Smart home application - user-interface

I'm planning to code a smart home application for touch sensitive windows 10 tab (already I have) which can hang in wall.
I need:
Weather API data viewer, Alarm manager, Scheduled music player for morning and evening, Google calendar synced event viewer, Arduino sensor reading (home temp and humidity) .
I tried and designed a interface using C# and WPF. But my goal couldn't reached due to sorted issues below. [See attached image.]
C# - Not enough support for UI. No transparent/ no curve buttons /etc.
WPF - Less supportive for some extension and discontinued product.
ASP.Net - Less knowledge and I believe mp3 player and other extra sensor readings will not success through this.
So I need to know is there any specific softwares for designing Windows os smart home applications. Please help on this.

Try Flutter or Electron.
Flutter was designed by google it is opensource and runs on all operating systems.
I think it uses dart as a main language.
Electron on the other hand uses mostly HTML, CSS and Javascript. But it should be easier to design the user interfaces. For example Discord and VS Code were built using Electron.

Related

New Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight App

I am writing a new Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight App BUT WITHOUT MVVM/MVC.
I have to implement Push notifications to this app sooner.
This app must run in the background
Will this be possible without MVVM/MVC?
Also, please tell me where from to learn MVVM/MVC from beginning?
It's definitely possible to develop apps that do not follow the MVVM or MVC patterns. You can develop your apps however you like; these are merely architectural patterns that many programmers follow when developing Windows Phone apps. MVVM, in particular, is suited to Windows Phone app development (and WPF) because of the data binding mechanism provided by XAML.
For example, you might choose to write your code entirely in code-behind (*.xaml.cs) files and subscribe to events directly on the view. This might be fine for small apps, but may not be suitable for larger apps, especially when there are multiple people working on different parts of the app (e.g. a designer working in XAML and a coder working in C#) and when testability is extremely important.
I won't provide links to learning materials for MVVM/MVC; a mere bing search results in an abundant amount of information at your fingertips. Good luck!

DJI Phantom API or hackable procedure

Maybe I have't looked hard enough, but I spent yesterday googling for a bit and found no relevant projects on hacking the DJI Phantom Drone in order to create new coordinating apps. This is besides the app for coordination DJI currently uses for their drone. I'm trying to see if there's a way to communicate with the Drone with a specific protocol in order to accept a set of procedures.
Any help would be awesome,
Thanks.
Great News for you and all us Droneys! DJI has launched their SDK since you asked this question. They released it last November and you can now apply for a license and write your own apps for the Phantom2 Vision+ using their SDK.
Check it out at https://developer.dji.com/
I am already building a project using the SDK - you can follow my progress on my blog / product site. I will also try to update it with good DJI related development links and tips.
This post is old but I think it is good to leave a foot print for others :)
There is this new company called NVdrones, which created a peace of hardware that you can attach to any drone (you need physical access to the flight controller), and once you do that you can use their SDK (Arduino, Java, Android and Javascript) to write your app without the need of hacking, soldering or anything else. It is just plug and play.
Another benefit is that you are not locked with a specific drone (DJI SDK or 3DRobotics SDK), you can use the board on anything you want. Which gives lots of flexibility.
The developer site is http://developers.NVdrones.com
Hope this helps.
This is a great topic!
You could check how to hack your copter here: https://github.com/flyver/Flyver-SDK/wiki/-2.2--How-To:-Flyver-Hack-a-Copter
By opening the drone, taking out the original controller, soldering a few wires and sticking an Android phone to it, you will have the ability to program your Phantom in a modern manner with an open source SDK and application based development. This means that you could add computer vision to it, automation or additional hardware. You could also use smartphones, web and other interactive devices for remote controlling the copter instead of using the standard remote controls.
The Phantom, however, is offcenter balanced due to the fact that most people use gimbal with it. Without the gimbal is a lot less stable from my experiments so you will have to put some extra work in center balancing it.

