Problem
Sometimes images look nice on a regular computer screen, but when used in your Windows Phone application they become ugly. This effect is most often seen on gradients and images with smooth coloring. In gradient images you’ll start to see stripes and bands. It looks like the colors in the image don’t blend anymore.
Below are the 32bit and 16bit versions of the same images. Notice the banding on the right one.
Cause
This problem may be caused by a setting in your application or just by screen of the phone itself. It occurs when a 32bit image is shown on a 16bit screen. Because there are way more shades of colors available in 32bit images than in 16bit images, you’ll start to see these artifacts when the
depth doesn’t match the screen.
Solution
The solution is relatively simple. Just scramble the pixels a bit to make the colors look like they blend. This process is called
dithering. Maybe you’ll remember, back in the days with Windows 3.11, you often saw ‘gradients’ in images with only two colors. Starting with 1 color and along the image there appeared more and more pixels of a different color.
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Interested in learning more about game programming with XNA or building applications for Windows Phone 7? Two free all-day events are coming to Phoenix in May that you can attend to learn more. These events are always a ton of fun with some talks on the different technologies, labs, and hands-on time to actually build a custom game/application. Did I mention that there will be prizes given out and free food as well? Register at the links below and I’ll look forward to seeing you there!
- XNA Game Development with Dan Wahlin, Spike Xavier, Rico Rodriguez, Lou Prado, and Ryan Plemons, May 5th, Tempe, AZ.Register
- Business Application Development with Joseph Guadagno, May 12th, Chandler, AZ. Register
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When you create a background agent for Windows Phone 7 there are a couple of important details you must be aware of:
- The total scheduled time for the agent to execute is 25 seconds, if you exceed it the agent will be killed by the scheduler.
- The max amount of memory available is 6 MB, if the agent allocates more the agent will be, again, killed.
- With Visual Studio debugger attached these limits are disabled.
An agent is killed silently and after two killing operations the scheduler will automatically disable it and your user probably will start wondering why your wonderful tile doesn’t work as expected.
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Yesterday I recorded a screencast to demonstrate how to colorize images in a Windows Phone 7 application using Expression Blend 4. In Silverlight or WPF I use a shader to colorize images, but because shaders aren’t available in the same way in Silverlight for Windows Phone I had do come up with a different technique. In this tutorial I show how to use application bar icons as an opacity mask on rectangles. I set the fill brush of these rectangles to the default phone accent brush.
Here’s the video:
colorizing images using expression blend
Intro
The
Technical Certification Requirements for Windows Phone 7 applications state the following:
5.5.2 – Content and Themes
Application content, such as text and visual elements, must be visible and legible regardless of the phone theme. For example, if the phone theme changes from black background to white background, the text and visual elements of your application must be visible or legible.
This means that everything in you application, including images, should be well visible in the dark and light theming of the phone. Handling dark/light support is very easy.
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I did some designing for a Windows Phone 7 App this week. I wanted to test some graphics using the accent colors. I’ve saved the color swatches I use.
If you’re using Photoshop or Illustrator and would like to use them too, you can download them here:
Today my new app was published to the Windows Phone Marketplace. The application shows a big red button. When this button is pressed a quote from the movie and TV series of
New Kids is played.
In this I application I wanted to try a few things. First, I wanted to see how to create a trial version of an application with possibilities to buy the app. Next I added a couple of behaviors to make it very easy to share a link to the application in various ways. The main goal of all these is ease of use for the developer and reusable. For example, a lot of times you’ll need a link to the marketplace, navigate to a URL or let the enduser write a review.
Another thing I would like to build is a localized app. The first version of this app is in Dutch only. I’m working on the German version. There will be an English version too, although this will contain the Dutch quotes.
Trial version
For the trial version of the application I wanted to show a MassageBox after a few taps on the button. The MessageBox should have a link to the marketplace to directly buy the app.
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