National Geographic for Windows 8: milestone

National Geographic for Windows 8 reached a milestone today... Its not even a month since it was launched, it has already crossed 10k downloads. A serious bug has caused its ratings to go down but we hope people will like the update that we have added. Hope to see more downloads in the coming month. Thank you all for enjoying this app so far. If you find any bugs or have any suggestions please email us to silverspots@outlook.com

National Geographic for windows 8: Update available

A new update is available for National Geographic for windows 8. Some interesting bugs are fixed. :) We will soon be launching exciting features to it. till then sorry for the inconvenience caused. Keep rating it good. :)

National Geographic for Windows 8: Launch

Happy to launch the new app dedicated for National Geographic lovers. Get all the news, photos and videos from National Geographic.
The killer features include,

1. View latest news from National Geographic.
2. View the picture of the day
3. Set the picture as lock screen background.
4. Check out the videos from National Geographic.
5. view them with in the app.

Get it from here http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/national-geographic-for-windows/329d02e5-806a-45f5-9b62-9bd9f7c324f0

Set your image as lock screen background in Windows 8

Ever wondered how many times we change our wallpapers?? Well I change it everyday! With Windows 8 you can change your lock screen background too. And I can change it everyday because of my App called as National Geographic for Windows 8. And this is how I did it in xaml,

StorageFile file = await StorageFile.CreateStreamedFileFromUriAsync(URI), new Uri(URI),
                RandomAccessStreamReference.CreateFromUri(new Uri(URI)));
            await LockScreen.SetImageFileAsync(file);
            MessageDialog md = new MessageDialog("This image is set as your lock screen background", "Hurray");
            var result = await md.ShowAsync();

this code snippet would set an image from a uri and display a friendly message to the user.
you will have to include
using Windows.Storage.Streams;

using Windows.System.UserProfile;

to use the LockScreen class. LockScreen.SetImageFileAsync accepts a StorageFile object that contains a new image for the lock screen.
Now you can create an app on your own or download my app and get beautiful wallpapers and lock screen backgrounds everyday! Happy Coding!

To embed Youtube videos in Windows 8 xaml

I was making my 5th windows 8 application called National Geographic for Windows 8. The best part of the channel’s info lies in videos and all the major videos are uploaded on  YouTube. Though YouTube exposes all the videos through its feeds, its difficult to embed their video in xaml. Mainly because xaml does not support Flash. Now YouTube supports HTML 5 videos but I was not able to find many such videos. So I thought of going ahead with Flash players in xaml. The trick lied in embedding the player in an Iframe in a WebView.

This is the code snippet,

 str = string.Format(@"<iframe width='{0}' height='{1}' src='{2}' frameborder='{3}'></iframe>", videoView.ActualWidth - 10, videoView.ActualHeight - 10, link, 0);
videoView.NavigateToString(str);

where "link" is my YouTube video url and  "videoView" is my WebView control in the xaml like this

<Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}">
<WebView x:Name="videoView" Grid.Row="2" Margin="120,0,10,90"/>
</Grid>

I just did a bit of styling and here is the output,

Things that I hate in Nokia Lumia 800..

Ever since I got Nokia Lumia 800 I have not stopped admiring it for its cut finishing and smooth touch response. But there are few things that I totally hate. No matter how hard I try I still cannot forget the facts that few things are so complex , rather just not there!

I am a person who loves to change the ringtone everytime a new song is released. But that was until I got Lumia. This phone does not allow the user to set their songs as ringtone. I cannot say that it does not allow completely as we can set the ringtone through Zune.

Steps to set ringtone in Lumia 800,

1.      Start your PC and plug your phone.

2.      Start Zune and search for you song.

3.      Change its genre to ringtone.

4.      Go back to your phones settings and search for your song.

5.      If you find it there then you are lucky and can set it as ringtone.

6.      If not then you have to “understand” that the song which you have selected must have been greater than 1 mb. Argh!!!

Steps to set ringtone in any other phone

1.      Search your favourite song and go to options

2.      Set as ringtone!!!

Oh I miss my old phone for this simplicity!! On top of it I thought of ending this problem and creating my own application that would simply set the ringtone without going to zune….To my surprise the classes are not exposed, the music file is not exposed!!!!! Why on earth did Microsoft do this!

Another thing that I really hate is not being able to use mobile tethering or sharing the internet connection with other devices. After a lot of searches on forums I found that it is not a windows phone 7 problem as its not available only in Nokia Lumia 800!!

These are few moments when I hate myself for buying this phone. I am otherwise a Microsoft fan and a pro Microsoft person but few things like these makes me crazy.

Our first WP7 application-PicLabs is live!

I was busy all these days creating a new application for Windows Phone 7..and I am so happy to announce that it is live! The app is called as PicLabs and is a photo editing tool. You can even post your edited photos on Facebook. Try it from here,
PicLabs on WP7 Market Place or check out the QR code