It has been more than 18 months but I have finally received my sales proceeds from my WP7 Apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace: SG-Drive and NaviRoutes. It was really projects that I just wanted to get my hands wet into WP7 and XAML programming. It garnered great interest from the start since there was a glut of a WP7 developers. I suspect buying interest had waned since then because there are now tons of developers and also the proliferation of iOS and Android devices out there.
The sales proceeds I have received from the sale of those applications were only a small token amount. However, as I have said in the T&C in my WP7 applications, sales proceeds of the above will go towards charity. I have always given to charities I believed in and, most importantly, often overlooked. That said, the best mileage is to go for those 1-for-1 charities to get maximum impact per dollar.
I will update this post once I have decided on a charity to donate the sales proceeds of my WP7 applications to.
Thanks for all your support.
I just started using SQL Server express edition 2008 R2 in my workplace. But the express edition does not have a profiler to trap the errors.
SQL Profiler is only available for developer editions and beyond.
I found this neat tool that works like sql profiler and it is free for download.
http://code.google.com/p/sqlexpressprofiler/downloads/list
Grab it while you can.. :)
Below are the schedule when the apps turned free. Each of them cost $5.99 usd. It will be worthwhile if you do travel a lot. For Android users, all tripwolf guides are also available in the Android Market
Thursday December 1st
Italy, Amsterdam, Istanbul, Cologne, Linz
Friday December 2nd
London, Florence, Copenhagen, Oslo, Leipzig
Saturday December 3rd
New York City, Lisbon, Dublin, Dresden, Saint Petersburg
Sunday December 4th
Austria, Mailand, Frankfurt am Main, Valencia, Bordeaux
Monday December 5th
Paris, Stockholm, Porto, Turin, Stuttgart
Tuesday December 6th
Venice, Sevilla, Nice, Glasgow, Düsseldorf
Wednesday December 7th
Vienna, Hamburg, Brussels, Palma de Mallorca, Genoa
Thursday December 8th
Barcelona, Edinburgh, Bologna, Marseille, Heidelberg
Friday December 9th
Bangkok, Los Angeles, Melbourne, Chicago, Dubrovnik
Saturday December 10th
Budapest, San Francisco, Hongkong, Singapore, Rio de Janeiro
Sunday December 11th
Prague, Vancouver, Sydney, Cape Town, Delhi
Monday December 12th
Las Vegas, Buenos Aires, Athens, Tokyo, Cairo
Tuesday December 13th
Shanghai, Hanoi, Dubai, Beijing
SmartAssembly:
This is a tool to obfuscate your .NET code using SmartAssembly
Read more here:
http://www.red-gate.com/products/dotnet-development/smartassembly/
SQL Connect for Visual Studio:
SQL Connect is an add-in for Visual Studio 2010 that lets you work
directly with a database in real time, rather than offline with scripts.
- Easier to update the database at the same time as your application code, without leaving Visual Studio.
- SQL Connect works with your current source control system and
add-ins, and gives you notification of object changes in the Solution
Explorer.
- Adds a new project type for working directly with databases, and makes it easier to commit database changes to source control.
http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-connect/?utm_source=forgnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=forg1711&utm_campaign=redgate
Free trials of both products are free for download.
Get Jonathan Kehayias' eBook 'Troubleshooting SQL Server' to help you diagnose and solve common performance problems.
Download your copy now!
Link: http://www.popcap.com/promos/2011/zuma/free/?cid=fb:popcap:zumafree
Register by email and they will send you the link to download.
Use the coupon code to checkout the game free.
The coupon code is valid till 29 Nov 2011.
After so many months of starts, stops and many distractions, I finally took the time over the (long) weekend to port my Windows Mobile 6.0 GeoBlog application over to Windows Phone 7. I had searched and waited so long for a similar application on the Windows Phone Marketplace but none were there that could do what I wanted it to do.
While geo-taggers, geo-markers can be found in the dozens in the Windows Phone Marketplace, most of them doesnt allow you to share with your family and loved ones on the trails you have been to, local or somewhere exotic and far-away. Even the ones piggy-bagging on Google Maps doesnt have certain features like adding comments, taking pictures with each geo-blogging location.
Hence, I decided to port my Windows Mobile application to Windows Phone 7, taking this opportunity to add and further enhance some of the features along the way. I named this application WP7 GeoBlog and I will be taking this along to the Great Ocean Road a few weeks later.
However, I am not publishing on the Windows Phone Marketplace as of yet. Reason is because, it needs a certain back-end Server infrastructure of a web server hosting a simple web service. The push-pin points and locations uploaded will be overlaid on a Google Map, using the Google Maps API, specifically the Javascript SDK. I have no idea at this point in time how to package the back-end Server infrastructure so it is not a complete solution for anyone downloading WP7 GeoBlog without that infrastructure.
If you have a developer-unlocked or jail-broken WP7 and want to try this out, feel free to drop me a note here. For now, I will leave my readers here with an image that my WM 6.0 GeoBlog application generated when I was in Hokkaido, Japan last year.
Learnt it the hard way on Enterprise Library 4.1. We were getting inconsistent response from the cache manager for a key that we defined. Apparently, to the cache manager, key named “Key A” is different from “key a”. The following code snippet will give you 2 counts of cached objects.
