Today, I will be attending a UX-Dev camp with Microsoft Sweden. We’re currently at Stockholm’s Modern Museum getting ready to start the day off. Developers are starting to trickle in, and I’m looking forward to the day to come.
I’ve been working in secret on a remake of an old application that I did for Windows 7. I’m remaking it for Windows 8 as a training exercise.
This might be a bit late for a link tip, but I’ve always admired the site www.picnik.com . A photo-editing site where casual users can do amazing things without being a photoshop pro. I’m a bit sad to say that Picnik will be closing shop by mid-april. Until then however, the whole site will be free. Even the premium services. I’m excited to see what the Picnik team achieves in service of their new master Google. I hope to see some of their awesomeness come to one of google’s free services, such as Picasa.
Microsoft TechNet and Knowledge factory are hosting a cool lecture later this month. The topic is how to give successful presentations. The speaker is none other than the famous Richard Klees flown in from the US by Microsoft. Here is a blurb from the event site:
We can feel and demonstrate confidence, professionalism and conviction when we are comfortable, feeling well, know our content inside and out, and the stakes for being successful are not so high that the pressure to do well isn’t so great. If we had a good night’s sleep and the audience is a manageable size made up of people we know and feel calm, we can do a good job.
But what happens when life is not going as well as we planned?
- We’re nervous
- We didn’t get a chance to prepare as thoroughly as we would have liked
- We must be successful because our boss is counting on us to do well
- We are jet-lagged or fighting a cold, and just don’t feel well-rested
- We are presenting to a larger audience than we are used to and they are complete strangers
- We feel pressure to do well and so we are constantly self-evaluating, even as we speak
- What’s at stake could mean the difference between moving ahead and staying in the same place
- WHAT DO YOU DO?
We would always like life to play fair, but it doesn’t. That’s where this seminar and “The Action Effect” come in. This seminar will show you how to be confident, compelling and persuasive under any circumstances, with any audience, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. That’s a big promise, but this seminar can deliver and you will see it before your eyes. Hope to see you there.
- Richard Klees
The event is September 29th here in Stockholm and is a great opportunity for anyone who wants to improve your presentation skills. Hope to see you there!
Kahls coffee in Kista Gallerian serves damned good coffee. If you’re passing by, stop in for a good cup of java (mine’s empty since it’s so good)
August has been a strange month. I’ve been thrown between different projects, had a few slices of Mango and finally ended up on a migration project at a large telecom company. With little WP7 action in my future, I’m at least looking forward to giving a very delayed speech on what went down in Las Vegas earlier this year at MIX. I’m presenting along with my friends and colleagues Michael and Johan.
Tech breakfasts, as Avanade calls these tech-oriented morning sessions are a very good way to reach out to a growing company. I’m thinking about doing one around Windows 8 as well in a few weeks.
Quick “I-hate-InfoPath” tip: I had a bunch of dropdowns with Swedish text in them as values. InfoPath then proceeds to flag this text as faulty. “Ok” I think, “Let’s just switch that spellchecker off”. No dice. There is no setting for the spellchecker on dropdown menus. Once it’s there, it won’t go away. Not very user friendly.
The solution to this, I found, is to change the dropdown to a textbox via the “Change this control…” action. And then switch off the spellchecker. You can then switch the control back to a dropdown and the spellchecker is removed.
WARNING: This will reset all connections/preset values on the control, so be prepared for this.
Here is a quick tip for anyone struggling with InfoPath. It’s not the smoothest peach in the bowl, but it gets the job done.
When configuring an InfoPath form tied to a SharePoint list, you lose the ability to use custom code. This gets old really quick. I was struggling with fields not matching because of case sensitivity. Here is an example:
NameField = NameFromDatabase
NameField might be Viktor, viktor or VIKTOR. NameFromDatabase could also vary. What I did here was apply a translate function to each value I was comparing.
translate(X, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")
This replaces all the uppercase with lowecase letters. In my case it would read:
translate(NameField, "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ" , "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz") = translate(NameFromDatabase , "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ", "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")
It’s not pretty, but it works. Similarly, I used translate to fix phone numbers and postal codes which might have spaces in them with this snip
translate(X, " –.", "")
As you might have guessed, it replaces all the special characters (space, – and . ) with a blank value. In this way “08-40 12 13” and “08401213” matches each other.
When I got around to running my application on an actual device, there were a lot of things which didn’t work as expected. Besides maps, the camera which had worked well before didn’t want to start. All my code was perfect but it still didn’t work. The fix for this was to first deploy code via debug/release and then untether the device. When running the app untethered, you can use the camera just fine. Hope this helps someone 
I’ve been using the prototype WP7 for almost one day now. Although most of the services are switched off before the launch, I like the OS very much. The phone’s connectivity with social networks such as Facebook and Windows Live is very seamless. I would like to have seen a “sync to SkyDrive” feature for my documents, but hope that it’s something that will be available down the line. One thing I didn’t really realize until I got the prototype is that the hardware model will actually matter a great deal. I must say that the LG model (prototype hardware) I got was real shoddy in comparison to something like the iPhone, and honestly, that is what you will be comparing any hardware to.
But as I said earlier, the OS is really solid, the animations and the UI are gorgeous and I just can’t wait to get a WP7 of my own.
