ActiveNick's Big Bald Blog

Xamarin EVOLVE Follow-up: Building Mobile Cross-Platform Geospatial Apps

2013-04-19T16:16:59Z

I spent a few days this week at Xamarin EVOLVE, hanging out with the Xamarin folks, the mobile cross-platform dev community, talking to attendees at our booth and speaking about mobile geospatial development. It was definitely a great event and Xamarin deserves major kudos, both for the event itself, but also for their products and impressive keynote announcements. Xamarin is a partner of Infragistics and it’s certainly an exciting time to be a mobile developer.

As promised during my talk, I’m posting all my session material here, including the slides, demos, and reference links. I had a great time at EVOLVE and I hope to speak there again if/when Xamarin holds another show.

Building Mobile Cross-Platform Geospatial Apps

This session will not reveal why we are on Earth, but it will teach you how to find out where we all are on it. Looking for the user? Just find the phone. Thanks to standard built-in Location Services and hybrid positioning hardware, every modern smartphone knows where it is. In this session, ActiveNick shows you how to build a truly “smart” cross-platform phone application by adding Geospatial Services to it. Using C# and MonoTouch for iOS, the Windows Phone SDK, and Mono for Android, you will learn how to locate the device using the phone GPS and other Location Services, display spatial data on maps, manipulate them with touch gestures, geocode addresses into lat/long pairs, and more. We’ll discuss the various mapping technologies, SDKs and APIs across various mobile platforms, how to tap into geospatial features programmatically with Xamarin tools, and explore how geospatial systems can benefit from mobile services and apps. Location Intelligence is a natural extension of mobility. Come learn how all mobile developers should also be geospatial developers.

Download the session slides here

Download the iOS & Windows Phone demo here

Download the Android demo here. It’s a modified version of the Google Maps Android API v2 demo found on Github here. Make sure to read both readme files in the Zip since you’ll need dependencies from the Github project to make the demo work.

Noteworthy Links

Generate JSON Parsing Classes in C#: http://json2csharp.com
Google Maps

Google Maps Developer Resources: developers.google.com/maps
Google API Console: code.google.com/apis/console
Google Maps SDK for iOS: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/ios
Google Maps Android API v2: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android
Geocoding API: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

OpenStreetMap Wiki: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Nominatim Geocoding Service: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

Bing Maps

Bing Maps Platform Page: www.microsoft.com/maps
Bing Maps Developer Resources: www.microsoft.com/maps/developer-resources.aspx
Bing Maps Management Portal: www.bingmapsportal.com

Esri ArcGIS

Esri ArcGIS Developer Center: developers.arcgis.com
Free Data: www.esri.com/data/free-data

Building iOS Apps with Xamarin and NucliOS

We (Infragistics) launched release 13.1 of all our developer controls yesterday. This includes NucliOS 13.1, our stellar native controls for iOS developers. With NucliOS you get a powerful data & layout grid control, a versatile chart control supporting more than 40 chart types – including the new Pie Chart control – as well radial gauges and rich-text labels.

The good news for C# developers is that NucliOS also ships with full bindings for Xamarin.iOS. With a single package, NucliOS offers the best native iOS controls for developers, whether they build their apps in Objective C with Xcode, or in C# with Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio.

If you’ve never built any apps for iOS or even learned iOS development, this is your chance to get started. Download the free starter edition of Xamarin.iOS here, then download the trial for NucliOS and start building gorgeous iOS apps for iPhone and iPad today.

Here are some links to get you started.

Download a trial version of NucliOS 13.1 here

NucliOS Product Page at Infragistics.com

What’s New in NucliOS 13.1 for iOS Developers

Visit the NucliOS 13.1 page in the Xamarin Component Store here

Creating iOS Apps with Xamarin.iOS and NucliOS – Webinar by Brent Schooley

Download the NucliOS 13.1 Samples Browser for free on your iPhone or iPad from the iTunes App Store here

Until Next Time…

I will be doing a very similar session to my mobile cross-platform geospatial apps talk at Code PaLOUsa, April 25-27 (next week!), in Louisville, KY. Make sure to attend if you’re in the area.

You can also catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:

Prairie DevCon, May 6-7, in Winnipeg, MB
Visual Studio Live!, May 13-16, in Chicago, IL
Philly Code Camp, May 11, in Abington, PA
DevTeach, May 27-31, in Toronto / Mississauga, ON
TechEd North America, June 3-6, in New Orleans, LA – Look for me at the Infragistics booth!
Visual Studio Live!, August 19-23, in Redmond, WA

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

VSLive! Las Vegas Event Recap – A Quintet of Mobile iOS & Windows Phone Dev Talks

2013-04-02T18:04:59Z

I’m exhausted…

I’m still recovering from my days in Vegas last week…

You might say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, but then again you’d get the wrong idea about why I’m exhausted. It probably has something to do with presenting FIVE breakout sessions at Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas at the MGM Grand last week, four of which were presented back-to-back on Thursday. Also to blame was the hotel network which decided to wreak havoc on my mobile push notifications demos for Windows Phone and iOS, and my Windows Phone emulators that decided to crap out on me (I hate Hyper-V), both forcing me into late night debugging sessions while attendees & speakers were partying at Tabu.

All my demos worked out fine in the end, but my sleep patterns suffered the most. Well, almost. The true sufferance came when my back gave out at the Vegas airport on Friday morning, forcing me into an excruciatingly painful travel day aboard connecting flights after my direct flight was cancelled “because the pilot did not feel too well”. Two chiropractor appointments and one deep muscle massage later, I’m still on the road to recovery, but thank goodness for Advil!

Back to my talks. I promised attendees I would post all my session slides and demos, and I’m here to keep my promise. Below is a list of all my talks, along with descriptions, links, slides and zipped demos.

I want to thank all the attendees who came to my talks. Prissy networks and emulators aside, I love getting on stage in front of developers and geek out for an hour or so about cool mobile practices and development techniques. I especially want to thank the attendees who came to my Windows Phone & Speech talk on Thursday morning at 8:00AM. Considering the early hour and the fact this was a last minute replacement session where I stepped in for a speaker who sadly couldn’t make it, you guys are troopers!

Designing Your Windows Phone Apps for Multitasking and Background Processing

It may be called "Windows" Phone, but Microsoft's smartphone operating system does not share its big brother's multitasking model. "Fast and fluid" is the motto to insure the best user experience possible while at the same time optimizing power consumption on the device. Windows Phone may only allow only one application to run in the foreground at a time, but several features were introduced in version 8.0 and 7.5 to allow an application to perform some actions even when it is not the active foreground app. This demo-heavy session will focus on those techniques including scheduled tasks & background agents, playing audio & tracking the user location in the background, and we'll also discuss how Voice-over-IP (VoIP) integrate deeply into the OS for better background processing. You'll also learn about Fast Application Switching & Tombstoning should your application ever get terminated. Learn how to make your application a first-class citizen on Windows Phone and put this session in the foreground of your schedule.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from my Windows Phone talks:

Developer Portal: dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
Developer Blog: blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
Consumer Blog: blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Windows Phone Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
www.dvlup.com by Nokia
Jerry Nixon, Microsoft Developer Evangelist: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg, Microsoft Developer Evangelist: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone: infragistics.com/mobile

Developing with Speech in Windows Phone 8 Apps

Can you hear me now? Move over Siri, here comes an army of speech-enabled mobile applications on Windows Phone. Mobile applications are not always easy to work with due to the small screen and small on-screen keyboard. Using our voice is a natural form of communication amongst humans, and ever since 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’ve been dreaming of computers who can converse with us like HAL9000. Thanks to the new Microsoft SDKs for voice recognition and speech synthesis (aka text-to-speech), we are now several steps closer to this reality. This session explores the development techniques you can use to add voice recognition to your Windows Phone applications, including in-app commands, standard & custom grammars, and voice commands usable outside your app. We’ll also see how your apps can respond to the user via speech synthesis, opening-up a new world of hands-free scenarios. This reality is here, you’ll see actual live demos with speech and you can now learn how to do it.

Download the slides and demos here

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

The trend continues where .NET developers show their hunger for iOS development. This was the SIXTH time I presented this talk to date, and despite the larger keynote room, I once again had a full house. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from my iOS talks:

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Code by SteveZ: www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/stevez
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:
- iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
- Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Modern Apps Live! – Building a Modern iPad App

Co-located with VSLive! Las Vegas, Modern Apps Live! was a novel 3-day event, presented in partnership with Magenic, that brought Development Managers, Software Architects and Development Leads together to learn the latest and greatest techniques in low-cost, high-value application development.

What sets Modern Apps Live! apart is the singular topic focus; sessions build on each other as the conference progresses, leaving you with a holistic understanding of modern applications. Attendees got to dive deep into MyVote, a full-featured polling platform hosted in the cloud with multiple front-ends on Windows 8, Windows Phone and iPad.

In this session I presented a high level overview of how the iPad version of the MyVote client was built, and what were some of the design decisions behind it. Attendees learned how to implement a mobile iPad application that provides a comparable user experience, while leveraging the same back-end code that supports Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Download the slides here

The MyVote application code for all components will be posted as a whole by Magenic. I’ll be sure to update this post once everything is made available.

Additional links for this talk:

Windows Azure Mobile Services for iOS: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-ios
AFNetworking open source library: http://afnetworking.com
TFS on a Mac via Eclipse Integration: http://bit.ly/YRT3Nt
Git-tf: http://gittf.codeplex.com
TestFlight: http://www.testflightapp.com

Building Multi-Platform Mobile Apps with Push Notifications

The best mobile applications don't live in a vacuum. They are augmented by dedicated servers, the Internet and Cloud services. While it's one thing to reach out to server-side services from a mobile application, it's a completely different affair when the tables are turned and the server needs to reach the phone. Enter push notifications. From iOS to Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8, discover how to send push notifications from cloud-hosted services to a mobile app running on a tablet or phone, and learn how to handle those alerts in your mobile app. We'll discuss the various push notification services from Microsoft, Apple and Google, how to leverage them in your mobile applications, how to deal with push scenarios for any given multi-platform app, and we'll also look at platform-specific notifications, like scheduled alerts on iOS and Live Tiles on Windows Phone and Windows 8. The live demos will include a variety of iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps, and also include technical details about Android.

Download the slides and demos here

Additional links for this talk:

Windows Phone Tiles & Notifications: http://bit.ly/Y5axJS

Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training - Push: http://bit.ly/Y5ahut

Windows 8 Tiles, Badges and Notifications: http://bit.ly/YnPOgn
Apple iOS Local and Push Programming Guide: http://bit.ly/X05046
Google Cloud Messaging for Android: http://bit.ly/YnP9vr
Windows Azure Portal: www.WindowsAzure.com

Azure Mobile Services: www.WindowsAzure.com/mobile
Windows 8 Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources/
WP8 Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-wp8/
iOS Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-ios/
Android Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-android/

Until Next Time…

I will be speaking at the next Visual Studio Live! conference at the Hilton in Chicago, May 13-16 2013, as well as the VSLive! Redmond event at the Microsoft Campus on August 19-23. I hope I will see you there.

You can also catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:

Xamarin Evolve, April 14-17, in Austin TX
Code PaLOUsa, April 25-27, in Louisville, KY
Prairie DevCon, May 6-7, in Winnipeg, MB
Philly Code Camp, May 11, in Abington, PA
DevTeach, May 27-31, in Toronto / Mississauga, ON
TechEd North America, June 3-6, in New Orleans, LA – Look for me at the Infragistics booth!

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

iOS Developers Rejoice: More Native UI Controls and More Features in NucliOS 13.1

2013-03-25T13:00:00Z

Are you an iOS developer? Maybe you’re starting to learn how to build apps for the iPhone or iPad and you want some help? Maybe you’ve already published some apps and you want to take your current and future projects to the next level with a killer UI and advanced visualizations? Tired of undocumented, unsupported, feature-poor, buggy Open Source Cocoa controls?

NucliOS is your answer.

Whether you build your iOS apps in Objective C with Xcode or AppCode, or using C# with Xamarin.iOS (aka MonoTouch), NucliOS has the native iOS controls every Apple developer needs. Coming this April in just a few short weeks, NucliOS 13.1 will bring you more controls, more features, more productivity.

Why Does Infragistics Care About iOS Development?

iOS was initially introduced as a platform for consumer devices. As more and more businesses are adopting Bring Your Own Device programs, iPhones and iPads are starting to dominate within the enterprise. With this shift comes a need for corporate applications designed & built for iPhones and especially iPads.

I get to see this shift in technical interest first hand at conferences. Last Fall I started doing a new conference talk titled “iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)” at HDC in Omaha. The talk was an immediate hit. .NET developers are hungry for iOS knowledge. It got scheduled again for Prairie DevCon in Regina, VSLive in Orlando, Dallas Day of .NET, and I’m doing it again this week at VSLive in Vegas, and in May at Prairie DevCon in Winnipeg and VSLive in Chicago. You can even catch the webinar version I recently recorded here.

The Microsoft .NET ecosystem is rich in partners, component vendors and ISVs. The Apple world? Not so much. It’s a world dominated by Open Source developers. A world where the enterprise can’t get the premium components, full documentation, quick start samples and top-notch developer support they expect and need. This is where Infragistics comes into play.

For over two decades, enterprise developers have turned to Infragistics controls for help in building the best in state of the art user interfaces for the Windows platforms and the Web. For the first time in its history, Infragistics introduced in 2012 a suite of native iOS controls named NucliOS, continuing our tradition of excellence and bringing over 20 years of UI controls design experience to Apple iOS developers.

Our controls are designed and engineered with versatility, extensibility, scalability and forward-compatibility in mind. They are fully supported, fully documented, and ship with dozens of samples to get developers up to speed quickly.

The initial release of NucliOS was just a first step for Infragistics in a long journey within the Apple world. Infragistics is committed to the iOS platform, and Apple developers can expect new features and controls from us in 2013 and beyond. As iPhones and iPads keep evolving, users expect richer experiences. The iTunes App Store has more than 750,000 apps and the competition is fierce. Developers need to push the envelope. NucliOS helps developers create more advanced applications in less time, increasing their productivity and lowering their costs and time to market.

