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Chandamama iPhone app

Download  from app store here

Yesterday night I submitted an iOS app to Apple for approval, it’s first time ever I have experienced nerdgasm!
Chandamama is one of my favorite comic and I still read it when find old issues, I’m really excited to write an App for it. The first version has support for three languages that is Kannada, Hindi and English, it allows user to read Chandamama archives from 1949 which is exciting the best part is the will be available for free, yes you heard it correctly it is going to be FREE. Basically as C# developer I should live up to Microsoft in naming the product, so I named it “Chandamama Archive Reader”!
I have posted the screenshots of app just give sense of what we are going to get on iPhone/iPod.
The Home screen where you get select language.

List of Issues of Comic all the way from 1949!

Comic View, where we can navigate through pages by swiping on screen and you have option to use Next and Previous Button to navigate and Pinch in and out to zoom

When, you tap on Comic view it enters to full screen mode so you can continue reading comic without  any visual distractions. (I love these vintage ads on comic )
 
You possibly may think that App looks very boring, well, I have few tasks lined up for future release, as one of famous software quote “If always think of future, you never going to release V1.0” so that justifies everything.
If everything goes well it will be available in App store by end of October!

Weekend! There's an app for that

Well I did not had plans for this weekend when woke up on Saturday afternoon morning, Okay, I thought lets write some code, create an app for iPhone. But what app? Apple says "There's an app for that"

I was like without any idea for hours, just thinking what to create. Finally I decided to create an app for StackExchange (Stackoverflow) API. 

Already few fellow community developer listed there apps on the StackApps, but I had whole different idea for my app like. Monitor latest updates, reputation change and answers for your question. I haven't listed it on stackapps yet, it needs still more work of another weekend. Here I have included some screenshots of it.

Homescreen show the list users, you are interested to get the updates for.

When you click the "+" sign on the right top corner, you will be presented a form to include new user.

After you entered user id, app will fetch details from server

Finally, you can see user name and avatar.

Still work in progress you may see lot improvements in later days and I'm planning to include Push notification support

Hello iPhone

Since I bought MacBook Pro all I had in mind is to build an iPhone app, I knew it is not going to be easy (not impossible either).  I had two options to build an app, Objective-C with Cocoa touch or MonoTouch.

Being a C Sharp developer the choice was obvious MonoTouch, but soon after I started using it, I felt that it is not way to go I mean MonoTouch is great simple to use and just feels homely, the point I want make here is that before using it have understanding how an iPhone app works read programming guides and at least use objective-c and XCode for initial learning for about week or two it really helps understanding iPhone app architecture and most libraries. Later it’s an easy ride with MonoTouch and C#.  (I found this link in Stackoverflow.com, which one to choose MonoTouch or CocoaTouch)

My first app was “Hello iPhone” (following tradition here), but I have uploaded DirnkMixture app an example from the “Head First iPhone Development” book but developed in Mono.

Single Line saves the day !

In my recent project, I was assigned to solve the bug reported from customer. Okay let me brief you about the application, its PC application for Ultrasound scanning exclusively used to scan Bladder, when technician scans the bladder transducer captures the 24 scanned images. Mean time we have to show the progress of image capture like “Image 1 of 24” so on..

To show the image capture status, we used the ReadComplete event supplied with transducer driver, but the problem was Readcomplete event used to trigger every 5ms, Each time the application handles this event, it processes all the code associated with that event. All other events wait in the queue.

The with event is while our code handles the it, our application does not respond. This caused the huge problem on low speed processor that it did not update Image capture progress.

For solving this issue we almost tried many ways for almost two days, finally we got solution in just a single line! Yes, its just single line solution! The savior is

System.Windows.Forms.Application.DoEvents()

If we call DoEvents in your code, application can handle the other events. For example, if you have a form that adds data to a ListBox and add DoEvents to your code, your form repaints when another window is dragged over it. If you remove DoEvents from your code, your form will not repaint until the click event handler of the button is finished executing.

Happy coding…

Small is good!

It's just been a week I'm using Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2, I already experienced the power of VS2010. It's packed with tons of feature, personally I loved the small features which come very handy while coding as well as while debugging.

When start VS, you see the new shinny and clean WPF shell and here is the first present for you.

You can actually pin the any of the recent projects to start page! This is very useful when want your frequently used projects to stay always on start page

When you open code any of code file you will notice a small dropdown box to zoom your code file it's very handy when we are giving code demo, so we can save lot of click to increase font size, hmm… impressive.

 

Next feature may not be used frequently but it's very useful, it actually allows you to insert file content without actually coping it….

Next feature is my favorite Phil Haack has detailed blog post about it, go check it out..

 

void Main()

Yes, you guessed it write it's yet another coding blog from unknown geekdeveloper who is in love with C# and Visual Studio :P

I started this blogs only to improve skill of explaining technical stuff some time I feel that  I know more than what I’m presenting but unble present those :(

I don't have any clear idea what I'm going to put here, but you may expect some design practices, eureka moments and thing related C# and Visual Studio.