#windows-phone

Goodbye, Picturex

It is with a deep regret that we announce that we will shutdown our beloved service, Picturex. We started Picturex almost five years ago, with a small team of passionate and experienced engineers and IT-professionals at MIT Cloud Innovation AG. Over the years, we have tried to follow our vision of making photo sharing private, secure and easy.

It has been a fantastic journey for us, we have learnt a lot, and we want to THANK YOU, our valued users, supporters, testers and partners, for giving us the opportunity to serve you! 😍.

This is the Schedule for the Shutdown

October 2, 2018: notice of Picturex service discontinuation

December 31, 2018: termination of the service (unable to access Picturex afterwards). Picturex credits can be used until then.

March 1, 2019: Picturex related customer service will be closed

Here is what YOU need to do BEFORE the shutdown

We don’t want you to lose your most precious photos! Download them before the end of 2018 to make sure you don’t lose any data. In 2019, it will NOT be possible to restore any of your photos. That’s how you can download your photos:

On your smartphone: open the photo album you want to download and click the download-icon. Then select if you want to store them locally, or export them with a single click to Swisscom’s MyCloud

On your computer: visit https://web.picturex.ch, log-in with your Picturex Plus account and download your photo albums

Being avid photographers and snapshot-takers ourselves, we will also need a new, secure photo sharing service. Having previously partnered with Swisscom, Switzerland’s biggest mobile phone operator, we can wholeheartedly recommend their fantastic service MyCloud. Photos you upload to MyCloud are saved in Swiss datacenters and you decide who has access to your photos (and other data).

What we’ve done & learnt

When we started out, the photo sharing space was already quite advanced, but had one big issue: it tried to maximize user numbers and (mostly) allowed only public photo sharing. We, however, believed that the private photos you take of your new-born, at your wedding, your city trip, or that party should only be shared with your closest friends and family only. YOU should be able to decide who sees your photos and when they are deleted (instead of being stored on some webserver for who know how long). This is how our friend Frank pitched his idea to us. We were immediately hooked and decided to invest our time and money to pursue Picturex with him.

A few months later, we released Picturex for Windows Phone, an instant hit in a user base that was rapidly growing (back then…) and not yet blessed with many apps. Of course, a sharing app (albeit secure) must be available on other platforms too. Thus, we soon started working on apps for Android and iOS too. Our good connections with bloggers and journalists around the world helped us to spread the word about Picturex. Also a couple of awards and honors (such as the European AppCup Award, Silicon Beach App Award and Telerik Featured App) helped us to further promote Picturex. In 2016, we were grateful and happy to partner with Swisscom. They helped us to integrate Picturex into MyCloud and release a major design makeover.

In the meantime, we also started working on our business offering - where companies could buy a whitelabel version of Picturex, along with custom design and tailored features. We imagined that travel-agencies could increase their customer-base, zoos/parks could make their visits more memorable, organizers could make their events more fun with live slideshows, or wedding-organizers would have an additional service for their customers. However, we weren’t aware of the very long sales process that was required to convince these mid-sized companies. As a result, we couldn’t grow as fast as we needed to scale Picturex and make it a viable competitor to today’s big photo-exchange services (including Google Photos, OneDrive Photos, Dropbox). 

In retrospect, that’s a common mistake of Swiss (European?) startups: spending too much time with building a perfect product and waiting too long with the launch, and subsequently missing out on getting actual real user feedback early on. 

Picturex recently crossed the 40’000 registered users, with thousands of photo albums created and hundreds of thousands of photos uploaded and shared in private! Nonetheless, we had to realize that it is time to move on, work on new and other exciting solutions, and that competition in the meantime has catched-up and there are indeed a couple of secure and private photo sharing services available. We are excited to have been part of and have influenced the secure and private photo-sharing space!

Working on Picturex was amazing and we’ve learnt a ton; especially in how to create and scale a cloud-service with Xamarin, Angular and Azure, and how to best work with users around the world! We also had a ton of fun, most memorably the fantastic photos people shared on the Tierpark Goldau Snapshots album, or the dragonboat race in Switzerland that we co-sponsored and where the winners of our photo-competition were invited to host a huge BBQ party.

Saying Thanks

Once again, we want to THANK EVERYONE for their fantastic support! All our users for using Picturex, giving us feedback and suggestions on how to improve the service. Our partners, most of all Frank, Swisscom, Microsoft BizSpark and Xamarin, for working closely with us and believing in our vision. MIT Cloud Innovation AG who financed our work. Our gratitude also goes to all friends and family who helped us tremendously with testing Picturex on different devices, in different scenarios, starting with early prototypes that grew more mature on the way.

We are happy to support you with your migration away from Picturex and answer any questions you might have. 

Thank you for being part of this amazing journey and giving us the opportunity to serve you!

Best regards,

The Picturex-Team

Noo artigo no https://www.informatico.pt/5685/tecnologia-microsoft-chega-aos-carros/

Tecnologia Microsoft chega aos carros

Quem iria imaginar que as tecnologias desenvolvidas pela Microsoft iriam chegar aos carros.