What’s New for iOS Developers in NucliOS 13.1?

NucliOS provides the core controls developers need to build high performance, highly interactive iPad & iPhone applications with stunning visuals. The initial NucliOS 2012 release included the two most requested types of controls regardless of developer platform:

an advanced Data & Layout Grid
a set of powerful & versatile Data Charts

In this new 13.1 release, Infragistics is introducing even more new features in these already powerful controls.

Our iOS Grid now supports:

Fixed Columns
Column Resizing & Reordering
Inserting & Deleting Columns
Infinite Scrolling
Filtering Attributes
New Slide Row Options
Better Theming

Our iOS Data Charts control now supports 17 additional chart types, for a total of 39 chart types and more features, striving for full parity with its XAML cousin.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS also sees the introduction of brand new controls, including:

a new Pie Chart control you can easily bind to your data
a powerful and fully configurable light weight high performance Radial Gauge control
the new Rich-Text Label, allowing you to easily display fully formatted text in your apps

We’re also extending the reach of NucliOS on the international scene, with a new localized version for the Japanese market. Japanese iOS developers now benefit from fully translated & localized NucliOS product, samples, help and documentation.

New iOS Control – Pie Chart

Pie Charts are a staple of virtually every report and data visualization dashboard. Thanks to the new Pie Chart control for iOS, you can now easily add simple or exploded pie charts in your iPad and iPhone applications. Connect the Pie Chart to your data with the Data Class Helper, set a customizable threshold for inclusion in the "Other" category, and configure text labels and images that can be displayed within or outside the pie in a manner that avoids overlapping. Users can tap or drill down to view underlying data, explode out a section of the pie, and get information via tooltips using touch gestures.

Key Pie Chart Features

Pie Chart Data Binding & Data Source Helper – To get data into the Pie Chart, we’ve implemented a Helper class that will make it easier to bind data, similarly to the Data Chart & Grid Data Source Helper classes. Developers provide an interface that implements a protocol that the view knows about, and the protocol methods provide the information that the IG Pie Chart needs to display data.
Slice Selection & Slice Explosion – Selected slices use selectedBrush and selectedOutline properties to color the pie slice with distinct colors. Exploded slices are disconnected and drawn at a distance from the origin. This distance is controlled via the explodedRadius property. Slices can be selected or exploded either programmatically or using touch gestures.
Touch Gestures – The NucliOS Pie Chart is optimized for touch interactions on iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad. The Pie Chart supports tap, long press (aka “tap & hold”) and rotate gestures.
“Others” Category – The underlying data for any Pie Chart can often contains small value items, too numerous to display in a significant manner via separate pie slices. For such occasions, the “Others” category allows for automatic aggregation of several data values into a single slice. Use the othersCategoryThreshold to separate which values get their own slice, and which values will get rolled under “Others”.
Styling & Themes – The look & feel of the NucliOS Pie Chart is completely customizable, allowing you to style it to your app design and your brand. Simple properties are exposed to easily style the outlines and brush fill colors of the pie slices, allowing you to use solid colors as well as gradients. Alternatively you can use chart themes to give your pie charts and other charts a consistent and color-coordinated look and feel. Simply set the theme property to one of the predefined themes or create your own.

New iOS Control – Radial Gauge

Make your data visualizations and dashboards more engaging with radial gauges for iOS that show your key performance indicators (KPI) with rich style and interactivity. Create highly configurable, round or semi-round dials and gauges for your information dashboard with the look and feel of a clock, industrial control panel, automotive dashboard or aircraft cockpit. The NucliOS Radial Gauge is powerful yet simple to use. Just drop it in your view and you’re ready to go with the default look & feel. Simply tweak the configuration options to meet whatever custom look you desire in your application.

The iOS Radial Gauge is compatible with the Ignite UI (i.e. HTML5 & jQuery) and XAML (i.e. WPF & Silverlight) versions of the same Radial Gauge, both visually and in features, that Infragistics is introducing on multiple platforms, helping you create a consistent look & feel across platforms.

Key iOS Radial Gauge Features

Fully Configurable Radial Scale – The Radial Gauge control lets you control the Start and End positions of the scale, major and minor tick marks, labels, color ranges and sweep direction. You can create full 360 degree scales, or half circular gauges with 180 degree scales, 90 degrees, 45 degrees or any custom value you want.
Fully Configurable Needle – The Radial Gauge control lets you control various attributes of the needle, including the needle color, length, point, base, and cap. These easy configuration options allow you to create over 50 needle types without the need for any external graphics. The following needle shapes are built-in:
- None
- Rectangle
- Triangle
- Needle
- Trapezoid
- Rectangle With Bulb
- Triangle With Bulb
- Needle With Bulb
- Trapezoid With Bulb

Fully Configurable Backing – The Radial Gauge backing can be configured to display any custom image. You can also control the transparency level of the backing, colors, shape around the gauge edges (fitted or circular), oversweep and corner radius.
Motion Framework Animations Support – The Radial Gauge control supports animated transitions between configuration states. The control gradually animates as it redraws changes to the needle, needle position, scale range, color range and more. You can control the speed of the animations by setting the desired Transition Duration.

New iOS Control – Rich-Text Label

The IGLabel is a Rich Text label that works similarly to the generic UILabel and applies styles to text in a similar fashion that is done when using attributed strings. It is based on Core Text to boost performance and functionality over the generic UILabel.

Key Rich-Text Label Features

Rich Text Attributes – Attributes allow you to adjust text characteristics within the IGLabel, including the font type, bold, italic, and underline characters, text color, kern spacing, text stroke color and width, interaction of text through tap, and more.
Paragraph and Text Styling - Paragraph and text styling options allow the developer to customize the paragraph formatting and layout of the label’s content. This includes word wrapping, clipping, truncating with automatic insertion of ellipsis glyphs, alignment to the left, center, right or justified, margins, paragraph spacing, indentation and more.
Overflow Indicator - The overflow indicator is used to display a custom view in a preset location for when the text overflows the label’s bounds. The most common scenario is to add an overflow indicator at the bottom right of the label when the text is too large to be displayed in the allotted space in the view.
Text Variables – Text variables are used to allow for dynamic text using custom variables to automatically fill in the necessary values when a label is updated.
RegEx – Use Regular Expressions to identify and style text within the IGLabel.

New Features – GridView

The NucliOS Grid is more than your typical tabular grid: it’s a powerful control that can be used either as a data-focused grid for both consumer and business applications, or as a versatile layout tool that allows developers to create compelling user experiences on the iPhone, but especially on the iPad. With this control, developers get the ability to style & template the grid to look like almost anything.

The NucliOS Grid can also be used as a single column list when other important elements need to be shown on the iPad, similarly to the native iOS Mail client, or when the screen real estate is precious, such as is the case in iPhone applications.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS builds on this strong foundation and adds even more features to our native iOS Grid, making it the most ubiquitous UI control for all iPad and iPhone applications.

New GridView Features

Slide Row Options – The NucliOS grid now supports new built-in behaviors to respond to a horizontal sliding gesture (i.e. swipe left / right). Simply set the swipeRowAction property to one of the following options:
- Swipe left or right and a Delete button is displayed (already available in release 2012)
- Swipe left or right and a row will slide to the right
- Swipe left or right and a row will slide to the left
- Swipe left and the row will slide to the left, swipe right and the row will slide to the right
- No action

Column Reordering – Column reordering allows users to rearrange the position of visible columns within their data source helper, by using simple drag and drop techniques. It is also possible to trigger a column move programmatically, without any manual dragging gesture.
Inserting / Deleting Columns – Inserting and deleting columns is very similar to inserting and deleting rows and cells. Methods are now provided for inserting and deleting normal columns using a data source helper.
Fixed Columns – The NucliOS Grid control recognizes two distinct column types, normal and fixed. A normal column is any column that is not pinned in place, while the fixed column feature allow for one or more columns to be frozen / pinned to stay in view on either the left or right side of the grid, while allowing horizontal scrolling of the other columns. New methods are available to specify how many columns to freeze on the left or right of the grid.
Column Resizing – The grid now supports resizing a column by setting the columnResizing property, thus allowing column resizing directly in the UI. You can also toggle column resizing on and off.
Infinite Scrolling – Infinite scrolling allows the grid to scroll the contents of the grid continuously, without the need to scroll back to the top or left most cell. Infinite scrolling is a popular UI paradigm that allows for a more fluid navigation. You can choose to enable infinite scrolling horizontally, vertically, both or none at all.

Filtering Attributes – Filter attributes allow you to apply a customized visual appearance to text matching a filtered text string. This makes it easy for users to find specific keywords or phrases using highlights within a grid that contains a lot of text data, just like you would with a colored marker on paper. You can control the color of the text highlight to insure that the filtered text stands out regardless of your app or brand colors.
Grid Theming – From photo albums and slide shows to movie collections and sales reports, the NucliOS grid can be styled to look like almost anything. As an iOS developer, you benefit from complete styling flexibility within the grid, allowing you to emulate first party iOS apps, match your own brand, or design any custom look & feel desired. Theming is now even easier. New to this release, you can create your styles in one place and toggle between multiple styles very easily. You can create your own themes, which consist of multiple properties that control various styling attributes such as font, background color, text color and more.

New Features – ChartView

The initial release of NucliOS introduced a powerful iOS control that lets you render charts with hundreds of thousands of data points that are capable of millisecond updates, sparing nothing to achieve blazing speed. Support for the Motion Framework™ within the Data Chart control allows developers to build highly engaging visualizations and provide smooth playback of changes in data over time, giving life to your data through fluid animations.

New Chart Series

Release 13.1 of NucliOS introduces 17 new chart types in the ChartView control, enabling you to easily implement heavy-duty data visualization and analysis on large volumes of data with high performance in iPad and iPhone applications.

The NucliOS ChartView control now supports a total of 39 chart types, including the following new chart series introduced in release 13.1:

Stacked Chart Category Series – ChartView now supports a whole range of stacked series for every day scenarios.
- Stacked Area Series
- Stacked Bar Series
- Stacked Column Series
- Stacked Line Series
- Stacked Spline Area Series
- Stacked Spline Series
- Stacked 100 Area Series
- Stacked 100 Bar Series
- Stacked 100 Column Series
- Stacked 100 Line Series
- Stacked 100 Spline Area Series
- Stacked 100 Spline Series

Scientific Charts – From wind patterns to performance metrics, Polar & Radial series can expose new insights in many scientific data sets. The new scientific charts supported include:
- Polar Spline Area Series
- Polar Spline Series
- Radial Area Series

Chart Financial Series & Financial Indicators – Financial charting scenarios were already supported for both Candlestick and OHLC bar charts. Release 13.1 now introduces 29 new financial indicators, including:
- Bollinger Band Overlay
- Bollinger Band Width Indicator
- Chaikin Oscillator Indicator
- Chaikin Volatility Indicator
- Commodity Channel Index Indicator
- Detrended Price Oscillator Indicator
- Ease Of Movement Indicator
- Fast Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
- Force Index Indicator
- Full Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
- Market Facilitation Index Indicator
- Mass Index Indicator
- Median Price Indicator
- Money Flow Index Indicator
- Moving Average Convergence Divergence Indicator
- Negative Volume Index Indicator
- On Balance Volume Indicator
- Percentage Price Oscillator Indicator
- Percentage Volume Oscillator Indicator
- Positive Volume Index Indicator
- Price Channel Overlay
- Rate of Change and Momentum Indicator
- Relative Strength Index Indicator
- Slow Stochastic Oscillator Indicator
- Standard Deviation Indicator
- StochRSI Indicator
- TRIX Indicator
- Ultimate Oscillator Indicator
- Weighted Close Indicator
- Williams Percent Range Indicator

Chart Scatter Series: Also known as Scatter Plots or scattergraph, you can benefit from this type of mathematical diagram in your iOS apps using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. You can also enable trend lines to facilitate data analysis. The new scatter types supported include:
- Scatter Line Series
- Scatter Spline Series

The iOS data chart control is designed for modularity using chart series. Multiple chart series are supported to create composite charts for better data comparisons on the same surface.

New Chart Features

Value Overlay – A Value Overlay uses the value property to bind a numeric value to display as a line superimposed over other types of series in order to highlight important values such as a data set’s mean, median, mode etc…. The Value Overlay uses either the horizontal or the vertical axis, as a reference, when bound to an IGNumericXAxis and IGNumericYAxis respectively, as a line segment emanating from the center of the chart when bound to an IGNumericAngleAxis, or a circle when bound to IGNumericRadiusAxis.

Support for Gradients – Enhance the look of all your charts thanks to added support for gradients. Gradients are exposed by a new brush type called IGGradientBrush, and we’re also introducing new themes specifically showcasing the use of gradients. Take a look at the various screenshots in this post to see the gradient support across many of our charts types.

Xamarin Support for iOS Development in C#

Objective C is the default language for iOS development. It’s been used to developer hundreds of thousands of applications for the iPhone and iPad. However, not all developers are ready to learn Objective C. We all have to juggle multiple technologies, languages and frameworks in our toolset. It’s perfectly normal to look for opportunities to reuse existing skills when jumping into a new environment.

iOS developers can use NucliOS controls in native iOS projects built with Objective C and Xcode, and we equally provide bindings to use all our controls within C# projects built with Xamarin.iOS (formerly known as MonoTouch), a product from Infragistics partner Xamarin. Xamarin’s products let developers write their apps entirely in C# and share your code on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac, using either Microsoft Visual Studio or Xamarin’s own IDE – Xamarin Studio.

Release 13.1 of NucliOS includes final Xamarin.iOS bindings for all five iOS controls, complete with API documentation, allowing you to build native iOS applications using C#.