ICacheManager mgr = CacheFactory.GetCacheManager();
mgr.Add("Key A", "Value A");
mgr.Add("key a", "lower cased a");
If you check the content of the cache:
mgr.GetData("Key A")
"Value A"
mgr.GetData("key a")
"lower cased a"
mgr.GetData("kEY a")
null
mgr.Count
2
Time to do my sporadic updates on this blog again. I have been making quite a few presentations on Business Intelligence recently and my next presentation will be together with Panoroma on the 17th August 2011 in Microsoft Singapore. Title of the presentation will be "Generate Actionable Insights and Increase Efficiency with Intuitive Business Intelligence"
With my usual presentation style of decorating the business of analytics with an interactive storyboard, I will be dotting the presentation with some bits on SQL Server "Denali" as well, highlighting on Project Cresent and PowerPivot v2. It should be a fun event. Come on down if you are around.
For those old WP7 faithfuls who are trying to get WP7 update 7.0.7392.0 to work on their Omnia7 without any success and thinking you have bricked your phone, I have managed to get mine to work successfully.
It is not an exercise for the faint-hearted and requires good 3-finger coordination. It is somehow still linked to an underlying bootloader issue from Samsung for the Omnia7. Read and download the fixed USB driver for Omnia7 here: http://bit.ly/mN3tzu and http://bit.ly/jUEnBJ. Make sure your Omnia7 bootloader is more than 4.10.1.9. http://bit.ly/jVxK8B. Mine is the 4.11.0.4 and it worked like a charm. This really reminds me of those great CE and WM days :)
The better-than-expected response to my SG-Drive in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has resulted in some user feedback for a leaner version of the application. Feedback collected suggested that there is a need to just have the very-popular Navigation features of SG-Drive alone to cater to the international market who doesn't reside in Singapore. In this sense, the application would have a broader-based international appeal and I am able to price it below the psychological USD1.00 barrier mark.
I am happy to announce the release of NaviRoutes today. NaviRoutes is THE WP7 Navigation Application with Map Visuals and Live-Traffic Conditions on the Map. The trial version has limited functionalities such as incomplete navigation routes and directions, no map visuals, no live-traffic information, etc
In just less than 10 hours, it has racked up 5 downloads. I am also mindful to market NaviRoutes out of the Singapore context since the Navigation features really work everywhere. Well, almost everywhere.
If you are interested, please search for "NaviRoutes" in Windows Phone 7 Marketplace or use any of the Navigation key terms to reach the application. Thank you for your support.
One of the hidden is what I thought to be the most useful setting in IE9 - and that is to be able to split the STOP and REFRESH icons and move it before the address bar. This effectively reduce the cluster on the right of the address bar. Because all those icons were bunched up together by default, it was hard to see what you want to do and easy to make the wrong clicks.
Right-Click on the icon cluster on the right of the address bar to make that change.
It has been about 4 months since I released SG-Drive into the Windows Phone Marketplace. v3.0 onwards has been a popular hit, judging by the user requests coming in via email and the good and not-so-good user reviews from all over the world. It seems to me that people living outside of Singapore are buying my WP7 application because of its navigation features since it is not restricted to navigation within Singapore.
I have had many requests from me asking me to port my SG-Drive to the iPhone, iPad as well as the Android. The idea is sure attractive and I had thought about it for some time. However, after some scouting and research, I realized that there are rather similar apps on those various platforms so I am deciding against it since it will not be productive use of my time.
For the record, I chose WP7 first, not because I am a fan-boy, but rather that it was new and it was a green-field for applications without much competition. It is not about the money since it is ONLY USD1.26 and all sales proceeds of SG-Drive will go towards charity. I just wanted to be sure the time invested in creating this application would be put to good use by the consumers out there. I not too sure about the sales of WP7 overall but the velocity of releases has slowed down a fair bit since I have been busy with my work and music. I do tinker with the application to make it better when I have time but users shouldnt expect a new functionality every fortnight.
That said, v3.12 is one release that I actually took a functionality off - and - that is the Estimated Travel Time feature. From what I have asked and checked, that seems to be a feature that most users (whom I know who bought the application) find the the least useful and took a big chunk of real estate of the application screen. There was also a recent outage from the source service provider, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) of Singapore, whom I was told, deliberately took the service offline as they dont want too many "free-loaders" consuming the service. Apparently, this stems from the fact that there are paid-users of this feature of www.onemotoring.com.sg who are complaining.
Much as I disagree with LTA on what I think I should be the role of what a Government Agency and its public civil servants should be to the general public: To freely serve as well as to disseminate public useful information for the greater good of its citizens' consumption without a commercial agenda, removing the Estimated Travel Time feature is a common-sense decision since a much-unused feature is taking up much clutter of the applicaton real estate and generally affecting the user-experience of the application (too much scrolling).
Real-time traffic conditions such as the Estimated Time Travel can still be derived from the Navigation features as well as the Live Traffic Conditions on the map, which provides better contextual information to the user. In the end, users want to know the estimated time to get to their destination, not from Exit A to Exit B on a certain highway.
- With this feature removed, there is not much "scrolling" anymore and users can get to the feature they want much quicker now.
- Another by-effect is that now SG-Drive loads much faster.
- Coupled with the WP7 NoDo update and its enhancements built into SG-Drive, v3.12 will even load faster from cold and the NoDo update will provide the much-awaited copy-n-paste functionality as well.
- Visual Maps from the navigation routes and directions also gets a boost with faster rendering time and better delivery mechanisms.
- Live Traffic Conditions on the map takes it own spot and it is location-aware now. If GPS is turned-off, the default location will be Singapore.
- Interfaces are much stream-lined now and can be accessed directly from the horizontal (and often-missed) ApplicationBar menu items.
Do download it or refresh your older versions. Try it and let me know what you think. I can always un-do my decision if the majority tells me I am wrong.
... AND YES - it will still cost a measly SGD1.99/USD1.29 and the proceeds will still go to charity.
Go to the url on today 28th Dec and download the software to get rid of malware. It is a free for 24 hours. So get your copy before it is too late.
http://reviews.cnet.com/exclusives/
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