Nós últimos meses a Microsoft tem trabalhado juntamente com a equipa West Coast Customs para equipar e modificar um Ford Mustang, com diversos tipos de software e hardware Microsoft.

O Mustang 2012 foi equipado com uma série de itens da Microsoft, muitos dos quais nunca foram integrados em um carro até agora.

Por exemplo: semelhante ao que é encontrado em aviões de combate, o para-brisa contém um lado do motorista e do passageiro uma tela Heads Up que mostra informações do Bing Maps enquanto um passageiro joga Xbox 360 no seu lado do para-brisa sem distrair o condutor.

Com duas câmeras Kinect é possível ver objetos e pessoas ao redor do carro.

Pode até mesmo ver e ouvir a transmissão de vídeo a partir da cinética remotamente utilizando um smartphone com Windows Phone, além da possibilidade de enviar uma mensagem para o sistema de áudio externo do carro.

O Ford Mustang ainda conta com rede sem fio 4G, Ford SYNC e comunicação com serviço cloud, incluindo Bing Maps, sistema Viper’s Smart Start, bem como armazenamento de dados em tempo real de telemetria, tais como velocidade, localização, RPM e nível de combustível no Windows Azure.

Get TouchMountain for free in June!

We want to know more about your experience in the mountains! Tell us your story about the highest peak you’ve ever climbed.

As a small thank you gift, we will send you a license to use the premium version of TouchMountain for free, which includes the offline mode (to use TouchMountain without internet in the mountains) and a higher search radius (up to 100km)!

We are looking forward to hear your stories!

Best,

TouchMountain-Team

VLC pushed out a new update for Windows Phone which enables “Partial Hardware Decoding”. Now, this is a good thing. It enables all phones to be able to render out high quality video to nearly all devices, low to high end. The thing is, it’s not VLC doing it.

As many people know, at the time of this writing, Libvlc does not support hardware acceleration for ARM devices (So, Windows Phone and Windows RT). This is not ideal, but verses not having a release at all, it’s better than nothing. At least you know that VLC is actually rendering video. There is work being done to correct this, but, of course, it takes time. And apparently, with enough people on the Internet bitching about it, something had to be done.

As a stop gap, VLC for WinRT is now using MediaElement for video playback. If the video you picked does not support MediaElement, then it falls back to Libvlc. Let’s look at some code:

(InitializePlayback: MediaPlaybackViewModel.cs)

// First set the player engine // For videos AND music, we have to try first with Microsoft own player // Then we register to Failed callback. If it doesn't work, we set ForceVlcLib to true if (UseVlcLib) _playerEngine = PlayerEngine.VLC; else { var path = ""; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(media.Path)) path = Path.GetExtension(media.Path); else if (media.File != null) path = media.File.FileType; _playerEngine = VLCFileExtensions.MFSupported.Contains(path.ToLower()) ? PlayerEngine.MediaFoundation : PlayerEngine.VLC; }

Now on Windows Phone, we were already using the default Microsoft frameworks for audio. If the file did not support it (Ex. FLAC) then it would use Libvlc, but it would not play in the background. Now, I’m somewhat forgiving over why this had to be done. The Background Audio API on Windows Phone is, quite frankly, a royal pain in the ass to implement, and currently does not mesh well with Libvlc. It’s possible, but not practical. For video, I’m less forgiving.

To me, users are using VLC because they expect VLC to be, you know, running the file. They want the flexibility the library brings. That’s why so many people are excited about it being on the platform. But technically, right now, it’s not doing that. The built in frameworks are. If it works in the built in video player, it works here too. Exactly the same. Sure, people will be able to watch HD on their devices right now, but they could do that in other video apps on the platform. And now the video they watch will be acting exactly the same as it would in those other apps, just with a different UI... so to me, right now, VLC for WinRT is not nearly as special as it once was.

Now, of course, this stuff going to be changed out when actual hardware acceleration is ready, but I feel changing this right now to use media element is a waste of development time. I would argue (many times, as I did in the VLC ports chat room), that instead of taking the time to implement these services, other bugs and issues could have been addressed that are more important. The “Universal” UI is still a bitch to maintain, and it’s still being actively changed. The view models are a mishmash of operations and there is no separation between where they should go. The IValueConverters contain tons of business logic that should not belong there.

VLC for WinRT is a behemoth of a program. Now only does it have to handle managing your video collection (including things like separating out your normal videos from your TV shows), but also your music collection. It’s hard: Metadata is a pain in the ass to keep track of, especially when removing just one file may mean having to re-index the whole collection again. Most users, as far as I know, face tons of crashes because of how this stuff is currently handled. So let’s go into what’s going on.