Learning iOS Development and NucliOS

if you’re new to iOS development and/or NucliOS, here are a few quick references to help you get started:

	iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal) Webinar by Nick Landry
	Going Native: How to Develop Native iOS Applications with NucliOS 2012 Webinar by Nick Landry and Brent Schooley
	Creating iOS Applications using C# with Xamarin.iOS Webinar by Brent Schooley
	Getting Started using NUCLiOS with MonoTouch Part 1: IGChartView Technical Blog Post by Brent Schooley
	Code by SteveZ Technical Blog series by Steve Zaharuk, NucliOS Lead Product Architect, covering topics like: - Moving from C# to Objective-C - Creating a Bookshelf for your iOS App - Creating a Netflix Style iOS Grid - Using TFS on a Mac - Creating Nightly Builds of Your iOS Projects from TFS - Creating Your own iOS Framework - and much more!

Let Us Know About Your Apps

NucliOS 13.1 is an exciting release. Our grid control got better with even more data manipulation and layout features. We already had the most powerful & versatile charts on iOS, and we made them better, with more chart types, more features, covering more scenarios, regardless of your industry or app consumer target. Not stopping there, we introduced new controls with the Pie Chart, Radial Gauges and Rich-Text Label.

So when can you get this awesome release? Soon! NucliOS 13.1 is scheduled to be release in mind-April in just a few weeks. If you can’t wait to get your hands on our new iOS controls detailed above, drop me an email me at activenick@infragistics.com, tell me what control and/or feature you really want to work with now and I just may give you early access.

NucliOS is truly THE PREMIER suite of native iOS controls for professional app developers, enterprise developers, indie developers, enthusiasts and weekend warriors. We already started work on our next release coming out later this year. Expect more features in existing controls, more chart types, entirely new controls, more samples, more of everything. If there are specific controls you'd like us to prioritize, be sure to let us know on the NUCLiOS forums.

Get started today! Download the NUCLiOS trial on your Mac, fire up Xcode and take your iOS apps to the next level. When you end up publishing cool new apps based on NucliOS, make sure to let us know, we would love to showcase your work on our website.

Take our controls for a spin on your iPhone or iPad and try the NUCLiOS Samples Browser by downloading it from the Apple App Store here. This free browser app currently showcases our grid and charts initially released in October 2012. We’ll be publishing an updated version at release time in mid-April so you can play with all the new controls and features.

We value your feedback. Make sure to post your comments, feedback and questions on the NUCLiOS forums. You can also follow @infragistics on Twitter. As the product manager for NUCLiOS, you can reach me at activenick@infragistics .com or on Twitter via @ActiveNick.

What’s New in NetAdvantage for WPF & Silverlight 13.1

2013-03-25T13:00:00Z

It was barely more than a year ago that I joined Infragistics as Senior Product Manager, and here I am, already writing about a third exciting release since I started working here. Signed, sealed & delivered. Well, almost delivered. The release is done and our official launch is in mid-April. I’m here today to tell you more about all the XAML goodness in this release. Our Engineering, Quality Engineering and product Guidance teams have been hard at work for the past 6 months, and this release doesn’t disappoint.

This post applies to all users of our NetAdvantage for WPF and NetAdvantage for Silverlight products. Both products benefit from the changes and new features described since our Infragistics Shared XAML strategy allows us to target both WPF and Silverlight with the same XAML controls.

If you’re an enterprise developer building applications with WPF and/or Silverlight and haven’t had a chance to try our controls yet, read on to see all the new reasons for adopting our controls, and download a free & fully-supported evaluation version: WPF | Silverlight.

If you haven’t had a chance to review everything we added in our 12.2 XAML controls, you can catch-up and read the 12.2 Line of Business controls post by my colleague Brian Lagunas and my post on 12.2 Data Visualization controls.

13.1 XAML In a Nutshell

So what’s new in terms of XAML controls for WPF and Silverlight in this release? Here’s the skinny:

Doughnut Chart: New control!
Geographic Map: New features including support for Esri geographic imagery and server-side data tiles, support for multiple map imagery layers, and more
Data Chart: New advanced features and series, allowing developers to show even more data points in a single chart, and interact with those points more easily using the mouse and touch gestures
Pie Chart: New feature to add a hole in the middle
Treemap Chart: New built-in tooltip support
Syntax Editor: New features added, including SQL parsing, visible whitespace, current line highlight, ruler margin and more
WPF Ribbon: Backstage feature added
Gantt Chart: New feature to save projects to XML
Menu/Context Menu: Support for MVVM
Radial Gauge: Preview version of a newer, easier to use Radial Gauge control

I’m sure you’re curious to know more about the details? Keep on reading…

Hello GIS Developers!

Geographic Information Systems (aka Geospatial Information Systems, or GIS) are software systems designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage, and present all types of geographical data. Hardware peripherals and devices are often used, but the core of GIS lies in software. In the simplest terms, GIS is the merging of cartography, statistical analysis, and database technology.

GIS developers specialize in the design and development of GIS software. Just like enterprise developers, GIS developers rely on external libraries, cloud services and custom controls to augment their productivity and reach new heights in their applications. One such key component of every GIS developer is a full-featured map control.

With the xamGeographicMap control for WPF and Silverlight developers, our goal is to continue to deliver a rich thematic mapping solution to our customers. Redesigned from the ground up based on our Data Chart foundation, the xamGeographicMap shipped a year ago in release 12.1, providing powerful geospatial development capabilities, allowing you to display multiple geographic data series on top of mapping imagery. In release 13.1, we’re taking the mapping game to the next level, allowing you to mix & match tile imagery, server-side data tiles and client-side data layers.

Infragistics Teams-Up with Esri

Thanks to a new partnership between Infragistics and Esri, developers can now benefit from new advanced features in the Geographic Map control normally reserved for dedicated geospatial developers, such as new geographic imagery sources, server-side data tiles, and more. The result is a uniquely powerful geographic map control capable of displaying both client-side and server-side data on various sources of imagery, enabling very advanced geospatial scenarios.

Esri is the leading worldwide supplier of GIS software and geodatabase management applications that function as an integral component in nearly every type of organization.

New xamGeographicMap Features

The rundown of new features in the xamGeographicMap includes:

New Geographic Map Series

Geographic Proportional Symbol Series
Geographic Tile Series
High Density Geographic Scatter Series (updated CTP)

New Geographic Map Features

Support for multiple layers of tile imagery in addition to the baseline tiles via the new Geographic Tile Series
New built-in support for all Esri ArcGIS 256x256 Mercator geographic imagery tiles
Simplified API to support various geographic imagery providers, including:
- OpenStreetMap
- Bing Maps
- Esri ArcGIS
- Cloudmade maps
Brand-new Geographic Map Browser sample

Geographic Proportional Symbol Series

Similar to the Scatter Area Map Series, the Proportional Symbol Series allows you to show thousands of data points on a map where symbols of different sizes and colors are used to represent geospatial data associated with different areas or locations within the map. This feature was introduced as a preview last year and we are now pleased to release officially as part of the product in 13.1.

Geographic Tile Series and Multiple Tile Layers

Similar to the baseline imagery of the control, the Geographic Tile Series allows developers to overlay multiple layers of geographic imagery, create cutouts to see underlying imagery or use transparency to see through one layer of imagery and exposing the layer underneath. This new feature allows GIS developers to load multiple tile data layers from Esri ArcGIS sources within the Geographic Map control. You can also control the opacity of one layer to see through to the underlying imagery from another layer.

High Density Geographic Scatter Series (updated CTP)

A High Density Geographic Scatter Series in the Geographic Map control can be used to show millions of data points without sacrificing performance. The map plot area with more densely populated data points are represented by condensed color pixels and loosely distributed data points are represented by pixels of another color. Options are available to control the palette of colors used and to change the min/max heat properties of the series in order to adjust how heat colors are mapped.

The HD Geographic Scatter series was made available as a CTP feature in release 12.2, and we are now providing you with an updated CTP in release 13.1, which includes multiple stability and performance improvements. As a preview feature, be sure to try it and take it out for a spin. Give us your feedback so we can address it before we release it later this year.

Support for Esri ArcGIS Imagery

Developers can now use Esri tile sets within the Geographic Map control. Imagery sets based on Mercator projections and tiles of 256x256 pixels in size are supported and are compatible with the tile sets from the other supported providers, such as OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps and Cloudmade. Other tile sizes and projections are not yet supported.

The screenshot above illustrates an example of an Esri overlay containing the Soil Survey Geographic (SSURGO) layered on top of Bing Maps road imagery. Another geographic proportional symbol series layer displays select major cities based on population size. This demonstrates the power of the xamGeographicMap control by combining commercial imagery from Bing Maps, server-side data tiles from Esri ArcGIS and client-side data bound to the application code.

Simplified Geographic Imagery Providers API

The Geographic Map control supports a simplified API to use the various geographic imagery providers. Instead of writing extensive code to load the proper geographic imagery, developers need only set a few properties to display tiles from OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, Esri ArcGIS, and Cloudmade maps either as the baseline imagery or as part of a Geographic Tile Series.

New Geographic Map Browser

In addition to the Silverlight Samples Browser and WPF Samples Browser, Infragistics is introducing a new standalone Geographic Map Browser sample project that lets you experiment with the capabilities of the XAML Geographic Map at runtime. The standalone Geographic Map Browser ships with full source code for you to explore, and includes the following features:

Over 55 geographic tile imagery options for the baseline map and additional Geographic Tile Series layers, from various providers like OpenStreetMap, Bing Maps, Esri ArcGIS, Cloudmade and MapQuest
Additional Geographic Tile Series that can be overlaid on top of baseline map imagery or as composite of multiple tiles from different imagery sources
Navigation pane with pan & zoom controls
Location coordinates pane with latitude and longitude of the mouse cursor
Overview + Detail (OPD, aka “Mini Map”) panel to see your current zoom level, pan the map, change the zoom slider as well as toggle between Drag/Pan or Drag/Zoom modes
Support for built-in geographic series with configurable spatial data, including:
- Country Shape Files (using the Geographic Shape series)
- Sample Cities and Population Levels (using Geographic Proportional Symbol series)
- Earthquakes (using Geographic Proportional Symbol series)
- U.S. Airline Traffic (featuring the Infragistics Motion Framework)
- Precipitation measurements from U.S. weather stations (using the Geographic Scatter Area series)

The following screenshots illustrate some of the great features of the Geographic Map Browser and the xamGeographicMap control itself.

The Best Data Charts Get Better

The Data Chart is Infragistics’ star control in our suite of Data Visualization controls. The NetAdvantage xamDataChart is already the most powerful XAML charts & graphs control for your custom WPF or Silverlight applications. With over 50 supported chart types, over a dozen built-in trend lines, dozens of financial indicators, and the ability to customize the interactions and style the charts to any look & feel, this already a very mature control in use in thousands of applications today.

Release 13.1 sees the introduction of new features in the Data Chart to improve the experience as to how users interact with their data in their chart – using the mouse or touch gestures. We also continue to strive for the best performance possible, making the fastest XAML chart on the market even faster.

Beyond the new xamDataChart control features, we’re also introducing a brand new Doughnut Chart control, and new features in the Pie Chart and Treemap controls.

New Doughnut Chart Control

The Doughnut Chart – just like the Pie Chart – is primarily used to show statistics expressed in percentages. Both consist of a circular area divided into sections, where each section has an arc length proportional to its underlying data value. Both are used for representing categorical data, are most effective when there are only a few categories, and when each category makes up a relatively large percentage of the data as a whole.

The primary difference between the Pie Chart and the Doughnut Chart is that the latter has a “hollow” or “empty” center, and will typically display multiple series. A given data series is represented by a ring that is drawn around the “hole” and the data in any given ring totals 100%. These rings are displayed in a concentric pattern where each ring representing a data series, either independent from one another or linked via a hierarchy. The sections that make up each ring may differ in size or each section within a ring may be the same size.

Key Features of the Doughnut Chart

Multiple Ring Series & Data-Binding – The Doughnut Chart supports one or more rings surrounding a hollow or empty center. The center may either be a “blank circle” or may contain a label. Each ring can either represent a separate data series that you data-bind to a collection via the ItemSource property, or can be a ring within a parent-child hierarchy. Support for hierarchical data rings is a CTP feature in this release.
Configurable Inner Radius – The inner radius of the Doughnut Chart center is configurable, allowing the developer to select the center as an object and extend the boundary or set the inner radius via a property setting.
Slice / Section Labeling – The Doughnut Chart allows developers to control how each slice or section is labeled. Options are available to automatically select how the labels are displayed inside or outside of the chart, or using the BestFit method.
Legend Support – The Doughnut Chart supports the automatic display of a legend which identifies each series displayed as a data ring, as well as each slice / section within a data ring. The legend can be configured and docked to any of the chart’s corners or borders.
Slice Selection & Slice Explosion – Allow users to select slices and change the color of selected slices. Exploded slices are disconnected and drawn at a distance from the origin. This distance is controlled via a configurable property. Slices can be selected or exploded either programmatically or using touch & mouse gestures.
“Others” Category – The underlying data for any Doughnut Chart can often contains small value items, too numerous to display in a significant manner via separate slices. For such occasions, the “Others” category allows for automatic aggregation of several data values into a single slice. Developers can set the OthersCategoryThreshold property to separate which values get their own slice, and which values will get rolled under “Others”.
Styling & Themes – The look & feel of the Doughnut Chart is completely customizable, allowing you to style it to your app design and your brand. Simple properties are exposed to easily style the outlines and brush fill colors of the pie slices, allowing you to use solid colors as well as gradients. Alternatively you can use chart themes to give your pie charts and other charts a consistent and color-coordinated look and feel. Simply set the theme property to one of the predefined themes or create your own.

New Pie Chart Features

What’s the difference between a Pie Chart and a Doughnut Chart that only has one series of data? The hole. Period. Some customers have been requesting the ability to insert a hole in the pie chart. You asked, we delivered. You can now turn a Pie Chart into what visually looks like a single-series Doughnut Chart by setting the new InnerExtent property to a positive value. Or you can turn a single-series Doughnut Chart into a Pie Chart by setting the InnerExtent property to zero.

