Coding Magic

Windows Phone SDKs comes with icons that one can also use when developing an app, especially when creating an app bar (aka ApplicationBarIconButton ), These icons are located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\vX.X\Icons\ There are different sets of icons, namely the dark icons set for use with a dark windows phone theme, and light icons set for use with light theme, and there is also vector based icons set. Note: You should only use the icons under the dark folder, during runtime, Windows Phone will automatically put colors on the icons according to the theme selection Always looks at the icons set and see if you can reuse any of the icons before creating yours, chances are high, icons you needs are already there. Below is a snapshot of icons available in SDK v7.1 (32 icons) icons for SDK v7.1 Add there are slightly more icons for SDK v8.0 (37 icons) icons for SDK v8.0 Also, check out how to create an app bar using XAML on MSDN.

If you're a Gmail user, your going to notice that recent changes to the user interface, that's right, there are several tabs now. If you've not seen it, you will soon. Google has decided to roll out the Inbox tabs to all Gmail users. Gmail's welcome message for Inbox tabs I've been a Gmail user since it's early days, and this tabs thingy really makes me uncomfortable, I believe there are others out there that has the same feeling as I am. Fortunately, as of today, there is still a way to disable the tabs. And I'll shows you how to do it. Right after you log in to Gmail, you will be introduce to to the new Inbox interface, where you will see 3 default tabs: Primary, Social & Promotions . The new Inbox tabs You emails will be parked under different tabs, this solely depend on what Google think they should be. (and there's an ads pretending to be an email) Promotions tabs Moving email between tabs You can manually move messag...

Having spend much time switching between Windows, Linux and OS X. I figure my Windows Command Prompt could use a little tweak at least on the PROMPT. Basically from this single line prompt To this (basically making the path section on a separate line than the prompt input) Just like on other platform, the command prompt load it's configuration from the environment variable, and the variable that changes the prompt is "PROMPT".. duh... Head over to configure Environment Variable on Windows and add a new variable to overwrite PROMPT Setting it to $P$G$_$$  should do the trick. You can also modify the prompt using the SETX command to modify the global environment variable. So just type this on a prompt SETX PROMPT   $P$G$_$$ Following is a list of variable that you can use to customize the prompt  $A   & (Ampersand)  $B   | (pipe)  $C   ( (Left parenthesis)  $D   Curren...

Over the past few weeks, I've been focus on doing performance tuning on a iPad app.  A little background of the app It is an business app, doing financial investment. It has lots of moving parts on the GUI, user can drag, slide and flipping, a graph, and lots of numbers and dates. User can play around with different combination of input and see their investment prediction over few years. There were around 50 parameters (or more) that affects actual calculation result. The app has at least 8000 lines of codes just for doing calculation.  The story The Product Owner has been complaining to the team that the app has a serious performance issue. It's sluggish and the financial result does not reflect user's interaction immediately (PO generally don't care how complicate you back-end is). The financial graphs took ~5 seconds to redraw on screen, when user is moving the slider, and they are moving it continuously back and forth. Tools I uses for this task. ...

Recently I've got myself a ExpressCard USB 3.0 controller ( AKE BC398 USB3.0 Card) from ebay for my almost 5 years old Lenovo T400 (amazing machine, it seem to last forever). AKE BC398 ExpressCard The card only cost me around USD $12 from ebay. Installing the card was a piece of cake; just eject the plastic piece from the ExpressCard slot and slot the card in; it fit nicely. It is a 54mm type. 1st think I tried after installing the hardware is plug my USB 3 portable hard drive ( Seagate FreeAgent ) in and copy a large file (a openSUSE iso file ~4.5GB) to the computer's desktop. To my surprise, the speed was slow, I mean snail slow! Even slower then my USB 2 port ~ 10 MB/s. I unplug the portable drive and plug the drive to my USB 2.0 port and it has ~30MB/s speed, copying the same file. After trying with several trick, plug or unplug, give it an external power, driver updates, and even reformat my Seagate FreeAgent drive, but nothing seem to work. I turn to Google...