Category Archives: WPF

MetroTwit

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About a month ago i started using MetroTwit. Its a really good, nice, clean twitter application which runs brilliantly on Windows 7. I moved to it because of its great UI but in the most recent update they seem to have gone a bit AWOL on the UI. So the aim of this post is to point this out to them so they can improve in the next version.

MetroTwitApp

I have colour coded the issues.

Starting from the top, the green box. Why is the Timestamp / Client at the top, i think it looks weird put it to the bottom.

Next is the pink box. Now this is personal preference, i personally think its redundant information, maybe make it a configurable option.

Next is the light blue box, now it is good that they added support for retweet API, BUT i do not think they put any thought into the design of that “Retweeted by ….” component, i think it could be done more subtly  without taking up the large amount of space that it does.

Finally we get to the orange boxes, they need to have a bigger margin with the window border. I would suggest looking at evening out the spacing between all of the buttons so it appears equal.

Just to close off i would like to just say that it is a great piece of software, and is by far the best twitter client there is for windows so keep up the good work guys!

Windows Phone 7 Gaming – Part 3

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So i have gone out and brought a new laptop (MacBook Pro 13.3 2.4 etc.) so i can now develop applications in the emulator.

The emulator is still buggy, if i rotate the emulator i just get a garbled screen rather than what i want in the correct orientation (happens with the start screen on the emulator, and IE). Also the game doesnt seem to be taking up the whole screen, which im not sure if thats a emulator bug or a problem with my code.

Anyway i have spent the last hour or so making some modifications and improvements, and here are the latest screenshots it think it looks quite good in the WP7 Emulator. Next major job is the graphics, then everything should start to fall into place. I have the map now automatically generating, and movement around the map working. I have also renamed it, and i think i have one i like now.

StartScreen3LoadGameScreen3GamePlay3

Update

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Its been a white since I’ve blogged due to various reasons. Most of these reasons are due to various hosting providers misbehaving.

I have still been doing other things.

RedKite v 0.1 was released and although it still needs some UI adjustments, but v 0.2 is well on its way.

RedKite v 0.1

I got my phone upgraded to a HTC Hero, which is a truly awesome device, even though i do miss Windows Mobile, Android is actually pretty good, although it does suffer from some rather lame parts of Google Apps, like Calendar which is just absolutely crap.

Windows 7 has been released to manufacturing, and i have been running it on my machines since it was given to MSDN, its brilliant and faster than ever.

I’m currently working on a post about what i would like to see in Windows 8, which should be coming up soon.

RedKite – New UI Design

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A few weeks ago one of my misguided friends showed me his favourite twitter client – tweetie, and it has a very good UI layout idea. Rather than having a selection of tabs or filters across the top, it has them down the side. This solves the problem i was trying to solve in the UI of custom created tabs and filters.

So the initial problem was that i wanted a single column of tweets, and from my experience of twitter clients i automatically had the tabs on the top of the column of tweets, this lead to only having 4 tabs before i ran out of space. Anyway i saw tweetie and saw how it did it down the left side and this would solve my problem so i have taken a shot at implementing it.

In this design i have also customized and added extra features, a optional Close button so the tab can be closed, and a number which represents the the number of new tweets in that tab.

RedKite I am still working on making the code and templates for this properly, so it can be themed with minimal effort, if you want to take a look at the code, head over to my project on CodePlex and tell me what you think.

I’m about to start working on the Art for the splash screen and icons, so they should be up here soon.