It’s mostly a cosmetic feature, but if you’ve been using Pie Charts all along in your applications and you’ve been missing the hole in them, you can now dig one in without replacing any controls.

New Data Chart Interaction Features

The Data Chart control supports new interactions you can activate when users hover over chart data series using the mouse or touch gestures. These hover interactions can display crosshairs or bar/column highlights that can snap to actual data points. You can also attach tooltips to these hover interactions and lock them on crosshairs or to axes. An image may be worth a thousand words, but you have to see this feature in action to truly appreciate it.

New High Density Scatter Series

A high density scatter series in the Data Chart control can be used to bind and show scatter data ranging from thousands to millions of data points without sacrificing performance. Developers can change the series resolution in order to adjust the performance level of rendering when dealing with massive amounts of data points in the chart. This control was made available as a CTP feature in release 12.1, and now ships as a final RTM feature in release 13.1.

Data Chart Performance Optimization

At Infragistics, we always strives to achieve better performance in our controls. The Data Chart is a real work horse capable of displaying millions of data points in real-time with refresh rates measured in a few milliseconds. When we do identify bottle necks or fringe scenarios where performance can be improved, we introduce new techniques to optimize performance. Release 13.1 of the Data Chart does feature improved performance compared to prior releases thanks to some of those optimization techniques.

New Simplified Treemap Tooltips

The Treemap control is a key component for advanced data visualization dashboards. It lets you show users the relative weighting of data points at more than one level, supporting strip, squarified and slice and dice algorithms. The sheer amount of data you can display in a Treemap can sometimes make it harder to read, and this is where tooltips come into play. Adding tooltips to our Treemap control was always supported but required a certain amount of custom application code. The new Treemap control in release 13.1 introduces the new TooltipStyle, TooltipContentTemplate and TooltipMemberPath properties to let developers display and customize tooltips with no effort at all.

New Syntax Editor Features

We first introduced the xamSyntaxEditor in v12.2, and since then it has been getting even more love. The XamSyntaxEditor is a highly customizable text editing control that provides syntax highlighting and editing behaviors much like the Visual Studio code editor. The XamSyntaxEditor is provided in both WPF and Silverlight versions with an API that is common across both platforms, enabling you to incorporate code editing capabilities into your cross platform applications. In this latest release, the xamSyntaxEditor received even more features to give your users more options for authoring their code documents.

Transact-SQL Language support

The xamSyntaxEditor has provided language support for C#, VB, and PlainText since its release. The xamSyntaxEditor now supports a subset of the T-SQL language to give visual cues, such as colorization, to the user on how the text is being interpreted so that comments, keywords, and language specific entities can be easily differentiated. With support for over 26 different statements, the xamSyntaxEditor can handle the most commonly used SQL statements.

Visible whitespace

Some users may wish to show hidden formatting symbols so that they can clearly see spaces, tabs, and other white space characters. With this latest release of the xamSyntaxEditor, you can now enable the visible whitespace property to have the editor visualize spaces, tabs, and word wrap indicators.

Current Line highlight

When editing and navigating a large document with a lot of text, it can sometime be difficult to keep track of the line you are editing. To help alleviate this issue, we introduced a new feature which allows you to provide a highlight for the current line that contains the caret. You can customize the highlight by modifying the visibility, background brush, and border brush.

Ruler Margin

Losing the current line you are editing is longer a problem when editing large documents with lots of text, but what about keeping track of the character position. It is still possible to lose track of the current character position of the caret. Now, by setting a single property, you can enable the new ruler margin to display a character position ruler at the top edge of each view, and highlight the current caret position. You can easily customize the color of the caret indicator to match the theme of your application.

WPF Ribbon gets the Backstage

Our WPF XamRibbon control received a highly request feature in 13.1 that the Silverlight brother has had for a while now. The XamRibbon now ships with the ever popular Microsoft Office Application Menu 2010, aka “Backstage”. If you have ever used any Microsoft Office product, then you already know what the backstage menu is. If not, let me explain it to you. The xamRibbon contains buttons, menu items, and other tools that allow you to perform actions on a view. While the backstage menu lets you have menu items and tools to do something to a view. The backstage can be used to display controls, and invoke actions on a view like save and print. The backstage can also provide a list of recent documents, access to application options, and actions to exit an application.

XamMenu/XamContextMenu MVVM support

Do you use the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) design pattern to develop your applications? Have you been waiting patiently while we added ICommand support to our xamMenu and xamContextMenu? Well, your wait is over! We have improved our xamMenu and xamContextMenu to support the ICommand interface. This allows a developer to data bind a command that is defined in a ViewModel to the Command property that has been added to the xamMenu and xamContentMenu items. As you would expect, we also provide a CommandParameter property for you to pass parameters to your command implementation.

XamGantt save project to XML

One of the coolest features of our xamGantt control is the ability to load a Microsoft Project XML file directly into the xamGantt control. Now this feature becomes even more powerful with the added ability to save the xamGantt project data (i.e. the calendars, resources and tasks) to an xml file that follows the MS Project 2010 xml file format. This does not assume round tripping a Microsoft Project XML file. For example; if you used the LoadFromProjectXml method to load a Microsoft Project XML file into the xamGantt, made changes to the project, and then saved the project data using the new SaveAsProjectXml method, the original file would be overwritten and some information could potentially be lost/changed based on the things we support (e.g. we don't support task types, per task/resource calendars, wbs outline codes, empty rows, timephase data, etc.). If you are creating your data and saving your data from within the xamGantt control exclusively, then you have no worries about potentially losing data during the translation process.

Preview of the New Radial Gauge Control

Infragistics is introducing a new Radial Gauge control available on multiple platforms, including WPF, Silverlight, HTML5 & jQuery (packaged with Ignite UI controls) and iOS (packaged with NucliOS controls). The xamRadialGauge is a preview of the XAML version of this new control available to WPF and Silverlight developers, and is compatible with the Ignite UI and NucliOS versions of the Radial Gauge, both visually and in features. This new Radial Gauge is powerful yet simple to use. Just drop it on your page and you’re ready to go with the default look & feel. Simply tweak the configuration options to your liking to meet whatever custom look you desire in your application.

Key Features

Fully Configurable Radial Scale – The Radial Gauge control lets you control the Start and End positions of the scale, major and minor tick marks, labels, color ranges and sweep direction. You can create full 360 degree scales, or half circular gauges with 180 degree scales, 90 degrees, 45 degrees or any custom value you want.
Fully Configurable Needle – The Radial Gauge control lets you control various attributes of the needle, including the needle color, length, point, base, and cap. The following needle shapes are built-in:
- None
- Rectangle
- Triangle
- Needle
- Trapezoid
- Rectangle With Bulb
- Triangle With Bulb
- Needle With Bulb
- Trapezoid With Bulb
Fully Configurable Backing – The Radial Gauge backing can be configured to display any custom image. You can also control the transparency level of the backing, colors, shape around the gauge edges (fitted or circular), oversweep and corner radius.
Motion Framework Animations Support – The Radial Gauge control supports animated transitions between configuration states. The control gradually animates as it redraws changes to the needle, needle position, scale range, color range and more. You can control the speed of the animations by setting the desired Transition Duration.

Compatibility Notes

The new xamRadialGauge is currently introduced as a preview control (CTP) and will eventually replace the existing xamRadialGauge that was already available in release 12.2 and prior releases.
The current xamRadialGauge is still available in release 13.1. This current xamRadialGauge will eventually be deprecated in an upcoming release and replaced with this new one.
The new xamRadialGauge CTP API is NOT compatible with the current xamRadialGauge API.

Release 13.1 Looks Awesome! When Can I Get it?

There’s more coming since I can’t cover every single new feature, there’s too many of them. As you an see by now, release 13.1 of NetAdvantage for WPF and NetAdvantage for Silverlight is filled to the brim with new controls and new features. Whether you’re a corporate developer building intranet applications for your workforce, an ISV developer writing software for consumers worldwide, or an independent developer looking to create the next big thing, we have the controls to make you more productive and take your applications to the next level.

If you are not using our WPF controls yet, remember that a free evaluation download is only a click away (click here for the Silverlight download).

If you can’t wait to get your hands on the XAML 13.1 controls outlined here, drop me an email me at activenick@infragistics.com or my fellow XAML LOB Product Manager Brian Lagunas at blagunas@infragistics.com, tell us what control and/or feature you really want to work with now and we just may give you early access.

If you have ideas about new features we should bring to our controls, important issues we need to fix or even brand new controls you’d like us to introduce, please let us know. Follow and engage with us on Twitter via @infragistics. You can also follow and contact me directly on Twitter at @ActiveNick, and Brian Lagunas at @brianlagunas. Also make sure to connect with our various teams via our Community Forms where you can interact with Infragistics engineers and also other customers.

Lastly, when you do build something cool with our controls, please make sure to let us know, we always love to hear from you.

What’s New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers

2013-03-07T17:13:02Z

Another one of my popular conference talks is now available as an on-demand webinar! Excited?

Who is this webinar for?

You can approach this webinar from many different perspectives, depending on whether you are a:

.NET Developer: You already know Visual Studio, C# and/or VB.NET, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Silverlight or WPF. You’re now ready to make the jump into the world of mobile development. Windows Phone is a natural transition as your current skillset translates very easily to this platform.
Windows Phone Developer: You’re already familiar with Windows Phone 7.x but maybe you haven’t had a chance to explore the new consumer and developer features in Windows Phone 8. This webinar is a great way to get started on your ramp-up.
Mobile Developer: You already know mobile development on iOS, Android or maybe jQuery Mobile? Windows Phone is a platform that is definitely worth exploring. The market share may be small today but it is growing fast, especially given the similarities between Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Windows Store apps. This webinar does go over some of the reasons why you should care about Windows Phone too.

What is covered in the webinar?

In this session I discuss how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and hybrid HTML5 apps (i.e. PhoneGap). We look at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the Windows Store is at, and what the opportunity is for you as a mobile developer.

I present a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dive into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, what the upgrade story is for WP 7.5 devices, and explore some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs, Nokia Maps control and more.

Watch the Webinar Video

The webinar video is available via GotToWebinar. Free registration is required if you did not register for this specific webinar before. You can access it with the video image link below:

Download the Webinar Materials

The webinar slides and demo are available using the links below:

Download the webinar slides here
Download the webinar Text-to-Speech demo project here (with links to other demos)
Download the final app version of the Text-to-Speech demo for free from the Windows Phone Store: talk2me
Other demos I showed can be found in the Windows Phone Developer Portal at:

Noteworthy Links

Windows Phone Developer Portal: dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
Windows Phone Developer Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/
Windows Phone Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile

Interested in iOS Development?

Windows Phone is a great platform, but you can’t really call yourself a mobile developer until you’ve learned about other mobile platforms, especially when it comes to iOS development. Fortunately, we have another webinar for you!

More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This webinar is targeted at developers who know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#.

Watch the webinar here: iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this webinar, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick. Also make sure to let me know what other topics you’d like to see in future webinars.

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

2013-02-28T22:43:53Z

One of my most popular conference talks is now available as an on-demand webinar!

Who is this webinar for?

More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This session is targeted at developers who know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#.

What is covered in the webinar?

We look at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provide a quick intro to the Apple world. I present everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we build our first simple iOS project for the iPhone. I make several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we take a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

If you’ve always wanted to take a look at iOS development, this is the webinar to get you started.

Watch the Webinar Video

The webinar video is available on YouTube. You can start it with the video image link below:

Download the Materials

The webinar slides and demo are available using the links below:

Noteworthy Links

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:
- iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
- Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Learn More About NucliOS

I mentioned NucliOS only briefly in this webinar. To learn more about our native iOS controls, make sure to watch our NucliOS launch webinar from a couple months ago here.

To try the NucliOS Samples Browser app on your iPhone or iPad, download it from the iTunes App Store here.

Dallas Day of .NET Event Recap: iOS Development & Data Visualization

2013-02-11T22:50:37Z

I just came back from Dallas where I spent a few days at the Dallas Day of .NET. I’d like to thank the attendees who attended my two talks on iOS Development and Designing Data Visualizations. It’s always great to hang out with the developer community in various cities and I also want to thank all the attendees who stopped by the Infragistics booth.

As promised during my talks, you will find below all the session material, including slides & demos. If you want to attend some of my talks in the coming months, I’m already scheduled for the following conferences & events:

March 3rd – Stamford, CT: Fairfield Westchester .Net User Group at the UConn Campus
March 25-29 – Las Vegas, NV: Visual Studio Live! at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino
April 25-27 – Louisville, KY: Code PaLOUsa at the Louisville Marriott Downtown
May 6-7 – Winnipeg, MB: Prairie Dev Con at the Viscount Gort Ramada Hotel
May 13-16 – Chicago, IL: Visual Studio Live! at the Hilton Chicago

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

This session is quickly becoming one of my most popular talks. More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:
- iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
- Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Designing Data Visualization Dashboards

This talk from the “Executive Track” was focused on data visualization design principles. I started with a discussion on just what is data visualization, why should we care, and what makes for effective visualizations. I presented examples of noteworthy visualizations including electoral maps and the periodic table of the elements, as well as several live dashboards. We looked at the various attributes of data visualization dashboards, the UI capabilities, the widgets and the functional capabilities. I then explored the various steps to design beautiful visualizations and the many paths you can take to build those visualizations into dashboards. Lastly, I dove into the importance of maps in data visualizations and showed a live sample demo of a Twitter map built in WPF.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice), by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, 2nd edition
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, by Stephen Few
Designing Data Visualizations, by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
ReportPlus dashboard building app for iPad: http://bit.ly/igrplus
Sample Dashboards from Infragistics

ActiveNick’s 2012 Year in Review and Predictions for 2013

2013-01-02T14:00:00Z

Every January 1st for the past 9 years, I’ve been getting an email from Microsoft titled “Congratulations 20YY Microsoft MVP!” ( enum YY {Max = 13, Min = 05}; ) where I have the honor and privilege of being re-awarded as Microsoft MVP for Windows Phone Development. This is an awesome way to start the year and 2012 was no exception. It’s been an awesome year in the Windows Phone community and I love that I was able to take a more active part in it this year. I just received my 9th such email yesterday on January 1st 2013 (yay me!) but I’d like to take a look back at 2012 and reflect on some influential moments.