Windows Phone 7 : developing UI without xml

We are developing an Windows Phone 7 mobile application. We are new to this platform. In our application, screen will be dynamically generated. So we would like to render the UI
programmatically - without using any xmls. Please share some example code or resource or links, wherein UI is rendered programatically. In case of iPhone development, we referred "UICatalog" example. We are looking for similar type of example
It is possible to render the UI in code, though the examples of doing so are few and far between because it's a rare thing to do with XAML-based technologies like Silverlight and WPF. Instead, you tend to find that developers use to databinding and data templates to present generated content.
If you are porting an application from iPhone to Windows Phone (or even if you're just starting from scratch), the best thing to do is to firstly make sure that you understand the development platform. There are some great resources for this on MSDN here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/wp7trainingcourse_wp7gettingstarted_unit.aspx
The next thing to do is to make sure that you understand the Metro design language that Windows Phone is built upon. Here are some great resources in that respect:
Metro Design Language for Windows Phone 7
Microsoft design .toolbox
From Transportation to Pixels
Once you've reached this point, you will most likely realise that your current approach isn't the right one and switch to a databinding and data templates approach :)
If you are doing an iPhone port, it's important to realise that the design approach is different for Windows Phone applications. Content is King, so work out what that is, put it "front and centre", and trim away every thing else.
I hope this helps.
You may want to investigate the XNA path for Windows Phone development.
Developing with SilverLight but choosing not to use the most useful features of the platform is probably not going to be fun.

Windows Phone 7 Scoring provider

I am not too sure if this question is suited for this forum. If not, please let me know and I'll delete this.
I wanted to figure out the "easiest" way of keeping online score for a game or quiz on Windows Phone 7. Currently, I am not looking for things like Achievements etc. I know XBOX live provides a lot of stuff on these grounds, but it is not open for all.
I want to submit the score, and maintain the top 200 (may be less) odd scores. I am too lazy to write my own services and host it and go through the full maintenance cycle for that scoring system. Can someone point out some really good and easy to use + reliable services that I can use?
The product offered by Mogade has a lot of the features you have asked for:
Real time stats
Achievements
Logging
Javascript leaderboards & Facebook pages
Always free
No branding requirements
It's a very streamlined library where you only need to set up the bare essentials to get it working as all of the heavy lifting is managed for you automatically, allowing you to focus more time on the development of your game.
briansoli has written a fairly straightforward tutorial on how to get a leaderboard working with in a Windows Phone 7 game.
I hope you find this useful, let us know how you get on with it!
Microosft have just released a new toolkit called the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games. This should help you out with quite a bit.
Have a look at this Cloud Cover Show, Episode 52 - Tankster and the Windows Azure Toolkit for Social Games
The toolkit enables unique capabilities for social gaming prerequisites, such as storing user profiles, maintaining leader boards, in-app purchasing, and more. The toolkit also comes complete with reusable server side code and documentation, as well as Tankster, a new proof-of-concept game built with HTML5

Windows Phone 7 Samples

What Windows Phone 7 demo/reference applications have you seen which really made you interested in developing for the platform?
I know of Scott Gu's Twitter example and Foursquare. Also see here for MIX10 demo apps.
Other than developing games and re-creating functionality already present on other mobile platforms (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android), is there any good reference material and business benefits of developing for Windows Phone 7? Does the Silverlight dev environment really offer an advantage over what is already out there? My gut feeling is that this is definitely the case, but it will take some time for the platform to establish itself, if it does.
You can find a lot of examples and reference applications here www.reddit.com/r/wp7dev/ or search using the hashtag #wp7dev on twitter (full disclosure - some of my examples appear there).
There a examples of what people are openly working on, but one can assume it is a lot more - hopefully this is useful, as it shows what can be done, or is being done on the platform.
As a novice developer, other phone platforms came with a lot of overhead required to build even the simplest application. The fact that XNA will be available for game development is a huge thing for me, it means I can create simple games for me and my friends without having to spend time learning a new language or setting up awkward SDK's and deployment settings.
More advanced developers may scoff at that, but development tools that are already being used that can work right out of the box for the intended platform is important for the hobbyists. I think this will open up a huge arena for homemade games and apps just like XNA did for 360 development.
It should also help sales. I will buy a Windows 7 phone because of this, and I can imagine others will do the same. As it stands, I am going to port my existing XNA games over so I can play them on the go. It will be cool to show people at the office, airport, etc. projects I have made right on the spot, and even give them the option to play if they have the right hardware.

Resources