ppi for Windows 7 phone and tablets - windows-phone-7

I am fairly new at windows 7 graphics creation. My understanding is that all Windows phone 7 and Windows tablet graphics should be created at 96 ppi, not 72 like iPhone and android. Is this correct?
The sample graphics from windows and also another icon pack seem to support this idea as does this article (even though it's older):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/expression/archive/2007/10/31/trick-or-treat-resolution-96-ppi.aspx
Before moving forward, I just want to make sure I don't have any wrong ideas about Windows phone/tablet graphics.
Thanks in advance for any responses!

Sticking to 96dpi shouldn't give you any problems on Windows or Windows Phone 7.
While not a wrong idea about graphics you do potentially have a wrong idea about Windows Phone (7) being comparable to a tablet:
Widnows Phone 7.0 (& 7.1) OS(es) are not and will never be tablet operating systems. All existing Windows based devices which are advertised as "tablets" either run a version of Windows (XP, Vista or 7) or are based on Windows CE.
If you try and create images which you can use across all of them without modification you are likely to run into issues.

Related

Windows 7 and bluetooth 4.0 Smart

I am looking to implement the use of a Bluetooth 4.0 Smart Ready device (Polar H6/H7 Heart Rate Sensors) in my application. I am forced to target Windows 7 OS. However, I'm only seeing Windows 8 support for Smart Ready devices. I will not be able to upgrade clients to windows 8 in order to use these devices.
The first problem I found is that Windows 7 does not even see the device in order to pair with it. This might be the dongle I'm using. I have tried 2 different ones. The first is a CSR V4.0 (I'm not sure the actual model number). The second is StarTech USBBT1EDR4. Both seem to be using a CSR chipsets. Maybe I should try a different chipset based dongle? Such as Broadcom or TI?
I do see and can pair with the device with my Windows 8.1 Surface Pro.
Is there no way to get Bluetooth Smart implementation for Windows 7 OS platform?
I've recently faced the same problems! I need to run an application in o older version of windows (win xp) and I cannot find any support to that with my dongle (one based in broadcom bcm20702).
What I've found is that windows prior to windows 8, has no bluetooth low energy support, so you would not be able to use the windows bluetoth stack, and broadcom doesn't have a sdk for BLE (I've contacted them, and they said it).
So I've looked for other alternatives and BlueGiga bluetooth 4.0 dongle has a C SDK that you can use to develop your applications in Windows XP and 7. In that page (after register) you can find all the documentation you need.
I've also found a C# Wrapper and a Java Wrapper to its API.
Hope it can help.
[EDIT] : just received my dongle, tried it with win XP and it worked. Guess this is a solution for you also!
Strange thing is, I installed windows 10 and I could use bluetooth smart from my Logitech MX master mouse, but I had to go back to windows 7 because of display drivers and now it does not support it anymore. Windows 7 does not support smart bluetooth. It's just a driver I would presume, but Logitech does not provide it.
I find it realy strange that the old bluetooth device in my laptop worked fine with bluetooth smart devices in Windows 10 but in windows 7 it can only connect to plain old bluetooth devices.

Is there anyway for me to create windows 8 apps(for PC and Mobile devices) on mac

I use Mac OSX. I now want to try and develop an app on windows 8 for the Imagine Cup.
But i dont want to switch back to windows.
Is there any way to develop apps for windows 8 from mac?
Preferably free option....
The only available way is to use Virtual Machine because one cannot develop Windows 8 Modern UI app(Windows Store app) even with lower version of windows than windows 8. There are many virtual machines are available for free. Virtualbox maybe a good start.
www.techspot.com/guides/503-windows-8-virtual-machine ,A Tutorial to create vm of windows 8.
Assuming that windows phone is the platform you chose to develop app, again you need windows to create windows phone app.
Kick start your windows phone app development here .
I actually use VMWare on a Mac to do all of my Win32 development on Windows 7 and VS2010.
You will need:
a powerful mac (i7)
lots of RAM (I have 8G, I wish I had 16G)
a 7200rpm HDD or SSD.
With that, it's really great for me. I've been doing this for a few months now without a single kernel panic or blue screen at all.
Note: You cannot really develop for WP7 using this sort of configuration. The WP7 simulator uses VirtualBox, which either runs extremely slowly or not at all in other VMs, based on our experience. Will need a real Windows machine for that ^_^
It's a workable scenario. Good luck!