2012 was indeed a great year for me and for Infragistics, and I hope it was for you too. Allow me to indulge in a little retrospective as I contemplate all that transpired in what was supposed to be the last year of our existence. Since the Mayans were (thankfully) wrong about their predictions, I’ll try to offer my own for 2013.

New Job, New Responsibilities, New Products

Shortly after that MVP award announcement in 2012 came more great news: I accepted an offer to work at Infragistics and I joined this awesome company as Senior Product Manager for Mobile & Data Visualization Developer Tools. I joined up with old buddies Jason Beres (who is my new boss) and Ambrose Little, and met many new folks who have become good friends, like Brent Schooley, Brian Lagunas and many others. It was a weird feeling to leave the world of consulting services after 16 of my 20+ years career, but in retrospect, that was the best thing I’ve ever done. 11+ months later I still come to work with a huge smile on my face and I this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my professional career.

Being a Product Manager at Infragistics is a dual role. Not only am I the owner for several products, I also have community responsibilities to write, blog, tweet and speak at events. After several years on hiatus as a blogger, I relaunched “ActiveNick’s Big Bald Blog”, discussing mobility, devices, development in the Microsoft & Apple worlds, events, and more.

Some of my most popular posts this year have been:

From a products point of view, it’s been a very busy year for me here at Infragistics. We launched 2 releases of our full NetAdvantage collection, introduced new mobile products for Windows UI, iOS, Android and jQuery Mobile development and many more. Here are all the products I own which we shipped in 2012:

Two releases of NetAdvantage for Windows Phone: 12.1 & 12.2
Updates to the Data Visualization controls (charts, maps, gauges, bullet graphs, etc.) which are all now bundled in the following products:
- NetAdvantage for WPF
- NetAdvantage for Silverlight
- Ignite UI (HTML5 & jQuery)
Introduced New jQuery Mobile controls in Ignite UI
Launched the initial release of NucliOS for native iOS developers
Launched Iguana UI, a free Community Pack for native Android developers
Launched a new bundle for mobile developers: MobileAdvantage
Introduced new Data Visualization Controls for WinRT & WinJS developers in NetAdvantage for Windows UI Beta

Infragistics also launched many more products I was not directly involved with, including new versions of SharePlus for iOS and the inaugural releases of ReportPlus for iOS and Indigo Studio for UX designers, and many more. Yes, it has been an awesome year at Infragistics.

Community Events

My community role goes beyond tweeting and blogging of course. Traveling to community events and conferences is a key part of my job. As a product manager, it’s important that I connect with developers to hear about the projects they work on, what technologies they care about, and what topics they are interested in learning. It also allows me to spread the word about our awesome Infragistics products, meet current customers and get feedback from them about what we’re doing great and what we could improve upon.

Speaking at events is actually something that I’ve enjoyed for many years, going as far back as 1996 when I did a seminar tour in the province of Quebec, speaking about Internet and intranet development with Microsoft technologies, using Active Server Pages, ActiveX and all the other “Active” products at Microsoft. This is in fact when I was nicknamed “ActiveNick” by co-workers, a name that has stuck around since then. My responsibilities over the last few years at my previous job at Infusion had forced me to scale back my speaking engagements, sticking mostly to DevConnections and TechEd, and sadly neglecting the other conferences, code camps and user groups.

Thanks to my new role at Infragistics, I was able to jump back in the community head first, speaking at and/or attending the following events in 2012:

Central New Jersey .NET User Group in Cranbury, NJ
Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond, WA
Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA
Code PaLOUsa in Louisville, KY
Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee, WI
TechBash in Nanticoke, PA
Stir Trek in Columbus, OH
Philly Code Camp in Abington, PA
TechEd US in Orlando, FL
TechEd Europe in in Amsterdam, Netherlands
New Jersey Azure User Group in Iselin, NJ
That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, WI
Heartland DevCon (HDC) in Omaha, NE
Prairie DevCon in Regina, SK, Canada
Visual Studio Live! in Orlando, FL
NYC Mobile .NET Meetup in Manhattan, NY

I was also scheduled to speak at the Windows Phone Developer Conference in October in San Francisco, which sadly (but understandably) got cancelled/postponed, and I was also forced to cancel my sessions at DevConnections Fall in Las Vegas, but I also had the chance of appearing in a few online webcasts and podcasts, including:

The Tablet Show Podcast with Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell
Bytes by MSDN with Jerry Nixon
AJI Report with Jeff Julian and John Alexander

2012 was an awesome year, and 2013 promises to be even better for Community events. I can confirm that I’m already scheduled to speak at VS Live! Las Vegas in March and VS Live! Chicago in May, and also Code PaLOUsa 2013 in April.

If you want me to speak at your event, code camp or user group in 2013, don’t hesitate to contact me directly at activenick@infragistics.com or via Twitter at @ActiveNick.

Windows Phone, Nokia Devices & WP8

It’s been an interesting year for Windows Phone to say the least. Nokia finally started releasing their long awaited Windows Phone devices, including the Lumia 800 and 900. The problem is these devices came late (March 2012) in the Windows Phone 7.5 cycle that started in Fall 2011, and by then everyone was already wondering about the upcoming Windows Phone 8. Microsoft continued to uphold their veil of secrecy over all things Windows Phone, although they suffered from a lot of leaks in 2012. It looked like Windows Phone was on an upswing in Spring 2012, but it all came to (relative) crashing halt when Microsoft dropped the bomb that none of the current Windows Phone 7.5 devices would be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8. Even those shiny Nokia Lumias we had just bought a couple months before.

What a downer.

Microsoft sometimes suffers from being too honest. Microsoft seeks to emulate Apple to generate buzz in the mobility world, but Microsoft will always be Microsoft, and the two companies work in different ways. Allow me to illustrate the contrast. If an app or the OS suffers from a fault, Microsoft will tell you via an error message and you can often track down a log entry to diagnose it. Apple will just make your app disappear… *poof!* Error messages are bad, so instead of acknowledging the error and help you address it, Apple just sweeps it under the rug, hoping you’ll forget about it as they sprinkle more of that “Apple Magic” dust in your eyes. I prefer the Microsoft way because things will eventually go wrong in a piece of software. The interactions are too complex and errors will occur. Pretending the error didn’t happen is downright arrogant.

Why am I bringing this up? Because this same mentality is what drove Microsoft to announce Windows Phone 7.8. Microsoft’s approach for current devices was to borrow a few great features from Windows Phone 8 (like the new Start screen, tile sizes, Bing lock screen, etc.) and tack them onto Windows Phone 7.5, giving birth to Windows Phone 7.8. Microsoft is too honest. Apple prefers the “let’s fool our customers” approach. When Apple announced iOS 6, they also revealed that older devices would not get all the new iOS 6 features. Yet, Apple still calls this watered-down version of the operating system “iOS 6”. Why couldn’t Microsoft simply take a page from Apple’s dirty book? They could have announced that most current Windows Phone 7.5 devices would be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, except that some new features wouldn’t be available on older devices.

The cold wet towel that is Windows Phone 7.8 basically sent Windows Phone sales to a grinding halt. Why buy a new Lumia now when it’ll be hitting a glass ceiling in the Fall? That was an unfortunate course of events and the slower adoption for Windows Phone in 2012 is what led many analysts to severely scale back their expectations for the next four years.

Windows Phone 8 really has a solid shot at succeeding. This is the fabled “third version” where Microsoft typically gets things right, and while I’ve been a fan of the platform since the initial reboot in 2010, Windows Phone 8 finally reached top contender stage. Nokia brought us new devices, and HTC showed us they actually know how to design a sexy phone. Hopefully Samsung can bring some sexiness to their own devices. They have awesome specs and quality, but they need a phone borne out of the mind of creative designers, not engineers.

The combination of new OS features and new devices finally make Windows Phone much harder to dismiss as “irrelevant”. The good news came late in the year, but this was nonetheless a good year for Windows Phone.

Surface Announcement & Launch

The Surface announcement and launch was a real surprise. Microsoft may have released a LOT of hardware in the past, but nothing comes close to the Surface in terms of involvement or investment (with the exception of Xbox). Microsoft used to be primarily a software company, but we can’t really say that anymore. Sinofsky may be gone, but the Surface remains. For the first time in its history, Microsoft shipped a new version of Windows, Windows Phone and Office and yet none of those are the most talked about product coming out of Redmond within that same calendar year.

Surface is.

I wrote extensively about the Surface and if you have not had a chance to peruse my series titled “From iPad to Surface”, I invite you to do so via the following links.

The jury is still out on Surface and I plan on writing more about it in 2013. I just hope we get a brand new official Mail client because the current one really sucks.

Let’s now dive into my predictions for 2013…

ActiveNick’s Top 10 Predictions for 2013

I’ve never done this publicly before. Like a lot of people, I’ve offered many technology predictions casually through conversations in the past, but those are often more wishful thinking than actual predictions. Given my really bad track record on some of these (e.g. Beta VCRs, NEC TurboGrafx 16, Commodore CDTV, Star Wars Galaxies, Windows Mobile, HD-DVD, etc.) I expect to do really poorly on many of my predictions. Still, let’s have some fun and reflect back on them in a year.

1. Return of the Windows Start Button

I’m probably wrong on this one given how Julie Larson Green was so deeply involved in the UI design of Windows 8 and Windows RT, but I think that now that Sinofsky is out, Microsoft will cave to enterprise pressures and bring back our beloved Start button. This will only be available in Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise, and it’ll come back as an optional feature through some form of service pack or Windows Update. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was only available via enterprise policies / settings.

2. New Apple Devices

The fact that we’ll get new Apple devices is not really a prediction, it’s more like stating the obvious. What will we get though? Or more importantly when it comes to Apple, what WON’T we get? Here is what I think we’ll see from Cupertino in 2013:

Another iPad Mini, this time with Retina Display and better specs
New MacBook Air with Retina Display
iPhone 6 will ship in 2013. I’m not sure what Apple will add, but the screen size & resolution will remain the same, whatever new features Tim Cook introduces will be lifted from Android or Windows Phone, and it still won’t support NFC. Whatever it is, Apple fanbois and fangurls will proclaim “the Apple Magic is still alive” yet Apple’s global market share will remain stagnant.

Oh, and Apple Maps will still ~~suck~~ be inferior to Google, Bing and Nokia Maps. In terms of wishful thinking, I really hope Siri gets an SDK.

3. Windows Phone 9

IDC recently predicted that the worldwide Windows Phone market share will reach a very modest 11.4% in 2016. I think this is a very conservative estimate, especially given the big marketing campaign currently under way and the fact that every single Windows 8 computer and Windows RT device acts as an advertisement for Windows Phone. The Metro UI and Live Tiles will become more and more familiar to consumers and this will positively affect Windows Phone sales.

Microsoft will probably introduce the Windows Phone 9 OS along with new partner devices, and I predict that all current and future Windows Phone 8 devices will be compatible with it. This will prevent any slowdown in WP8 device sales, something that negatively hurt the platform in 2012. Disclaimer: At this point in time, I know absolutely nothing about any future version of Windows Phone. This is pure speculation on my part.

Based on IDC’s data, Windows Phone is at 2.6% market share today and I predict it’ll climb to 7% by the end of 2013 and officially claim the third spot ahead of RIM in the mobile ecosystem.

4. Nokia Devices

My new Nokia Lumia 920 is as perfect a phone as I’ve ever owned one. But it’s still not perfect. It only has 32GB of storage, no storage card slot, and the battery life could be better. Nokia is not all about devices, they have Nokia Maps and their “Here” location services that bring in a lot of dough after all, but if they want to stay competitive in the phone space, they’ll need more than the current three Windows Phone 8 devices (Lumia 620, 820, 920). We’ve seen rumored concepts for the Lumia 720, and we also know that Nokia wants to bring more of its PureView technology to Windows Phone.

I predict that Nokia will introduce a new wave of Nokia devices in 2013 *before* we see the Windows Phone 9 OS ship, and all these phones will be upgradeable to WP9.

5. Star Trek

The new “Star Trek Into Darkness” movie will be awesome and will rank over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I really miss having a good Star Trek TV show though, and sadly I don’t see 2013 changing this situation. Hopefully the new HD remasters of Star Trek: the Next Generation will make their way to Netflix.

6. Microsoft Surface 2 & Surface Phone

Microsoft sunk a lot of money in the development of the Surface and while the sales have been good, they have not been iPad-spectacular. Surface Pro also hasn’t been released yet. The question nonetheless remains: will Microsoft ship a “Surface 2” device, and if so, when?

There are already rumors that Microsoft is hiring for such a project and while the current Surface RT is great – though not perfect – there is still room for improvement. I was very doubtful about calling for a new Surface 2 – announcement or launch – in 2013, but now that I think about the potential features, it seems obvious Microsoft can keep raising the bar for other OEMs.

Potential Surface 2 improvements could include:

High resolution screen, matching the ppi count of Apple’s Retina display on the Newest iPad
More SKUs with higher storage options, including tablets with 128GB and 256GB built in
Better battery life
Built-in NFC
Built-in GPS
Improved TouchCover keyboard
Optional SKUs with cell radios for built-in 4G LTE support

There have also been a lot of rumors about Microsoft manufacturing their own “Surface Phone”. I would really love to see such a device get announced, though it would really create tensions with Nokia and HTC. The bar has also been raised when it comes to Windows Phone and both these manufacturers have proven they can design truly competitive devices.

My call: No Microsoft-branded “Surface Phone” announced or launched in 2013.