When VLC for WinRT was originally released as a Windows 8 (Note, not 8.1. Specifically 8.0) app, its database structure was, frankly speaking, insane. It originally housed all of your videos and music into one large JSON file. Now, some developers may read that and just start cringing. For those who don't know who may be reading this for some reason: JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is commonly used to pass data between a server and a client (IE: You). It’s easy to parse and turn into objects, so manipulating it whatever environment you’re in is trivially simple. For example (from Wikipedia):

{ "firstName": "John", "lastName": "Smith", "isAlive": true, "age": 25, "height_cm": 167.6, "address": { "streetAddress": "21 2nd Street", "city": "New York", "state": "NY", "postalCode": "10021-3100" }, "phoneNumbers": [ { "type": "home", "number": "212 555-1234" }, { "type": "office", "number": "646 555-4567" } ], "children": [], "spouse": null }

Simple right? Now imagine your entire music collection encoded like that, being loaded into memory every single time you started VLC. Sure, if you had a handful of albums or videos it was fine. But it’s not even close to being scalable! Start loading up the albums and your app will start to choke. One of the first major things I did for the project was introduce Sqlite (A SQL Database engine).

Unfortunately, at the time, there was no ORM (Object-relational mapping, like EntityFramework) solution for Windows Store apps. So I had to try and roll my own kind of solution.

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace VLC_WINRT_APP.DataRepository { interface IDataRepository { void Initialize(); void Drop(); } }

using System.Collections.ObjectModel; using System.IO; using System.Linq; using System.Threading.Tasks; using SQLite; using VLC_WINRT_APP.Model.Music; namespace VLC_WINRT_APP.DataRepository { public class ArtistDataRepository : IDataRepository { private static readonly string _dbPath = Path.Combine( Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder.Path, "mediavlc.sqlite"); private SQLiteConnection connection; public ArtistDataRepository() { Initialize(); } public void Initialize() { var db = new SQLiteConnection(_dbPath); connection = db; connection.CreateTable<ArtistItem>(); } public void Drop() { using (var db = new SQLite.SQLiteConnection(_dbPath)) { db.DropTable<ArtistItem>(); } } public async Task<ObservableCollection<ArtistItem>> Load() { var connection = new SQLiteAsyncConnection(_dbPath); return new ObservableCollection<ArtistItem>(await connection.Table<ArtistItem>().ToListAsync()); } public ArtistItem LoadViaArtistName(string artistName) { var query = connection.Table<ArtistItem>().Where(x => x.Name.Equals(artistName)); return query.FirstOrDefault(); } public Task Update(ArtistItem artist) { var connection = new SQLiteAsyncConnection(_dbPath); return connection.UpdateAsync(artist); } public Task Add(ArtistItem artist) { var connection = new SQLiteAsyncConnection(_dbPath); return connection.InsertAsync(artist); } public async Task<ArtistItem> LoadArtist(int artistId) { var connection = new SQLiteAsyncConnection(_dbPath); var query = connection.Table<ArtistItem>().Where(x => x.Id.Equals(artistId)); var result = await query.ToListAsync(); return result.FirstOrDefault(); } public Task Remove(ArtistItem artist) { var connection = new SQLiteAsyncConnection(_dbPath); return connection.DeleteAsync(artist); } } }

This is an example of the foundation of the app and how it stores data. Some of you may have started to spot the problems with this approach, but it was all I could think of at the time: A simple interface, just initialize and drop. Sqlite does not handle foreign keys in the Windows Store version I had, and there was no other addon for it for Windows Store apps that could actually handle them, so we just don't use them. From a schema standpoint, it’s nuts. We can’t even cascade delete! We just hope our code does not break when deleting them manually. But it’s the best we could come up with given the time restraints we had at the time.

Remember, the app was out. The press was talking about it. People were (trying) to use it. Sometimes you go for the quick solution instead of the right one because you need to fix it NOW, even though you know it’s not the ideal way it should be done. This is the paradox we all face in software development, and here’s another good example of it. I had work obligations to handle, so I had to drop out of the project for a few months after I gave them what I had. They would enhance it and the album parsing logic to try and make it faster.

In a perfect world, EntityFramework 7 will be released soon with fully working Windows Store support (It was in the beta before they dropped it to finish Asp.Net vNext support. Which is more important for my main line of work, but it would be nice here too ;) ). We could use that to handle all our ORM needs. But for now, it's the best we could do...

How-to: Windows Phone 7 – How to download SMS (text) messages to disk #programming #development #answer

Windows Phone 7 – How to download SMS (text) messages to disk

I need to download some text messages (including date and time and sender information) on my WP7 phone, on to my desktop computer.

Is there defined way?

Answer [by TreyK]: Windows Phone 7 – How to download SMS (text) messages to disk

The fine folks at XDA would probably be more constructive for helping with this specific question.

Th…

Fixed: What font is used on Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8? #solution #it #fix

What font is used on Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8?

What font is used for the interface in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8? Is this font free to use?

Answer [by grawity]: What font is used on Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8?

What font is used for the interface in Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 Dev Preview?

For their Metro design language, Microsoft use fonts from the Segoefamily. Windows Phone 7 uses…