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Lock Buster gets bumped to version 3.0

Lock Buster gets bumped to version 3.0

Today I’m glad to announce that Lock Buster 3.0 has reached the Windows Phone Store. The third version of Lock Buster follows in Hello Friend’s footsteps and adds support for more customization options. Color effects make your lock screen look even more exciting! The app offers various modes like a high contrast one and a black & white mode. Moreover, users are now able to select addons which show additional information on the lock screen.

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Update: Hello Friends 4.0 now available! More Fun with Addons & Color Effects

Update: Hello Friends 4.0 now available! More Fun with Addons & Color Effects

I’m glad to announce that the fourth version of Hello Friends is now available in the Windows Phone Store.

A lot of user feedback has reached us since the first version of Hello Friends. Most of them were asking for even more customization of their lock screens. Thus, we were reacting on the user feedback and implemented some nice new features. Hello Friends 4.0 for Windows Phone 8 supports addons that can be combined with your collage.

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Hello Friends updated and pushed to all Windows Phone markets worldwide

Hello Friends updated and pushed to all Windows Phone markets worldwide

Hello Friends has reached the marketplace in its current version 3.1 with improvements for WP7 and WP8 devices.

The Windows Phone 8 version comes with these changes:

  • Improved update mechanism: The previous version sometimes had problems setting the current lock screen image. This is now solved, the lock screen will be updated even more reliable.
  • Bug fix for the selection of custom contacts: Some users reported that the app crashed without any notice when trying to select custom contacts. A memory issue was solved so that this problem will no longer occur.

The Windows Phone 7.5 edition contains the following improvements:

  • New preview mode including miniatures of all available templates (the same one that was previously released for the WP8 edition)
  • One new template
  • Bug fix for the selection of custom contacts (equivalent to the WP8 bug fix)

Both editions were released globally to all existing Windows Phone markets, now also including 42 new countries with stricter content rules (including China and Indonesia).

You can get the updated version directly from the store:

WindowsPhone_208x67_blk

Have fun!

Hello Friends 3.0 is now in the Store with support for Windows Phone 7.5

Hello Friends 3.0 is now in the Store with support for Windows Phone 7.5

The third version of Hello Friends is now in the Windows Phone Store! It also supports the Windows Phone 7.5 platform. So I’d like to tell you what’s new in the current version:

First of all, we did an overall improvement of the user experience. We got very much feedback from our users (we appreciate that, thank you!), so we were able to tackle problems on several devices as well building a better usability.

The list of improvements covers the following feature updates:

  • 2 new templates (“6×10 Friends” is now the template with the highest number of pictures and “9 Accent Mix” contains a box that is colored with the phone accent color)
  • New preview mode
  • New template selection window that shows miniatures of all templates
  • A new live tile
  • More refresh intervals
  • Shuffle option when previewing your collage
  • Performance improvements
  • Several bug fixes from feedback of users

You’ve read right, there’s also a Windows Phone 7.5 edition available. Since it is not possible to change the lock screen automatically yet, you still can create your custom collage and set it manually as the current lock screen. We hope that the coming update of Windows Phone 7.8 will include the mechanism to get the same experience of Hello Friends as in the newest OS from Microsoft.

Here’s a picture of the template selection window with miniatures of available templates:

hello-friends-template-sel

If you have any questions or suggestions, please let us know! You can get the latest version 3.0 right here:

WindowsPhone_208x67_blk

Special Thanks go out to the guys at WPCentral.com who made it possible to get that much user feedback!

How to create a Windows Phone Live Tile in the style of the People Hub

How to create a Windows Phone Live Tile in the style of the People Hub

Since Windows Phone 7 Mango you are able to create your own Live Tiles. To be more precisely, you can specify content, titles and images for the front side as well as for the back side. The images can be taken from the web or from the app’s isolated storage. Sometimes it may be necessary to build a Live Tile like the one of the People Hub.

As you can see I’ve created a tile with 9 custom images inside of it. These photos are loaded by a background agent and dynamically merged into one image. I’d like to explain how I did this.

At first, provide a list of images to load:

        private const string FLICKR_LIVE_TILE = "/Shared/ShellContent/flickr_live_tile.jpg";
        private object imageCountLock = new object();
        private const int IMAGES_TO_LOAD = 9;
        private const int IMAGE_DIMENSIONS = 57;
        private static string PhotoLiveTileNavUri = "/MainPage.xaml?list=flickr";
        private static string TwitterLiveTileNavUri = "/MainPage.xaml?list=twitter";

        // Just using the DisplayImage class with an attribut called "ThumbnailImage".
        //The size of the image has to be really small.
        public void UpdateTileImages(IList images)
        {
            WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
            int imageLoadedCount = 0;
            var maxItems = Math.Min(images.Count, IMAGES_TO_LOAD);
            Stream[] streams = new Stream[maxItems];

            webClient.OpenReadCompleted += ((s, e) =>
            {
                lock (imageCountLock)
                {
                    streams[imageLoadedCount] = e.Result;
                    imageLoadedCount++;

                    if (imageLoadedCount == maxItems)
                    {
                        CreateBackgroundImage(streams);
                    }
                    else
                        webClient.OpenReadAsync(new Uri(images[imageLoadedCount].ThumbnailImage, UriKind.Absolute));
                }

            });
            webClient.OpenReadAsync(new Uri(images[imageLoadedCount].ThumbnailImage, UriKind.Absolute));
        }

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Creating a Windows Phone 8 app from Head to Toe – Part 1

Creating a Windows Phone 8 app from Head to Toe – Part 1

I want to write down in a couple of tutorials how to write a Windows Phone 8 app with the new SDK. In these tutorials I don’t want to spend too much lines on explaining C# language characteristics or new features of the SDK. Instead, I would like to focus on the following points:

  • How to start planning a Windows Phone 8 app?
  • How to structure the project?
  • How to get great maintainability for future extensions?
  • How to get clean code?

So how to get started? In my opinion, learning from a complete real-world example is much better than studying small incoherent examples.

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