7. Xbox 720

There will be a new Xbox in 2013. I really hope they find a better name for it, and I won’t speculate… ok, maybe I will. I’m throwing my own Xbox vNext names into the hat:

Xbox 3… or 8?
Xbox Pro
The New Xbox (just kidding, but this is what Apple would call it)
Skybox (Xbox in the Cloud, get it?)
Microsoft Gaming Console 2013 Total Pwnage Edition

Anyways, I have absolutely no knowledge about Xbox vNext, but here is what I think we’ll see in this device:

More powerful specs (obviously) like CPU, memory, etc. I call for 8-16 cores in the CPU
Built-in Blu-Ray player and all Xbox game discs will move to the Blu-Ray format
Full 3D support, complete with 3D glasses and augmented reality. We’ll probably have 2 GPUs to drive the dual image
Built-in storage will be SSD
More cloud integration, cloud saves, and the cloud will also be used to tie games to users, thus severely hurting the 2nd hand game market
Fully compatible with all Xbox 360 games
The controller will be the same except the D-Pad will be enhanced
Microsoft Points will go away and we’ll just buy stuff with normal currencies
A new version of the Kinect sensor will be packaged by default with all SKUs
Xbox vNext will share a store with Windows, and most Windows Store games will be usable on Xbox. Indie developers will be able to publish Xbox games with the same SDK they use to create Windows Store games today
XNA won’t be usable (officially) to build Xbox LIVE Indie Games anymore (I hate you Microsoft)
We’ll see more features added to the Xbox Smartglass apps to truly extend the console for gaming like the Wii U does
We’ll also get more media content, more TV channels built-in and the ability to use the Xbox as a DVR

I expect Xbox vNext will be announced at E3 and ship in time for Holidays 2013.

8. World of Warcraft and Blizzard’s Project Titan

World of Warcraft will extend it’s free to play offering beyond level 20. I suspect they’ll raise the level cap to 60 for free to play accounts and lift some of the restrictions (e.g. gold cap, whispers) to make it more viable and less of a trial.

We still won’t know what Project Titan is by the end of 2013

9. BlackBerry 10 Smartphones & PlayBook Tablets

Very little is known about the new QNX / BBX / BlackBerry 10 devices and I won’t speculate much. After many delays, BlackBerry 10 should finally be revealed in February but I suspect devices won’t be available commercially until March or April 2013. At the end of the day, it won’t matter much. Microsoft rebooted Windows Phone in 2010 and many pundits called it “too little too late”. How can RIM reboot their platform in 2013 and expect to stop the free fall?

Their only salvation might be if they released their own OS with its own merits, and yet still support Android apps out of the box without any repackaging, hacking or side-loading. Now THAT would be an interesting feat of engineering.

Bottom line: BlackBerry devices will slip to 4th place in the mobile ecosystem market share, and whatever new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is introduced will be as insignificant as the current one.

10. Android, Google, Samsung and Amazon

The Android platform holds a decent share of the tablet market but it’s definitely on smartphones that it dominates, with over 60% of market share. Android is a weird animal since so many versions have been forked or heavily customized by all those who seek to make money with it. What will happen to some of the major Android players in 2013?

Samsung is the main company making money off Android. They will keep customizing it to their heart’s content, growing farther apart from the rest of the Android ecosystem, like Amazon has done.
Amazon made Android their own. They forked it and built their own OS on top of it. They have their own UI, their own services, their own marketplace, and it’s all about selling you their content. Expect to see Amazon release newer services for your Kindle Fire tablets to insure you rely less and less on Google. I expect to see an Amazon Email service released in 2013, as well as a cloud-storage solution for consumers, akin to Dropbox or Skydrive. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon expand their search engine to go beyond content and include Internet searches as well, competing with Google and Bing.
Google is quickly losing control of Android and they’ll try to reign things in during 2013, but I don’t see them succeeding very well. They’ll probably just end up releasing more devices of their own with their own Android version. More phone & tablet OEMs will fork Android away from Google and follow Samsung and Amazon since no one is making any significant money with the baseline Android software. Android is winning but Google is losing.

What do you think of my predictions? On target or completely off? Which ones do you agree or disagree with? Which would you add? If you have any questions or comments about this post, the products and technologies discussed or my predictions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

Happy New Year!

Visual Studio Live Event Recap: Windows Phone, iOS & Data Visualization

2012-12-18T21:14:47Z

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Visual Studio Live! conference last week, located in the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando and part of the Live! 360 overarching conference. It was a fun week, I got a chance to meet many great attendees and also catch-up with old friends.

I was presenting on a wide range of topics, including mobile development and building native apps for the Windows Phone 8 and iOS platforms, and also a brand new session on designing data visualization dashboards. As promised during my talks, you can find below all the material I showed, including all the slides and demos for my 3 talks.

What's New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers

In this session I discussed how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and HTML5 apps. We looked at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the store is at, and then I presented a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dove into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, the upgrade story for WP 7.5 devices, and explored some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone Developer Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
Windows Phone Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

It’s obvious that .NET developers are interested in iOS development too. This was the third time I presented this talk, and once again I had a full house. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:

iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Designing Data Visualization Dashboards

This was a really exciting session, and also the one with the largest turnout. What originally started as an idea for a developer session eventually turned into a talk focused on data visualization design principles. I started with a discussion on just what is data visualization, why should we care, and what makes for effective visualizations. I presented examples of noteworthy visualizations including electoral maps and the periodic table of the elements, as well as several live dashboards. We looked at the various attributes of data visualization dashboards, the UI capabilities, the widgets and the functional capabilities. I then explored the various steps to design beautiful visualizations and the many paths you can take to build those visualizations into dashboards. Lastly, I dove into the importance of maps in data visualizations and showed a live sample demo of a Twitter map built in WPF.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice), by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, 2nd edition
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, by Stephen Few
Designing Data Visualizations, by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
ReportPlus dashboard building app for iPad: http://bit.ly/igrplus
Sample Dashboards from Infragistics

I will be speaking at the next Visual Studio Live! conference at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, March 25-29 2013, I hope I will see you there.

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

Going Native: How to Develop Native iOS Applications with NucliOS – Webinar

2012-12-03T22:29:57Z

A few weeks ago I wrote about the launch of NucliOS, the new Infragistics suite of native controls for iOS developers. NUCLiOS provides the core controls developers need to build high performance, highly visual iPad & iPhone applications. NucliOS is part of the Infragistics MobileAdvantage suite of mobile developer tools, which also includes NetAdvantage for Windows Phone, Ignite UI web & mobile controls for HTML5 & jQuery, and Iguana UI native controls for Android developers.

Last Thursday, my colleague Brent Schooley and I had the pleasure to host a webinar on iOS development titled “Going Native: How to Develop Native iOS Applications with NucliOS”. In this 1-hour webinar, we walk you through the features of the NucliOS Grid and Charts for iOS, including demos using Xcode and Objective C, as well as MonoTouch and C#. MonoTouch is a product by Xamarin that allows you to build native iOS apps using C#.

Use the following links to watch the webinar and access the webinar materials.

All the demos are taken from our NucliOS Samples Browser. You can find the source code for the Samples Browser in the NucliOS installer, available here. Be sure to also read Brent’s post on NucliOS and MonoTouch and Steve Zaharuk’s series on iOS development.

To download an evaluation version of NucliOS, click on the banner below:

To try the NucliOS Samples Browser app on your iPhone or iPad, download it from the iTunes App Store here.

If you have any questions about NucliOS or what is discussed in the webinar, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick. Brent can be reached on twitter at @bschooley. I also want to thank key members of the NucliOS team who answered questions during the webinar: Steve Zaharuk (@codebystevez) and Torrey Betts (@torreybetts).

You can also post questions in the NucliOS forums here.

From iPad to Surface – Head-to-Head Comparison: Surface vs. iPad

2012-11-29T22:40:27Z

I’ve been an avid iPad user for 30 months and counting. I still love and use my Pad a lot, but I also bought a new Surface RT. Will my Surface ever completely replace my iPad? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out. This blog series is aimed at comparing the two devices in all sorts of situations, from work to home, and analyzing the pros and cons of each. You can read other entries in the series using the links below.

Surface vs. iPad: One Month Later

I started this blog series exactly one month ago. I bought my Surface, full of hopes that it would become my favorite device and dream tablet. If you’ve been following this series, you know by now that was not the case. The Surface is an awesome device, but it certainly isn’t ideal. It’s got its pros and its cons. I found that out the hard way last week. I was vacationing in Spain during Thanksgiving week and carried both devices with me, and it turns out I was using my iPad 90% of the time. I probably would have used my Surface more if it had been a business trip, but in the end, I’d like to just use one tablet. Period.

It’s now time to score this contest. The table below shows various comparison aspects and I’ll be attempting to score this. Note that I’m only counting 1 point per comparison. It’s up to you to weigh in which aspects are more important and which are more trivial.

If you feel there are important comparisons I’m not making here, let me know in the comments below and I’ll add them.

Device Aspects	iPad 4th gen.	Surface RT
*Device Construction & Quality* Both devices sport superior design, construction materials and overall quality. Both easily win against virtually every Android tablet device out there. This is a really close one, but I have to give it to the Surface for integrating the Kick Stand without any compromise.		Surface
Dimensions & Weight The iPad is a 4:3 device whereas the Surface is a 16:9 device. Both can be used well in landscape mode, but the iPad definitely feels better in Portrait mode. The iPad is also slightly lighter (652g vs. 680g).	iPad
*Storage* Surface gives you double the storage space for the same price compared to the iPad. Surface also has a microSD slot and a USB port to plug in USB drives. No contest.		Surface
*Performance* On paper, the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad core 1.4 GHz in the Surface sounds better than the Apple A6X dual core 1.4GHz. In practice though, the iPad is more reactive and feels less sluggish	iPad
Screen Quality I wrote extensively about the respective screens and the bottom line is the 2048x1536 Retina display on the iPad is just plain superior to the Surface’s 1366x768 screen.	iPad
Cameras Remember how disappointing the iPad 2 camera was? You’ll then understand why the Surface camera can’t win this one.	iPad
Battery Life I don’t have hard numbers to share. The iPad has a 42.5 W-h battery vs. 31.5 W-h on the Surface, but it’s all about the consumption rate, especially given the higher resolution screen on the iPad. Based on my experiences, things still look better on the iPad, but the Surface is also quite good.	iPad
Wireless Options Both have Bluetooth support. Both have Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, but the Surface’s MIMO Wi-Fi radio is iffy and often drops, or can’t give me an IP. There’s also no GPS or 3G/4G radio in the Surface, and that’s disappointing.	iPad
Ports & Extensibility The only iPad port is proprietary, and even though many accessories support it, this was invalidated with the introduction of the Lightning connector. The Surface’s charge port is also proprietary, but is joined by standard USB, microHDMI and microSD ports/slots.		Surface
App Store Selection 700,000+ iPad apps vs. 20,000+ Windows Store apps, and most of the key apps are still missing on Surface. This is a HUGE win for iPad.	iPad
Shell & Navigation The iPad’s shell has virtually not changed since iPhone v1. Some conveniences were added on the home button to switch to other background apps, but that’s it. This is an easy win for the Surface’s Live Tiles, Charms bar, edge gestures and dynamic lock screen information.		Surface
*Operating System Configurability* The iPad offers a lot of conveniences in a greatly simplified and easy to use model, but the Surface does have greater configurability. It might scare off a few average users, but you also don’t need to use them.		Surface
*Document Management & Sync* One of the biggest pains with the iPad is moving files in and out. Everything is silo’d in application storage and it’s just plain hard. Surface lets you manage files like a normal Windows machine, you can connect to network drives and add USB drives & storage cards. SkyDrive is also integrated in the OS. Strong Surface win here.		Surface
*Use Case: Email* The iPad mail client has received several improvements over the years and works relatively well now. The Windows Store Mail is just plain bad and is very sluggish on Windows RT devices. This is a huge strike for Surface.	iPad
*Use Case: eReading* The iPad feels better since most read books in portrait mode and the 4:3 screen aspect ratio is closer to a standard book. The iPad Retina display also enhances the reading experience with smaller pixels.	iPad
*Use Case: Facebook* With 1B users, Facebook is a standard use case. Facebook is well integrated in the People hub in Windows RT and Windows 8, but this doesn’t come close to the full experience. It took a while to get an official Facebook app for iPad, but we have one now, and we don’t on Surface.	iPad
*Use Case: Gaming* The Surface has a lot of potential as a gaming device, especially given the integration with Xbox LIVE, the premier online gaming service. Sadly, the selection of games is still pitiful on Surface compared to the iPad’s massive catalog at this early stage.	iPad
*Use Case: Movies & TV* Both devices offer a premium movie watching experience. Both offer Netflix and HuluPlus. Both have their own video stores. The Surface has an edge with the 16:9 movie-friendly screen and the storage card to store media, but the iPad has a LOT more apps that stream content at this point.	iPad
*Use Case: Music* Just like movies, both devices are great music players. There are also more music apps on the iPad and a bigger catalog in iTunes, but the Xbox Music service clinches this win here. The deep synchronization between your Surface, Windows Phone, Xbox 360 and Windows 8 computers makes it all so seamless, much more so than in an all-Apple ecosystem.		Surface
*Use case: Presentations* Keynote is a nice presentation software with cute little effects, but the iPad version is actually a subset of the Mac version. Both also pale in comparison to the full-fledged PowerPoint 2013 on Surface, which is THE benchmark presentation tool in the business world. The standard microHDMI port also clinches this win.		Surface
*Use Case: Sharing* All iPad apps are on their own when it comes to sharing data and documents with other apps. Each developer needs to fully implement sharing support. The Share Charm on Windows 8/RT makes everything easier here and once you start using it, you won’t want to go back.		Surface
*Use Case: Spreadsheet* Full Microsoft Excel 2013 vs. watered down Apple Numbers. No contest. None. Next!		Surface
*Use Case: Twitter* The selection of Twitter clients in the Windows Store is sadly quite disappointing. Looking at the three leading apps (MetroTwit, Tweetro, Rowi), they are slow, unreliable, suffer from usability/design issues. The iPad has great Twitter clients for all tastes.	iPad
*Use Case: Web Browsing* Internet Explorer 10 on Surface is a very powerful browser. The problem is most websites still don’t fully support it as well as they do Firefox or Safari. The partial Adobe Flash support on Surface also doesn’t make up for it given how badly Flash runs un those white-listed sites. The edge goes to Safari on iPad here. There are also more browser options on iPad (though they’re all wrappers around Safari, even Google Chrome)	iPad
*Use Case: Word Processing* Again, just like Surface easily won in the Presentation and Spreadsheet categories, the same goes for Microsoft Word 2013 easily beating Apple Pages. Word is the King.		Surface
TOTAL SCORE	iPad 4th gen.	Surface RT
	14	11

iPad vs. Surface – The Verdict

Surface RT is a v1 product, and a very impressive one at that. In fact, if this was Surface v1 vs. iPad v1, the Surface RT would win a lot more points. Unfortunately, Surface needs to be competitive against the 4th generation iPad. The 14-to-11 score above shows how the Surface has a lot of great qualities, and once the Windows Store expands, Surface might even win a few extra points. The potential is definitely there. However, I’d like to carry just one tablet, and for now, I still need to carry two.

