|
|
I've just released my latest app; Snotify which is a Windows Phone 7.5 application that silences notification sounds based on a schedule. The application will let you set a schedule to turn off notification sounds once a day. It's the perfect application to keep you from waking up at nights due to emails, text messages or toast notifications.
Changing notification sounds requires write access to the registry. Thanks to Heathcliff74 and his WP7 Root Tools SDK, this is now possible if you have a compartible phone.
|
Snotify is available for FREE and can be downloaded here:
Snotify_1_1_0_1155.xap (269.11 kb)
Snotify_1_0_0_1153.xap (267.87 kb)
Now that Microsoft is shutting down the Marketplace for Windows Mobile, I've decided to release the full version of Marathon for free. You can grab it from here:
Marathon 1.4.0.3 Full (WM 6.X)
Marathon for Windows Phone 7.x is still available in a free and a premium version, and will continue to be so. If you haven't tried it out yet you can grab it here.
 |
The latest version of Marathon contains a new Live Tile where you can see your achievements, total distance and your latest result directly on the home screen of your device. There’s also a new voice announcement telling you how many minutes and seconds the last kilometer or mile took. Here's the full list of changes:
|
- A Live Tile containing achievements, total distance and latest result.
- A new pace announcement for the last km or mile.
- A percentage modifier for when your goal is based on track average or a previous result.
- Pace is written as 5:10 for "5 minutes and 10 seconds" rather than 5.16 (5 minutes and 16/100 minutes).
- Any link from the app to www.marathon-mobile.net will include your credentials (so you’ll be logged in automatically).
- Updated a few announcement translations.
- Changed so the system tray (the signal/battery/time bar at the top) is visible.
- Changed the buttons for "Start" and "Resume" to make them more intuitive.
- A few minor bug fixes.
- Performance optimization (increased battery life).
Premium with trial ($1.49):
Free:
I've added a new feature to the Marathon web site, namely the ability to manually enter results. From now on you can add your treadmill results to Marathon and keep all your statistics in the same place. All you have to do is logging on to the webpage and select "Personal -> Manually add result".
There are a lot of apps out there acting as a facade to expose a webpage. Some are just there to ride on the app hype; full of ads and worse functionality then the mobile webpage for the very same site. There are also apps out there doing an excellent job by providing a neat UI and some additional features. For the latter I have a suggestion that could improve your app in a way most mobile sites won't; it's a way to improve the network performance of your app.
I've done some experimenting with how Windows Phone handles HTTP request and come to the conclusion that it likes to cache a lot of things. If you request the same URI twice it'll return a result from the cache, a lot has been written about this on the net and the only way around it seem to be to add a random parameter to the query string. This behavior isn't isolated to either HttpWebRequest or the WebBrowser control, the cache is shared between them and that is what you can take advantage of.
Let's take a "Reddit Reader" app as an example. Unless there's a very good connection, the end user will spend most of his time waiting for that meme or cat picture to load. The image will not start loading before he clicks on the link, so all the time his connection was idle when looking at the previous image was wasted.
But if you (as the author of the app) build a queue in the background and do HttpRequests to cache up the next 5 items, the end user will be a lot more happy when the WebBrowser control returns the result almost immediately.
There's however a little gotcha. The HttpWebRequest will happily cache your pages, but in most cases the user is also interested in 1 or more images. So you'll have to manually parse the page and do requests for these as well.
Here's a simple sample app I've written to show the concept:
CachedWebRequest.zip (16.69 kb)
Please note that I'm not parsing any HTML, so if you'd like to check the performance of images you'll have to write the full URL of an image. Try this and you'll notice that if you use the cache feature the image will appear as soon as the WebBrowser control is set to load the image. If you don't use the cache the image will load normally (note that you'll have to add a random query string parameter if you want to do multiple tests on the same image).
I haven't implemented this in any of my apps, nor have I tried to figure out how long the items will be cached. So if you decide to try it, please let me know how it performs!
I've just released Pingy, my second app for Windows Phone. Its main purpose is to periodically monitor network resources and notify you when something goes wrong. Thanks to the background tasks in Mango it checks the status of your resources every 10 or 30 minute and notifies you through toast notifications and a live tile. It also contains quite a unique feature which lets you run remote PowerShell scripts from your Phone.
Pingy supports three different protocols:
- HTTP(s) for web resources.
- TCP Ping for any other service.
- PowerShell for remote scripts.
Pingy has its own PowerShell script library which lets you update secondary live tiles and send toast notifications based on your requirements. This will let you set any text or image as a live tile, the only limit is your imagination. Pingy uses the built in WS-Management service, so no third party application is required to run remote scripts.
The application is available for free from the marketplace:
Read more about Pingy and the PowerShell library here.
As of today a total of 366 372km has been recorded and uploaded to the Marathon website. Quite a large number, isn't it? To put it into context I've calculated the progress in percentage of the average distance between the earth and the moon. You can see it here.
Uploading data to the webpage is optional, about 17% of the users who have downloaded the Windows Phone 7 app have also registered and uploaded at least 1 result. The most active users are more likely to register and utilize the webpage, but I think it's safe to say that we would be back on earth by now if we count every recording ever made.
Recordings by platform
The Windows Mobile app still beats Windows Phone 7 in number of recordings with a total of 64%. If we only count results from 2011 Windows Phone is ahead by a total of 59%. We can also see that Mango is spreading quickly, over the past month 68% of Windows Phone 7 results were recorded using Marathon 3.0 (which requires Mango).
A positive trend
The number of Marathon users is continuing to grow; as are the amount of data uploaded to the website. Our speed is currently at about 20 000 km/month, but I suspect it'll slow down a bit during the winter in the northern hemisphere. Mars is at its closest point about 55 million km away from earth, so for our next mission we need all the help we can get :).
It’s now been one year since Marathon was made available in the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace; and over two years since the first public release on Windows Mobile! As of today you can also grab the Mango update and enjoy an even smoother user experience with fast app switching and 32bit colors. A lot of features have been added, bugs fixed and performance tuned over the past year. Here are some of the most significant additions:
- Live Tracking - Let your friends follow your progress online in (almost) real time.
- Achievements – A little reward for your hard work.
- Bing Maps – See how you’ve been running on an interactive map.
- Statistics on a km (or mile) basis.
- Backup and restore data using http://www.marathon-mobile.net.
- Voice announcements in all supported languages.
- Automatically pause a recording when you’re standing still.
- A lot of other minor features and tweaks.
The website hosting Marathon has also been updated with a new design and had a few features added. Together the users of Marathon have uploaded more than 29 000 results with a total of over 340 000 km, or 8.7 laps around the world!
So if you still haven’t tried Marathon, now is the time. It’s available in both a free and a full version with trial, so there’s no excuse not to try it out :).
Premium with trial ($1.49):
Free: