Android Big Tic Tac Toe ported to Windows Phone 7
We are proudly announcing: we’ve started to provide Windows Phone 7. Our Android Big Tic Tac Toe was ported to Windows Phone 7 and soon be published on Microsoft Marketplace. See demo below.
CoverFlow – style control for blackberry
HelloWebApps CoverFlow is highly customizable CoverFlow-like component for Blackberry devices. It doesn’t require OpenGL capabilities for Blackberry device, so it works with Blackberry OS versions earlier, than 5.0. It has been tested to work properly on Blackberry OS 4.6.
This component released under open source MIT license, so everybody could use it for free and modify it for thier needs. Current status of the component is alpha-version (API could change in the future) and it is under active development now. This article demonstrates component’s main features. You can see sources of demo application that uses most of control’s features (CoverFlow-based ToDo manager).
Producing JSON from Entity Framework 4.0 generated classes
Currently our favorite web-development framework is ASP.NET MVC 2.0 and out favorite ORM technology is EntityFramework. ASP.NET MVC is first web-framework shipped by Microsoft where View and Controller is really separated, so we are taking all advantages from this. We are using Controller and depending on “call extension” (no extension, .xml, .json, .xlsx, .html) we are producing different output, for example:
/User/Details => produces render of whole page with masterpages, controls, etc
/User/Details.xml => responds with data returned by Controller and serialized to XML
/User/Details.json => responds with data returned by Controller and serialized to JSON
/User/Details.xlsx => responds with a generated Excel file with output of Cotroller
/User/Details.html => returns strict html to represent just data returned from Controller
This approach allows to use one Controller and produce different views. You can read about more about implementation of extension driven approach here => http://icanhascode.com/2009/05/simple-ror-respond_to-functionality-in-aspnet-mvc/
But we faced problems most users facing while using EntityFramework and who needs to return JSON response from objects generated by EntityFramework. Read more 
Animating favicon with jQuery.favicon plugin
In my last post about Dynamic favicon generation I’ve described how to use jQuery.favicon, to dynamically draw favicon content. In his post I’d like to introduce new feature of jQuery.favicon plugin – jQuery.favicon.animate(), that simplifies animation of favicon and allows customization of each frame via HTML5 Canvas
Dynamic favicon generation with Javascript
In my recent post about Browser tab’s icons I’ve come across nice idea of Remy Sharp (@rem). He suggests to use HTML5 Canvas and draw current day on Google Calandar icon. It’s a great feature to have on board so I’ve added it to my jQuery.favicon plugin.
So, how it works? Read more
Browser tab’s icon as notification tool
In this world web browser became more then just a tool to view a web page. Now it’s like an operation system. We can see all this modern web applications like Gmail, Twitter, Facebook. We have them all opened in separate browser tabs. But what happen when we leave the tab? Web application is still working, but we can’t see what happens there. So web developers use sounds and window.title to notify user that something happend (new chat message, email, tweet, etc.). But the thing is that modern user has a lot of opened tabs in his browser and each tab became too narrow to see that title has changed. So user gets confused when checks all the tabs to find out “who made that sound”. So what can help our users?
iPhone face detection demo
Face detection and recognition quick demo
mDNS Implemetaion for BlackBerry
mDNS is an UDP multicast version of DNS protocol, mainly used by Apple as service discovery protocol. So it’s used by iPhone with no problems. When I started creating BlackBerry version of it I’ve faced several challenges.
Firefox 3.x: CSS tables render bug
Some time a go, when we started mShop product we decided to use CSS tables layout and then create special optimized version for IE 7 as it doesn’t support CSS tables. But today I’ve noticed interesting behaver of FF 3.x. When page with CSS tables is rendered at first time, all CSS cells behave like block elements and after refresh everything backs to normal.
After some googling I’ve found same problem and solution, but it didn’t help in my case, so I’ve continued my research. In the end I’ve come to conclusion that the cause of this behaver was CSS property min-width set to one of table cells, so I’ve removed it and after that I can’t reproduce the bug.