Windows phone emulator

I want to develop app for windows phone but I got a big problem, my laptop can't run the emulator, after checking the requirements I know that my vga driver doesn't support it. My question is, are there any alternative for windows phone emulator instead of the officially one from Microsoft? Or any other way to tweak it to be run on my laptop? Thanks
From my understanding there isn't any other windows phone emulators. If you can get a hold of a windows phone 7 it would be possible to test on that. You can try to contact a Microsoft windows phone evangelist in your area, the one in my area helped me get a phone to test on.
I am not sure about tweakinging your laptop to get the emulator to work. Is your vga driver up to date? If not maybe try to update it. I know it takes quite a bit of computer power to run the emulator smoothly.
If you wanted you can try to register for a virtual lab, here you remote into a windows machine and are able to build and test on the remote machine, but it is time limted and is usually for a class to learn about it. https://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/EventDetail.aspx?culture=en-US&EventID=1032485600&amp%3bculture=en-US

Windows Phone 7 Emulator runs in slow mode... even tho my system supports VT

Windows Phone 7 Emulator runs in slow mode... even tho my system supports VT
I just updated my Sony Vaio FW21E's bios update, now VT is enabled, but emulator still runs in same old slow mode.
How can I run the emulator in VT mode.
Please advise.
Make sure your system meets the requirements laid out here.
Setup and System Requirements for Windows Phone Emulator
In particular, verify your gpu is being recognised by the emualtor by checking the frame rate counters are visible.
This will not happen if your display driver is not WDDM1.1 compliant and minimum Directx 10.
I also recommend trying a Win7 install on a spare hard disk if you're running Vista. This consistently produces positive results when problems of this nature are reported on hardware compliant systems.
I had this issue on my Mac running bootcamp. I read in some forum what appeared to be the weirdest solution ever.
If I had Netflix open, streaming a movie, my emulator would work perfectly. When I did not, it would just be the slowest thing.
I read somewhere that could be related to drivers and hardware acceleration. So Windows Phone was not 'hardcore' enough to trigger turning on the acceleration on the video card but when you had the streaming ON it was using it, making it fast.
You might try that out... I know it sounds dumb but it worked for me.
The HD3450 should be ok as its a DirectX 10 card I beleive
As said above the card needs to be WDDM1.1
you can check this by running 'dxdiag' in the run or search box in vista. go to 'Display 1' (or just Dispaly) tab, and on the right there will be DDI Version - should be 10, and Driver Model - should be WDDM 1.1.
If its not compliant with WDDM1.1/DX10, it will work ok but you wont get things like aminmations on page transitions etc.

Zune as dev/test for WP7 apps

I have a Windows Phone 7 app to develop as a pet project and was going to get a phone just for testing my application. The app doesn't require calling features, so I was wondering if it would make more sense to get a Zune HD instead of the phone (trying to avoid paying monthly service fees).
In short, how close are the Zune HD and a windows phone 7 for testing simple "lob" type applications that would ultimately be sold as a windows phone 7 app?
This won't work since the apps need to run on the Phone O/S, which does not run on Zune devices. Nice idea though.
The Zune HD is a much slower processor than the Windows Phone 7 CPUs. The Zune HD runs at 600 mHz whereas the Windows Phone 7 devices all run at a gigahertz.
It's also not running the right operating system.
You might be able to test the games on the Zune HD. It uses XNA as does the Phone. The speeds (as above) would be different, but in theory this would work.
One can hope that perhaps a Zune HD2 might be in the works.

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