Monday, November 26, 2012

Simon Said in Windows 8

Simon Said was finally ported and released on windows 8. 

A fun simple game of Simon Said and the original one developed for phone and based on Silverlight Simon. Press the start button and follow the series of lights and sounds remembering the sequence. This Simon Said is the original Silverlight Simon written in XAML ported from WPF/Surface/Silverlight and finally to Windows 8 and is a codeplex project for demoing Composite codebase XAML development. The example shows porting of XAML assets, user controls, sound and lookless controls and styles. This version is missing the easter egg on windows phone but has the basic flexibility and contract implementations for windows 8.

Check it out here:

http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/app/simonsaid/21a2c339-4c5a-4d97-ad5a-752b9f37c9c8

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

Application Privacy Policy

Information that is gathered from visitors

In common with other applications, log files, user information and the like unless explicitly stated in an application and approved by the user are NOT stored or cached or collected in any way including details such as the visitor's IP address, browser type, referring page and time of visit.  As a rule my applications use and store information only on the users system or in the users roaming profile provided by the device or account and not accessible to us in any way.  Users data belongs to the user and not ours and therefore not collected.  Since I'm strongly against the miss use of information like this I do my best to protect users of my applications the same way I would want my information protected.

How the Information is used

User information is used by my applications only in the context of the applications and not shared by the application in any way.  Whiles users may choice to share content a user would have to specifically do that with intent and not done automatically by users and generally that is still regarding the sharing of application data and not anything specific to the user that can be shared.

E-mail addresses will not every be sold, rented, leased or viewable to 3rd parties or anyone else by me and as a rule apps don't collect this information. 

Parchment Apps do at times use Advertising controls that may collect generic information about location or preferences used by the application but not user specific information.  If you find evidence that this is not the case please contact me so we can review this and approach Microsoft about how their advertising control working and that I can remove it from the applications. 

In some cases applications will use live id for authentication purposes only to the point of uniquely identifying users.  For example Parchment whiteboard users live id to identify drawing surface data that it is posting to a public web service so users can have others subscribe to white board sessions.  But the live id account information is not stored or used on the service other then the user name for data interchange between two Parchment sessions.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Social Media Online Content Show Integration System for Windows Phone

Building on an app I started for a friend of mine at Microsoft I build out a phone app structure for building fan boy apps that integrates various news feeds, social media and much more. You can do things like pin speed dial to the persons show or follow there news elements. You can pick your favorites and share them on twitter or facebook or email and you then cross post then and even pin them to your home screen. For fun I decided to build the first two around some controversial figures with that the first two are for Glenn Beck and Howard Stern. Here are screen shots from 3 of the series at the bottom of this post. Here are market place links to the first 3 in the series:
Darek Mazzone
Glenn Beck
Howard Stern

Saturday, March 24, 2012

[wire] stone Connect

Every now and then the company [wire] stone flies all its employee's from around the world to Vegas for a conference on team building, communication and improving company processes. [wire] stone is an interactive marketing firm so this year (2012) they decided to do some marketing on themselves from a social media compaign to mobile app apps and other interactive digital experiences. With that in mind I wrote the mobile application 'WS Connect' as a cross browser cross plateform mobile application running on iPhone/iOS, Andriod and Windows Phone. The best part was that it was the same code base on all three platforms.


WS Connect is an HTML based application using the Metro Design Aesthetic and is the same code base on all three platforms. The application uses things like JQuery and Knockout with its HTML and JavaScript to bring in social media data, news, scedule and other conference information. The application works is then hosted locally on the device using an HTML application host framework. On Android and iOS that is PhoneGap and on Windows Phone I used the HTML Application Hosty framework off codeplex.

With the help of CSS Expert Ryan Lane we got the CSS difference between the webkit based browser rendering engines in iOS and Android vs the IE engine entire gone which by itself is an achievement. As to code differences between PhoneGap and the HTMLApplicationHostFramework there was only lines lines of data access code for reading and writing name value pairs that was required. If you manage to find the applications on windows phone, android or the iOS app store you notice you need a registration key to make them work. You will need to contact me for that but here are a few more screen shots.