Gil Fink's Blog : Windows Phone 7

Update Your Windows Phone 7 to Mango Release Today

Gil Fink — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:08:54 GMT

Update Your Windows Phone 7 to Mango Release Today

Two days ago I updated my Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7 device) to the Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) even though the update didn’t arrive to my device from my device carrier. If you ask yourself how I did it, the answer is simple. I used a hack. You can read about this hack in this PC magazine article – How to Force Your Phone to Upgrade to Windows Phone Mango.

Pay attention that it might take a few tries up until this hack will succeed to operate (it took me 5 tries and to other people that I know it even took up to 10 tries). So don’t get frustrated if it doesn’t go on the first attempt (or even in the second or third etc.).

Thanks to Alex for the tip about the hack.

Using The Viewport Meta Tag

Gil Fink — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 18:54:00 GMT

Using The Viewport Meta Tag

Many smartphone browsers support the viewport meta tag which controls the logical dimensions and scaling of the browser’s viewport window. In this post I’m going to describe what is the viewport meta tag and how you can use it in your web pages.

Using The Viewport Meta Tag in my Blog

When I got my HTC HD7 smartphone I wanted to see how my blog is looking in the smartphone’s browser. So I entered my blog’s address and this is how it was rendered in my phone:

The view is not so good since the blog is squeezed and it doesn’t look well at all. So I started to look for a solution and I found the viewport meta tag. The viewport meta tag controls the logical dimensions and scaling of the smartphone browser’s window and tell it that the web page is optimized for mobile. You use the meta tag like in this example:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />

Pay attention that if you use this meta tag there are some smartphones that doesn’t support it!

Now my blog’s display will look like this in my mobile’s browser:

Since my blog is optimized only for desktop view (it is based on Community Server and the theme isn’t optimized for mobile display), then the blog isn’t displayed so well either. So the experiment went wrong but I got to know the viewport meta tag. If you'll look at my blog in your mobile's browser then you'll get the first display (with no viewport meta tag) which let you scan my blog, zoom in and out when you find something interesting.

The Viewport Meta Tag Options

The demo showed only two properties of the viewport meta tag which are the width and initial-scale. There are much more options which are:

width – width of the viewport in pixels. It can also get the device-width (like in the previous example) value which indicates that the viewport should be the current device’s width.
height – height of the viewport in pixels. Like the width it can get the device-height value to take the device’s height.
initial-scale – sets the the initial scaling of the viewport. The 1.0 value displays unscaled web page.
user-scalable – specifies whether the user can scale the web page (zoom in or zoom out). Can get the yes or no values.
maximum-scale or minimum-scale – sets the maximum or minimum scaling for the web page. Can get values between 0.25 to 10.0.

Summary

The viewport meta tag enables the web developers to indicate that the web page they built is optimized for mobile devices. Most of the new devices support it including iPhone, Android, webOS, WP7’s Internet Explorer and more. For further reading about the viewport meta tag you can go to the this link.

MIX11 Second Keynote Session Summary

Gil Fink — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 23:31:53 GMT

MIX11 Second Keynote Session Summary

I’m currently attending the MIX11 second keynote session. Here are some of the things that you might consider to checkout in the following weeks:

The next version of Windows Phone 7 – Mango – is coming
- 16 additional languages will be added in the next version (still without Hebrew)
- More countries will be added for apps creation
- More countries will be added for apps commerce
Mango will include new features like
- Search capability for your installed apps
- Search extras that are connected to you search results
Mango will include support for IE9 as a browser for the phone
- Meaning that the same markup on PC can be viewed in the phone (but will less capability for hardware acceleration)
- HTML5 support included in IE9 and now in the phone browser
Phone integration

Metro UI controls
Live Tiles
Custom ringtones
Sockets
Database
More launchers and choosers
Raw camera access
Raw Compass access
Raw Gyro access

Motion sensor API will be available on Mango
Multi-tasking support in Mango

Fast apps switching
Background: Audio, downloads, alarms etc.
Live Agents in order to save battery

Angry Birds app will be available May 25th
Developer tools for Mango will be available next month

Improved emulator – location, gestures and more
New profiling support (identify hot spots in your app for example)

Performance enhancements in Mango

Scrolling and input
Image decode
Garbage collection
Memory usage

1500 new APIs in Mango. For example

Local SQL CE database
Network sockets support
Silverlight and XNA combination

Silverlight 5 beta is available for download

Hardware decode
Trickplay
Remote controls support
A lot of new APIs such as 3D, Data Binding debugging and more

Kinect Windows SDK is being built and will be available soon

P.S – Every attendee in the conference is getting a Kinect sensor