A lot of the built in applications have really subtle transitions and effects that really add polish to an existing application. In the process of building a new application I’ve been working on mimicking those controls. The first I’m releasing is the Status Indicator most commonly seen in the email application.
One of the major feature requests I get for To Do Today is for Live Tile functionality, I’ve even received zero reviews because it doesn’t have this functionality (that’s a whole different issue). Live tiles are one of the major selling points for the Windows Phone 7 and a task list management application lends itself to an updating live tile very easily. It’s something I put on my original feature list for version 1.0 before I started building the application, yet after two major updates it hasn’t been added. Why?
Almost all Windows Phone 7 applications at some point will store data on to the phone itself, the approach most developers are using is to serialize an object graph to a file which can at next use be simply deserialized.
I’m proud to announce that the 1.4 update for To Do Today was approved my Microsoft in record time (less than 12 hours), and should be available on yours phones over the next day or so.
Value converters are a really useful part of the xaml binding infrastructure, they work in Windows Phone 7, Silverlight and WPF. As we work on more and more projects in this space we build up a library of useful value converters. I’d like to illustrate some of the ones I use here.