Don’t take my scoring at face value. Assign the proper weight to each score based on which usage scenarios matter more to you. Are there also some important comparisons missing in the table above?

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. iPad, or any other tablet, feel free to ask them in the comments section below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the right tools for you with the new NetAdvantage for Windows UI. You should also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Which of the comparisons outlined above matter more to you? Based on the various scores, which tablets seem better suited for your needs?

Let me know.

From iPad to Surface – Favorite Fridays >> Google App

2012-11-16T18:07:33Z

Is it Friday already?

It seems it was just a couple posts ago that I covered the Windows Phone App for Surface in Favorite Fridays… and it was. Time flies and it’s been a busy week. I find myself wondering which Windows Store app to cover in this week’s Favorite Fridays. I’ll be honest with you: it’s slim pickings in the Windows Store and I’m at a loss. There may now be over 16,000 Windows Store apps worldwide (over 10,000 in the US), but many big brands are still missing and very few apps truly stand out.

I’m looking at my current library of installed apps and many of them are basically the “Surface picks”. You can find the usual culprits like USA Today, New York Times, Engadget (still in preview), NBC News, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, eBay, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Kindle, ABC Player, and Flixter.

There are other apps I use but either I need to play with them some more, or I’m not totally happy with them to feature them here yet. The Zinio digital magazines app was recently updated and works much better now, but I’ll have to use it more to comment on it. News Bento is positioning itself to be a true Flipboard replacement but still has many issues I want to see resolved before I switch away from Nextgen Reader.

There are apps that look really cool from the outside, but soon fall apart when you start using them. Jon Stuart’s The Daily Show Headlines app suffers from many data issues, locks up often, isn’t showing the latest videos, most videos are dated January 1st 0001, doesn’t have full episodes and is just a pale shadow of the iOS version. The same goes for the Dilbert app. You can read the last few comic strips but there is not full archive access and the UI is so simple it’s just plain bad.

Finally, my Twitter woes continue. Tweetro and MetroTwit are still light years behind my beloved Twiterrific on iOS, and I pretty much gave up on Rowi too.

So what app should I cover today?

It’s an app I stumbled upon yesterday. It’s a super obvious household name, but it certainly not the first name that comes to mind when you use a Microsoft Surface…

Google App

That’s right. Google published a Windows Store app. You have to give props to Google and Microsoft. They understand the fragmented nature of the mobile ecosystem. Microsoft has already published several apps on iOS and Android, like Bing, Skype, OneNote, SkyDrive, Xbox Smartglass, Live Messenger, Lync and Halo Waypoint. They even published games like Kinectimals for iOS and Android, and there are rumors that Office is coming to these two rival platforms.

In turn, Google also plays nice with Microsoft with a Google app on Windows Phone. Even though their relationship soured with Apple, Google still has a number of iOS apps like Google+, Google Search, Chrome browser, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Translate, Gmail and others. It’s also rumored that Google is working to bring back Google Maps to disgruntled Apple Maps users.

It seems Google is ready to recognize that Windows 8 and Windows RT are not going away anytime soon. They’re embracing the platform with what I hope will be a long line of Windows Store apps, starting with the Google app.

Why Google on Surface Matters

The Google app’s primary purpose is of course searching the Web. It supports your Google ID and remembers you after being logged in. The base experience is very similar to the one in the Google app for iOS. The Home screen displays the ubiquitous search bar, as well as icons to access your History, Apps and Voice Search. Unlike the iOS version, the Windows Store Google app sadly doesn’t support Google Goggles. This is especially disappointing since Microsoft doesn’t offer its rival Bing Vision service on Surface either.

There are two reasons why I picked the new Google app for Favorite Fridays:

Google is the leading Search Engine

My favorite search engine back in the 90’s was AltaVista. Newer engines were appearing like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN, but I stayed loyal to AltaVista… until Google came. I resisted that movement a bit but it soon became obvious that Google was crushing the competition with their superior results, blazing speed and lightweight UI. More than 10 years later, Google still commands over 60% of the search engine market share. I personally switched to Bing in late 2008 (it was live.com back then) and haven’t looked back. I personally prefer Bing overall, but only 15% of the population agrees with me. To each their own.

It’s very important to have solid Google support on Surface. Despite the built-in Bing, people will expect it and the European Commission will be happy.

You can talk to Google

This feature was the clincher for me: search via voice recognition. Just like the iOS version, it’s dead simple and it works, very well. Ever since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’ve been enamored with HAL 9000 (as have millions of other geeks been too) and I’ve been dreaming of the day we’d have conversations with computers. For some reason Apple’s Siri just isn’t doing it for me, but something as simple as the Google app Voice Search got me fired up.

Just launch Voice Search via the icon at the bottom right in the Google app.

When launching this feature, the app will ask you for permission to use your microphone, just accept and move on. I was still getting some error about microphone access, so I had to go back to the home screen and select Voice Search again. Everything worked well after that.

A huge red microphone tells you to speak your search query. The app does not seem smart enough to drop the term “search” if you say “Search bacon shortage”. It’ll actually include the word “search” in your query. To search for something, simply say what you would type in the search box without adding any extra commands. As soon as there is a short pause, the search will be executed without any need to say “Enter!”, or “Go!” or “Make it so!”

From this point on, you get the default Google experience, as you would in any web browser. Don’t expect anything special. The app won’t read results back to you. You’re expected to read the results on screen, not Google stuff while driving.

What else can this app do?

Google Apps

The Google app also features a collection of Google Applications. I was semi-excited to see what would show up when I tapped the “Applications” box in the middle of the home screen. I was greeted by a palette of application icons matching the popular offerings from Google: From Gmail and Maps to Google + and YouTube.

The excitement died. It turns out these are just quick shortcuts to various websites, offering nothing more than what’s available in a browser. These are not app screens or Metro redesigns, these are just HTML5 pages wrapped in a native Windows Store app. It’s a small convenience and nothing more.

This web page-driven experience is not unlike the iPad version of this same app. Google for iOS also offers a variety of shortcuts to embedded web pages like Google+ and Reader, but it also acts as a launcher for other Google apps available in the Apple iTunes Store for iOS, such as Google Drive, Chrome, Google Earth and a few others. Hopefully Google will release more apps in the Windows Store and integrate them with this app in the future.

The Google Maps page is bound to be a popular choice, but don’t get your hopes up. The performance is actually quite disappointing. The culprit is actually Internet Explorer 10 on Surface RT. These Google web pages may be in a Google app, but this is still using a wrapped IE10 control, not Chrome. If you open Google Maps in the native IE10 app, you’ll note the same deplorable performance. You better stick to the built-in Bing Maps app in the foreseeable future.

The Google Reader app simply links to the Google Reader web page as well, but for some reason we’re redirected to the mobile view. If you want to read your Google Reader feeds, don’t even bother with this page here, just use Nextgen Reader or News Bento.

I was curious to see how the YouTube experience would be. There is no default YouTube player on Surface and I was hoping for this Google app to give me this experience. This is also just a YouTube web page.

I ran into some issues when I tried to access YouTube. First, the browser control itself complained that “Part of this webpage is not supported and may not render properly”, offering to open the page in my default browser. This is not a good experience.

Secondly, the YouTube page told me I needed to upgrade my Adobe Flash Player. I tried to tap the provided link, and after many failed attempts, the page finally loaded, only to tell me that the Flash Player is already built-in both versions of IE10 in Windows 8 and Windows RT, and there’s nothing else to download. Again, another confusing experience for average users out there.

I was eventually able to select videos and play them. Upon right-clicking the video I discovered it was actually using an HTML5 player. Why was YouTube complaining about Adobe Flash then?

This is why we need real Windows Store apps and not lazy web pages in a wrapper.

Another drawback of the web page approach. I found it hard to hit the video controls with fingers. Those were designed for a mouse. It’s a good thing I do have a trackpad on the TouchCover, but this needs to be more touch-friendly.

Swiping from the top or bottom edge of the screen (or right-clicking the screen with a mouse) reveals an application bar and alternate view. From this view you can view your search history (also accessible from the Home screen History button), go back to the Home screen, view a Tutorial or initiate a Voice Search from anywhere in the app. The Tutorial is actually helpful and I recommend going through it once for any new user of this app.

Search Charm & Settings

Google knows how to play nice with the Windows 8 design guidelines. The Google app actually supports the Windows 8 / Windows RT Search charm. Initiate any search within your Surface and the Google app shows up in the list Search-compatible apps. This list gets pretty long so I suggest pinning the Google app to the top via a tap & hold if you think you’ll search with Google a lot.

The App Settings for the Google app are simple enough but useful. They are accessible via the Settings charm and allow you to:

Turn Instant search on or off
Enable/disable Voice Search
Enable/disable Personalized Search
Clear your search/browsing history on this device. Note this only affects the Google app, not your whole IE10 history
Record history on the device or not

Summary: Moar appz plz. kthxbai!

The Google app is a decent start, but it’s not enough. Those app shortcuts will have to become real apps in their own right.

I also hope we eventually get the ability to launch the app via voice commands too. For this we’d need built-in voice search at the operating system level like we have in Windows Phone 8. It’s on Microsoft to deliver.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Are you happy with Bing search on Surface or you ignored it to use Google.com in your browser on Day 1?

Let me know.

[Link to next article: Head-to-Head Comparison: Surface vs. iPad]

From iPad to Surface: Landscape vs. Portrait

2012-11-13T22:18:43Z

Default Orientation

There is a fundamental difference between the iPad and the Surface. Look at these two device shots and tell me if you can see what this difference is:

Notice the location of the Home / Start buttons? That’s right. Apple designed the iPad primarily to be used in Portrait mode, whereas Microsoft designed the Surface as a Landscape device. Sure, both devices support both orientations, but the placement of that Home / Start button speaks volumes.

The iPad features a 4:3 screen ratio. It seems old school given it’s the old pre-HD TV format, but it’s also the same aspect ratio as a standard sheet of paper or a book, things we’re all very familiar with. This aspect ratio choice was actually quite smart because it feels natural to us in both Landscape (TV) and Portrait (book) mode.

The Surface screen has a 16:9 ratio. It’s ideal for watching movies, and the Start screen shines with its Live Tiles and horizontal scrolling in Landscape mode. Switch to Portrait mode and the Start screen will immediately feel “odd”, the screen just feels too narrow & tall. Landscape is clearly the default orientation on Surface. In fact, many popular apps don’t even support Portrait mode (yet), including USA Today, NBC News, ABC News, Engadget, and many others. Even the first-party Xbox Gaming Hub doesn’t work in Portrait mode.

Which orientation is best? None really (at first). Here are common typical scenarios for each mode:

Portrait: Reading, Web Surfing, reading/writing email, reviewing documents, etc.
Landscape: Watching TV/movies, browsing folders & emails, master/detail navigation, etc.

Email is a toss-up. Reading / writing individual emails feels better in Portrait mode, but Landscape can show you multiple folders or the email list. In fact, any notion of master list / detail view works better in Landscape mode.

So why do we care about which might be best? My personal answer is simple: Typing.

Typing in Landscape vs. Portrait Mode

The Surface is designed around landscape mode because it runs Windows RT, Windows 8’s sibling. Since desktop and laptop computers running Windows 8 all use landscape screens, it made sense to design a landscape-friendly ecosystem. This is also why virtually every marketing photo of the Surface shows the TypeCover attached to it. The Surface is a tablet, but it definitely shines as a replacement for a netbook, Ultrabook or a cheap laptop.

Sooner or later, you’ll want to do some real typing on your tablet. Whether it’s for email, document editing, or tweeting, tablets are productivity devices that feature many apps that require typing. The three primary positions for typing on a tablet are:

Tablet propped-up at an angle with an attached keyboard, typing as you would on a laptop, whether the tablet is on a desk or on your lap. The keyboard covers & kickstand on the Surface make this scenario really easy. You can do this on the iPad too with the help of third-party keyboards like the Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard Cover. In this scenario, the tablet is almost always in landscape mode.
Tablet lying flat on a table or lap where the user types with an on-screen keyboard. The Surface supports this well, and the iPad makes it even easier with the smart cover you can fold into a triangle to prop-up the iPad at a slight angle. Landscape mode also works well here since the keyboard will be bigger and easier to use. Portrait mode is still usable if you prefer.
Tablet in your hands, usually when standing, sitting on a couch, or lying in bed. While you can technically hold the tablet with one hand and single-finger your way through your text with the other, tablet-typing is best done with hands holding both sides and typing with your thumbs.

This third scenario is the one that bugs me on Surface. Here’s why. Look at the iPad when typing in Portrait:

The blue overlays represent the average keyboard coverage with your thumbs when holding an iPad with both hands. This shows how easy it is to type when holding the tablet up. Now, when typing on a Surface, this is the default experience:

In landscape mode, the full keyboard is way too big for two-thumb typing. My thumbs can barely reach the letters e-d-c on the left and p-l-comma on the right. That leaves a huge space in the middle completely unreachable without moving one hand.

