.
2. We did not have any control over our on media, for example the volume.


While I started working on developing a Settings page, Rajeev Venkitaraman had completed the Alphabets app. So we got that app uploaded, without any audio. It passed the certification.

We have completed the work on the Shapes app and have submitted the same.

Here's how we solved the two issues.

1. Controlling the background audio.
There is no inherent methods in Silverlight to check whether a background audio is being played. So, we take help from XNA framework. For that we need to refer the following assembly:

Microsoft.Xna.Framework

The following property would help us identify whether a background audio is being played:

Media.MediaPlayer.GameHasControl

If it returns false, then it means the background music is being played. Do not forget to call FrameworkDispatcher.Update() before accessing the Xna property.

2.Controlling our own audio
We created a separate Settings page for controlling our audio. The IsolatedStorage ApplicationSettings came very handy in this case. We created a separate AppSettings class and accessed this as a resource in both the MainPage.xaml (in which we rendered the Shapes) and Settings xaml page.



The testing is in progress.
(Cross fingers!) :)

UPDATE

The Shapes4Kids app has passed the certification and is available for download.

Alphabets4Kids - Our first app

Our very first app Alphabets4Kids is ready for download in the marketplace, for Windows Phone 7 users. This is a very basic app, targeted towards kids aged 3-5, who are learning alphabets. We would be adding audio, to make it more interesting in further releases.

Please feel free to drop a line regarding this app.