Category Archives: Uncategorized

Jul 29

Hitting two dice with one tile.

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Microsoft tag with links to appropriate mobile app stores.

Today I am excited to announce the immediate availability of Word Dice for Windows Phone 7 and iPhone. The apps actually came online a few weeks ago but I haven’t had a chance to write-up this article. Feel free to scan the tag above(or click the links below) to start downloading and using WordDice. The primary feature set is the same on both platforms, however there are bells and whistles here and there that differentiate the two. Specifically:

Windows phone 7
  • Full metro color theme integration. Word dice takes full notice if your system color theme settings and adjusts the ascents accordingly.
  • Fun interaction with tiles. You can drag tiles around on the screen as you see fit.
iPhone
  • Believe it or not, Word Dice will use the GPU to ‘animate’ tiles on the screen. What that means is that even as you type, you’ll see your tiles fly out onto the screen. A nifty touch.
  • While you think, tiles ‘float’ freely. Hard to explain! Try it and you’ll see!

I created WordDice.com a few months ago as a way to find words while playing ‘Words with Friends’ on Facebook. The latest version Continue reading →

Jun 15

Changing MainPage.xaml in a Windows Phone application

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Last week I was trying to add some launch page logic to a windows phone application (*word dice* cough cough) where users will see the ‘help page’ the very first time they launch the application and the homepage on every other launch. If there’s any iOS developers out there you would know that is simple enough to do since you just have to initialize and push a different ViewController. However in windows phone Continue reading →

May 11

Mobile application development with a internet redirection server (rinetd).

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Developing for mobile devices can raise some interesting constraints around mobile devices being unable to access a debugging/test service for some reason. Some examples of what I am talking about would include:…

  • Having a mobile device access a guest virtual machine that is inaccessible since it is behind a NAT on its server.
  • Being able to access a ASP.NET application that is running in Visual Studio’s development server.

Fortunately there’s a very nice utility called rinetd that boutell created that you can use to get around these issues. You can get started with rinetd on OSX, Windows and Linux by visiting boutell’s page about rinetd or downloading the source from my mirror… Continue reading →

Apr 24

How to hide Microsoft SkyDrive from the OSX Dock

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Yesterday Microsoft released a pretty big update to SkyDrive that gave all users Dropbox like functionality on Windows and Mac OS X. However for some magical reason, Microsoft decided to ship the OS X client with a very irritating icon in the Dock along with the title bar. Removing the dock icon is surprisingly easy. Keep these instructions close you can do this with all OS X Applications. Here’s what you need to do…
Continue reading →