Animate tile in Start Menu - windows-phone-7

I would like to know if it is possible to animate the tile in the start menu of the WP7, much like the tile "foto's" is animated, or if this is restricted to Developers for Windows only ( I can image battery life etc. are taken in mind by the developers ). I have already looked at the ScheduledAgent, but the periodic agents typically run every 30 minutes, and only when the app is running in the background.
So, anyone knows if this is possible, or am I just wasting my time looking for a way?

Further to the answer from #Ku6opr - you can create an animated tile without push notifications, or background agents. The application tile supports 'background' content. If you specify this, your tile will flip periodically while on the start screen to reveal the other side. Details of how to use this feature are found on MSDN.

No, you can't. You can change Tile only from: running application, Background Agent (30 min interval), Tile scheduler (1 hour minimum interval) or Push Notification (updates are not guaranteed)

Related

Prevent Dota 2 HUD from scaling

I was wandering if there is any way (maybe a console command) to keep the "external" size of the in game HUD unchanged when a hero acquires new abilities. e.g. when Tusk gets his Aghanim's scepter and gains Walrus Kick the abilities become 5 and the HUD resizes to accommodate 5 abilities instead of 4. Can I stop that? I have seen it happening in the HUD used for the TI broadcasted maps where the abilities' icons shrink, instead of the UI expanding.
I have gone through the list of console commands but the number is so vast and the documentation so poor that I couldn't find anything!
Thanks!

How to optimize Raster (Rasterizer Thread) as seen in the Chrome Dev Tools Performance tab?

I'm trying to understand why these Raster processes have such a long duration, but I'm finding the documentation to be sparse.
From other people's questions, I thought it might be related to the images being painted, or javascript listeners, or elements being repainted due to suboptimal CSS transitions but removing the images, javascript, and CSS transitions didn't do the trick.
Would someone be able to point me in the right direction? How do I narrow down which elements or scripts are causing this long process? It's been two days and I'm making no headway.
Thanks!
The "Raster" section represents all activities related to painting. Any HTML page, after all, is an "image". The browser converts your DOM and CSS to the image to display it on a screen. You can read about it here. So even if you don't have any image on the page you still would see as a minimum one rasterizer thread in "Raster" which represents converting your HTML page to the "image".
By the way, Chrome(79.0.3945.79) provides some information if an image was initiated this thread.
Also, you can enable "Advanced paint instrumentation" in "Performance" settings to see in more details what is going on when the browser renders an image
After spending some hours with the same, I believe that the 4 ugly green rectangles called "Rasterize paint" are a bug in the profiler DISPLAY. My suspicion based on:
1) The rectangles start some senconds after the profiler started. NOT after the page loaded, so it seems it is bound to the profiler, not to the page.
2) The starting point of the rectangles depends on the size of the profiling timeframe. If I capture 3 seconds it starts after ~2 secs, if I capture 30 seconds it starts after ~20 secs. So the "cpu load increase" depends on the time you press the stop button.
3) If I enable "Advanced paint instrumentation" as maksimr suggested, I can click on the rectangle to see the details, and the details show ~0.4 ms events in the "Paint profiler", just like before the death rectangles started. (see screenshot, bottom right part)
3b) I even can click on different parts of the same rectangle, resulting different ~0.4 ms long events in the Paint profiler...

Scene2d tables turn black on one phone after a few game resets

My game screen uses both Scene2d and normal libgdx sprites. I use scene2d for the pause menus which contain some tables and textbuttons. All is ok on the pc. All is ok also on two mobile phones I'm testing the game on, but I have a pb on a third phone. It seems that after a restart or two of the game level all the scene2d elements that are supposed to appear on the screen have turned black. They are still responsive, meaning the buttons do what they are supposed to do, they move rotate and execute properly but they are all black. what could be the issue here? I don't have this pb on the pc or on the other phones.
What you describe is a symptom of using a texture across a reset of the OpenGL context. Your app contains pointers, in the Libgdx Texture objects, into OpenGL state, and when the OpenGL device is given over to another app, your pointers become stale.
LibGDX generally does a good job of restoring state across simple resets, but there are several ways to cause problems. The most common is to (1) store LibGDX OpenGL state (e.g., a Texture) into a static property. The JVM will get reused across application instances, so LibGDX cannot tell that this static object has become stale. See http://bitiotic.com/blog/2013/05/23/libgdx-and-android-application-lifecycle/ for details on how to trigger the different lifecyles.
See In game Images disappear on Android device if i run from widget, but not when I install apk first time and Android static object lifecycle
I know that there is already best answer for this post, but maybe this will somehow help you too:
Texture is not displayed in the application
the main idea is to dispose your assets and load them again when application becomes visible

XNA windows phone 7 how to create a load page?

How to I create a load page?
Such as a progress bar or some sort of control that will display on how long will it take to load?
Progress bars are generally not a good idea unless you can with a high degree of certainty know exactly how long something is going to take.
Instead creating some sort of loading image is generally a better idea and I'm sure you've seen the switch in the industry to this style. (A spinning circle on the tab in Google Chrome for example when the page is loading, or the rotating circles in the bottom right of the screen for most Xbox 360 games).
As for how to do it, there isn't a lot of complexity to it. Your game runs in a loop and most long running things like loading happen in the background so all you have to do is keep checking in every Update call if that thing you're waiting on is still happening. If it is continue showing the "loading" graphic. Ideally you'd be handling that with some sort of game state indicator so that all your game has to do is switch to a "loading" or "waiting" state and the game would automatically drawing the standard waiting/loading screen for your game.
For more understanding of Game State I've got a fairly lengthy tutorial that you can read on the subject called "The State of Things"

Most useful animation in web or desktop application

Many animation effects are simply gratuitous eye candy -- however, there are situations where animations effectively communicate to the user what's going on.
What are some of your favorite uses for animations, and what specific animation type would you use?
E.g.: Animate items downwards when a new item is inserted into a list
I really like Google Chrome's use when a file is being downloaded. It's hard to describe, but, it's a circle that fills like a pie chart as the download progresses, and the circle is overlaid with the icon for the file you're downloading. Very slick.
One example I can think of is the animation used by operating systems when you minimize a window.
Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X animate the window going down to the taskbar (or the Dock in OS X) to show the user where the window went. Otherwise novice users that hit minimize by accident might have trouble getting the window back.
I don't use linux, but I'm pretty sure it does the same. I'm not being discriminative =)
From enjoy3d.com
enjoy3d.com http://worldsware.com/images/mouse.gif
Press your mouse button
and move to look around.
There is a very nice paper by Ben Bederson and Angela Boltman in which they evaluate the impact of animation on user’s ability to build a mental map of the information in the space:
Does Animation Help Users Build Mental Maps
of Spatial Information?
I believe that all visual changes should not be swift. Be it status notification, window maximized/minimized, or data deleted/added. I cannot find a reference, but usually it is recommended that all animations should not be around 1-2 seconds, matching human's response time.
My favorite uses of animation is not in a commercial software (though Apple is good at this) but a research paper called Phosphor which I consider one of the great UI ideas that have not yet implemented into major operating systems.
AJAX loading gifs - you've got to have an indicator that you definitely registered an event and you're doing something about it
Progress bars are nice for things that take more than a moment or two, but only when they are accurate. An inaccurate progress bar is worse than none, in my opinion.

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