Jerry Huang apps and developing apps

I'm currently working on the localization of my app (IP CAM Controller), the next release of the app would at least support English and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

In fact, I wish to support as many languages as possible. So I would like to invite any one of you could help me out. If you are interested to be a volunteer, please click the "Contact" link at the top, and leave me a message with details such as what language you could do. I will reply you as soon as possible, thanks!

Although the Nokia officially annanced that the pre-order starts from Dec 2, I have just verified by myself that Nokia Lumia 800 pre-order could be made right now at Nokia's local store at HK. You need to pay HK$300 deposit for each phone you order. The deposit is un-refundable if you decide to cancel the order while it will count into the total amount when you pick up the phone and pay the rest.
 
According to the staff, the free earphone offer is available per phone if you place the order now. However, it won't be shipped with the phone at Dec 12, it will be provided later instead.
 
In case you are wondering, I ordered 3 lumia 800 myself at the Nokia store which next to Time Square at Causeway Bay.
 

• Price at HK$4,398
• online pre-order starts from Dec 2
• deliver at Dec 12
• free Nokia WH-920 Purity earphone offer to the first 2000 orders
• 3 colors available: Blue, Pink and Black
• built-in local Apps include WhatsApp (well, this is not local), OpenRice, MyTV, TownGas, AAStock, HK Weather (mango update)
• Internet Sharing will not be available initially, but will be avaialbe through update or download

First of all, here is a high level briefing how push notification works and what have been involved.

Parties:
1) your phone application: register push service; receiving notifications
2) your server: sending messages
3) the so-called "Windows Azure": microsoft server (MPNS, Microsoft push notification services), assignning token to your application; forwarding alerts (sent from your server) to your application

Now let's see how it actually works.

step 1) Your application will first register with Azure, and will be assigned back an URI (token) if the registration is successful. P.S: the token is unique per application per device, so that one token would be able to tell the Azure which app on which phone.

step 2) Your application must tell your own server that what URI has been returned (by calling a web service would be classic). It's your job to maintain the subscriber list on your server side. Once a condition is met for sending out an alert to a device, your server application will then use the URI (that previous notified by your app) to send a message (which its format is pre-define by Microsoft) to Azure service.

step 3) Eventually the message will then be transfered to target device via Azure service.

For the details of implementing these steps, I'm pretty sure you would be able to find a bunch of samples and resources via Mr. Google. So, go for it

Next, there are 3 types of notification currently supported by WP7.0 and 7.1:

1) Raw. Custom format, maximum 1KB for the message. The message will be discarded ("Suppressed" status) by Azure if your app is not currently running on the phone.

2) Tile. User must "pin to start" your app, otherwise, the message will be discarded ("Suppressed" status) by Azure. The image URI could be pointing to remote (internet) or local (within the phone), as long as it's valid. For remote image, the size must be less than 80KB and the download time has to be less than 1 minute.

3) Toast. If the phone is switch off, the message will have the connection status "TempDisconnected"

What else you may need to know? Here you go...

1) MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402558(v=vs.92).aspx

2) 500 messages per application per device per 24 hours if your server doesn't use SSL to communicate with Azure. By using SSL, you will need to upload your cert via your developer account, and then this limitation is not applicable on your apps. details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff941099(v=VS.92).aspx. Last but not least for this issue, a very stupid action is required that you must upload the cert every 4 months if the post here is ture (which most likely is): http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/85207.aspx

From v1.11 version, the IP CAM Controller will support free trial, and what's more? Price drops to $2.99 for sale

You can actually try if the app works for your camera without paying in advance.

As always, in case it doesn't work or has any question, click the "Contact" link above to leave me a message.

Whatsapp just released its beta, it's private beta however, so you are not able to download from market. However, you could directly download from here if your phone is dev unlocked:)

WhatsApp.rar (873.45 kb)

It's not quite stable however. It directly access to all your phone contacts and add those who already used whatsapp to a "favs" list. Then you could send message from people in that list, but it seems couldn't locate my overseas friends whose phone number have a country code prefix. You can also see all your contacts in an "all" list, but sometimes it crashs when I scroll down the list.

what's new?

• directly access to your phone Contacts (address book), no need to import from Live account anymore
• faster load and search performance
• FREE TRAIL

Search "Jerry Huang" in Marketplace to download

If you are a WP7 marketplace paid developer like me who is not working on a "real" WP7 handset, instead, using HD2. You will find VS2010 cannot debug with your phone after freshing the custom ROM for HD2. The VS2010 compaint that:

The application could not be launched for debugging. Ensure that the target device screen is unlocked and that the application is installed

And then you probably will try to register your phone since you had paid for the 3 developer unlock quota from App Hub. However, the registration program will also throw an error "Error communicating with the developer portal" with error code 0x64. You will know 0x64 is because the phone cannot connect the App Hub registration services after google.

 So what now? Give it up? After some thinking, I suspect the problem is due to the ROM embeded with the "prevent relock" patch which causing the phone cannot connect the registration services. The so-called "prevent unlock" patch is actualy a Registry hack to remove the URL of developer portal which will causing the phone to be relock when connecting with Zune. If so, what I need to do is update the URL back.

[code language=XML]

<wap-provisioningdoc>
<!-- *** COMMENTO *** -->
   <characteristic type="Registry">
      <characteristic type="HKLM\Comm\Security\LVMod">
         <parm name="DeveloperUnlockState" value="0" datatype="integer" />
      </characteristic>
      <characteristic type="HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DeviceReg">
         <parm name="PortalUrlProd" value="https://developerservices.windowsphone.com/Services/WindowsPhoneRegistration.svc/01/2010" datatype="string" />
         <parm name="PortalUrlInt" value="https://developerservices.windowsphone-int.com/Services/WindowsPhoneRegistration.svc/01/2010" datatype="string" />
      </characteristic>
      <characteristic type="HKLM\Software\Microsoft\DeviceReg\Install">
         <parm name="MaxUnsignedApp" value="2147483647" datatype="integer" />
      </characteristic>
   </characteristic>
</wap-provisioningdoc>
[/code]

so I made a relock XAP base on above setup, run on my HD2, reboot (must reboot, otherwise won't take effect), register again, done!

The relock XAP could be downlod here (rename to .xap after download), deploy to your phone, tap "HTC-ProvXml-Deploy", click the green icon, your HD2 will be relock again.

From v1.9, I removed the left, right, up and down buttons from the viewer screen. Instead, provided flick/swipe to move gesture support: use your finger flickon the image, e.g. flick left camera will move left.

Apart from new gestures, a new function - save snapshot was being added to viewer screen (both single view and multi-view). Click the button, current image will save into pictures hub (in Saved Pictures category)

The main reason for such "big" change is that gesture is one of the coolest innovation of smart phone, so there is no reason not to make use of it:)

there are some other versions of implementation in different programming languages, here is my c# version and I believe this sort algorithm will be very hot soon:)

[code language=C#]
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;

namespace SleepSort
{
    class Program
    {
       
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            int[] ints = { 1, 4, 2, 6, 3 };
            foreach (int i in ints)
            {
                SleepSort ss = new SleepSort(i);
                System.Threading.Thread t = new System.Threading.Thread(ss.Sort);
                t.Start();
            }

        }

       
    }

    public class SleepSort
    {
        int i;
        public  SleepSort(int i)
        {
            this.i = i;
        }

        public void Sort()
        {
            System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(i);
            Console.WriteLine(i);
        }
    }
}
[/code]