There is an alternative using the split keyboard:

However I just cannot get used to this mode. I’ve tried, time and time again, and I just can’t feel comfortable with this split keyboard. Is it just me? Have you tried it? Do you like it?

What’s wrong with Portrait mode then?

“Nick, stop complaining and use your Surface in portrait mode then.”

I wish I could. The problem first of all is that awkward feeling you get when holding the Surface vertically. It’s just too tall. Maybe lawyers will love it since they love legal-size paper, but it just feels weird to me. I had the same feeling when I started using an Asus Transformer Android tablet and I tried to type in portrait mode on it too. It just doesn’t feel right.

The other problem is how most Windows Store apps are primarily designed to be used in landscape mode, since that’s the “default experience” on Surface and in Windows 8. While many apps don’t even support portrait mode, others do support it but don’t support it well. I’ve observed that some apps made an effort to redesign the functionality when in portrait mode, but in doing so, they are providing fewer features or a lesser experience. Tweetro is one such example.

On an iPad, I can read & type emails in portrait mode really fast, and with a simple left-to-right thumb gesture, I can reveal the email list from the edge to select another email. On Surface, I am forced to tap a small arrow at the very top-left to go back to the email list. There are dozens of little details like this here and there that cheapen the Surface experience when used in portrait mode.

I want those annoyances to go away. I want better portrait apps on Surface.

Summary: Calling all developers

The lack of proper portrait mode typing on the Surface is a show-stopper for me. This is why I find myself reaching for my iPad when I go through emails in the morning or at night in bed, and also when I’m comfortably tweeting from my couch or when working out on my elliptical in my basement.

Some people will be just fine with the landscape-first experience on Surface, but I think it’s fair to say that some others will be put off like I am. There is still hope for the Surface to be a portrait-friendly tablet, but it’ll require extra attention from all Surface developers to offer a premium experience in both orientation. If you’re a developer and you prefer landscape mode, don’t just design the app for yourself, think of all the other users that will try your app. The more inclusive you are, the more popular your app will be. This includes Microsoft too, starting with much needed changes in the highly disappointing Mail app.

Bottom line: Resolution-awareness is not a checklist feature, it’s an entirely different user experience. Design your app with this in mind.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? When using a tablet, do you find yourself more often in landscape mode or portrait mode?

Let me know.

[Link to the next article in the series: Favorite Fridays >> Google App]

From iPad to Surface – Day 9: Favorite Fridays >> Windows Phone App

2012-11-09T22:55:46Z

The Microsoft Ecosystem

For a software company, Microsoft sure makes a lot of hardware. Setting aside most of the devices Microsoft ever created, we can look at the Microsoft ecosystem today in 2012 and we find a trifecta of devices:

Windows PCs, laptops & tablets
- Windows 8
- Windows RT
Windows Phone 8 devices
Xbox 360 Gaming Console

This ecosystem is glued together by your Microsoft Account and SkyDrive. The Microsoft Account is the new name for the melting pot that is your Windows Live ID, Xbox LIVE Gamertag, and Hotmail account. SkyDrive can be compared to Dropbox in that it serves as cloud storage for your files, but it goes further. It also syncs settings, photos, music, files, notes and such across your devices and computers.

Apple has a similar ecosystem:

Computers running iTunes (Mac or Windows)
iOS Devices (iPhone & iPad)
Apple TV

Apple also has the Apple ID and iCloud service to bind everything together. When it comes to computers, there is little benefit to actually using a Mac since you can pretty much get the same benefits from running iTunes on Windows. It can also be argued that the Apple TV certainly doesn’t have the clout of the Xbox 360. It’s a media consumption device for videos, music and photos on your TV, and not much else.

The main difference I want to explore is how you can sync data between devices. The following connections are allowed between devices:

Apple Devices Sync

Sync content between an iPhone and an iTunes computer
Sync content between an iPad and an iTunes computer
Sync content between an Apple TV and an iTunes computer

The iTunes computer is the central link. All these devices can interact and sync with the cloud, but not with each other. For example, you can’t connect an iPhone to an iPad and move files & media around.

Microsoft Devices Sync

Sync content between a Windows Phone and a Windows 8 computer
Transfer content between a Windows RT tablet (like Surface) and a Windows 8 computer (via network or USB key)
Sync content between an Xbox 360 and a Windows 8 computer
Sync content between a Windows Phone and a Windows RT tablet

Don’t panic, I use “Windows 8” here but Windows 7 is still supported to sync data with Windows Phone 7.x via the Zune client. To sync Windows Phone 8 with Windows 7, use the the beta app. There is also a Windows Phone app for Mac if you don’t use Windows.

Did you notice that 4th bullet in the Microsoft list above? Indeed, you can’t connect an iPhone to an iPad, but you CAN connect a Windows Phone to a Surface. You do it with the Windows Phone app from the Windows Store.

Windows Phone App on Surface

The Windows Phone app allows users to sync their Windows Phone 8 devices with any Windows 8 or Windows RT computer, including the Surface. Yes, you heard me right, I said Windows Phone 8. Don’t try to connect your Lumia 900 or Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7.5 , it won’t work. This is why the app rated so low in the Windows Store. Not supporting the current generation of Windows Phones is a lame omission and I really hope this gets fixed in the Windows Phone 7.8 update.

When you launch the app, you see a list of Windows Phone apps available in the Windows Phone Store. You’re instructed to connect your phone via USB. Upon connecting for the first time, you get prompted to name your device. Don’t worry, this name is not permanent and you can change it in the app settings.

You can tell the app to automatically import all your photos from your phone to your Surface upon connecting. If you connect your phone and the app is not running, a popup shows up in the upper-right. Tapping it presents you with options, including launching the Windows Phone app (the recommended option).

Once connected, the app imports all your Windows Phone photos if you opted to do so. The app shows your device name, device type, phone number (I erased mine from the screenshot) and battery level of the device. You can indeed charge your phone with your Surface via USB. You can also see at the bottom of the screen how much space is used and remains on your Windows Phone.

The app scrolls horizontally and presents several sections. It doesn’t rotate and can’t be used in portrait mode.

On your phone

This section presents a preview of the photos, videos and music on your phone. Photos can be browsed by album, music by albums, and videos by type (e.g. all vs. personal). Three tiles are available to add photos, videos and music. Each option allows you to browse for individual items or entire folders.

In the Store

These are just browser links to the apps and tapping them opens the app link in the browser. It only shows you 12 apps. To see more, you have to tap the link which takes you to the Windows Phone Store online. Disappointing.

On the Web

The last section on the far right contains more links to the web. These shortcuts take you to Microsoft pages to find a lost phone, see your Microsoft Account or visit the main windowsphone.com page.

Room for Improvement

It’s a good starting point, but the app is not perfect. It’d be nice if the Windows Phone app could do more, such as:

Sync with Windows Phone 7.x devices
Control where stuff gets sync’ed on my Windows 8 or Windows RT computer
Allow me to add music to my phone by albums without having to manage files or folders
Actually shop for apps and queue them for remote download on my phone without using a browser
Find, ring or erase my phone remotely without using a browser

The Zune client on Windows 7 was a great way to manage Windows Phone content, and I would really like to see this Windows Phone app be modeled more around the Zune approach. I’m certainly glad we have this app, but Microsoft seriously needs to keep working on it as this is a very basic version 1.

Day 9 Summary

A common debate these days is whether or not the Surface can replace a laptop. I still believe that you’ll need a laptop for more involved productivity work, but my Surface certainly takes me further in laptop-less territory than my iPad can. Being able to sync (and charge) my phone with my tablet certainly becomes a part of that equation, and a step in the right direction.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? How many devices in the Windows RT, Windows Phone & Xbox 360 trifecta do you own? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to the next post: Landscape vs. Portrait]

From iPad to Surface – Day 8: Top 10 iPad Apps Missing in Windows Store

2012-11-07T22:21:22Z

12,000 Apps vs. 275,000 Apps

31 months after its introduction, the Apple App Store has 275,000 apps for the iPad. If you include all the iPhone apps that still run on the iPad, that number jumps to a whopping 700,000 apps.

How can the Surface compete with this, given it just came out 12 days ago and only has 12,000 apps? For starters, 12,000 is more apps than anyone would ever use. I currently have about 75-80 apps on my Surface and even after 30 months of iPad ownership, I have 350 apps on it.

The app store numbers game is often quoted, but remember that it’s not about the number of apps, but rather making sure you have the right apps. Windows Phone has 10 times as many apps as the Windows Store, but as I wrote about earlier this year, there are still some key iPhone apps missing on Windows Phone. I figured it would be a good idea to do something similar here and quickly review the top 10 iPad apps missing in the Windows Store for Surface and other Windows 8/Windows RT users.

1-2. Facebook and LinkedIn

When Windows Phone shipped, Microsoft knew they needed a Facebook app, so they actually paid an outside firm to build an official Facebook app on their dime (with Facebook’s blessing, of course). Why is Surface then shipping without a Facebook app? Granted, the iPad shipped without a Facebook app and it took until October 2011 (18 months after launch) before we got one.

The same goes for LinkedIn. It took even longer before we got a LinkedIn app (2 years). Given how the LinkedIn iPad app is actually a mobile web app wrapped in a native shell, you’d think they could easily port it to the Windows Store.

The People hub/app on Windows RT does provide a very good level of integration to various social networks, including Windows Live/Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. That’s greatly useful and it does provide cool cross-network features normally not available in silo’ed apps, but there are also Facebook-specific features we want in a dedicated app, such as the Timeline, Groups, Fan Pages, Likes, and more. The same goes for LinkedIn Messages, Groups, News Updates and more.

3-4. IMDb and Audible

Amazon is a content company. They don’t care if you buy & consume their content on an iPad, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD or Surface (though no love for the BlackBerry Playbook). As such, they made sure they had a Kindle Reader app available in the Windows Store on Day 1… and stopped there. Amazon actually owns a few of the most popular apps on iPad, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Audible services. IMDb is the perfect companion to anyone that’s ever watched a TV show or movie and asked “Where have I seen her before?” or “Was Johnny Depp in The Matrix?”

Audible is the premier service for Audio Books. There technically isn’t an Audible iPad app, you’re instead stuck using the iPhone version on an iPad. That doesn’t matter since the nature of audio books is that you interact with the app less than 1% of the time when you listen to them. There is an Audible app for Windows Phone, but since Windows Phone apps can’t run on Windows RT (what a missed opportunity, topic for another day), we therefore need a dedicated Audible app in the Windows Store.

I really want these apps on my Surface. While we’re talking about Amazon, I would also like to see them bring more of their iPad apps to the Surface, including the Amazon shopping app, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Windowshop.

5-6. Flipboard and Instapaper

I’m repeating myself here, I know. I love Flipboard as it’s the ultimate best news reader app on any platform, and my favorite app of all time. I won’t dig too much on Flipboard here, you can simply read last week’s Favorite Fridays post as I was hunting the Windows Store for a replacement.

Instapaper is one of the greatest services ever and credit goes to Scott Hanselman as he convinced me to start using it. Throughout the course of any week, I stumble upon tons of great articles via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email and most often via my expansive Google Reader feed. There are too many to read and I often want to remember them so I can read them later. Instapaper saves me from keeping 74 web browser tabs open. I instead “save” links for reading later via a single browser shortcut, and Instapaper saves them in my (free) account. Better yet, Instapaper strips out all the menus, ads and fluff from the web page, keeping only the core formatted text and graphics of the article, making it easy to read in the Instapaper app on a phone or tablet.

Instapaper even packages my 10 most recent articles into a Kindle eBook every Friday and emails it to my Kindle PaperWhite device. I often read saved Instapaper articles on my iPad though, especially when I fly somewhere. I need this app on my Surface.

7-8. Dropbox & Yelp

Windows 8 and Windows RT are beautifully integrated with SkyDrive. This makes it easy to manage my photos, music and documents between the cloud and multiple computers. Not everyone uses SkyDrive though, and even if they do, many have been using Dropbox for years and this is where they store their documents & files in the cloud. If the Surface is to be a true player in the mobile ecosystem, it’s important that we get a Dropbox app in the Windows Store.

On a different note, we need to remember that tablets are mobile devices too, and people use them on the road. Sooner or later, you’ll be looking for a place to eat or buy stuff. Yelp is the premier website, and now app, for people looking for a good restaurant. It’s not rocket science, we need a Yelp app on Surface.

9. e*Trade & Other Finance Apps

Tablets are great to keep an eye on stocks, financial news, indices and your personal portfolio. You can do it on a smartphone but the larger screen on tablets is really better suited for financial data visualization, especially if you want to place trades too. I’m no day trader, but I personally use the e*Trade app on the iPad and I would love to get a Windows Store app as well, not just for Surface, but also for use on all my Windows 8 computers.

Maybe you prefer a different finance app to track stocks & read financial news. Other key finance apps missing include CNBC Real-Time, Bloomberg, Fox Business and MarketDash by Yahoo Finance.

10. Cable & Network Streaming Apps

By now, most cable & satellite companies have their own apps on the iPad, including Comcast Xfinity, Time Warner Cable and others. Some can be used as a TV schedule guide, others even allow you to search & queue up on-demand movies to your cable box or program your DVR. As more and more people are watching TV on the road and on the go, we need these apps on Surface. Once you start using them, it’s hard to give them up.

Streaming video to your tablet is also a critical scenario on any successful tablet (sorry PlayBook). We already have the two key video streaming apps on Surface: Netflix & HuluPlus. That’s great start, but I want to see more, including HBO GO, Amazon Instant Video, a CNN app that let’s me stream live TV, and others.

Day 8 Summary

There are of course many more apps missing on Surface today. Your list may be different than mine. I could add the Safari Books Online app which lets me read 1000’s of technical books on my iPad, or two of the best productivity apps for the iPad: SharePlus and ReportPlus. When it comes the the latter two, I may actually be able to do something about it. Stay tuned.

I will be updating this post over the coming months as some (and hopefully all) of these apps get released in the Windows Store, so make sure to bookmark this page and come back from time to time.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Is your list very different than mine? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to Day 9: Favorite Fridays >> Windows Phone App]