Porting Week View to Windows Phone 8.1 and testing of ‚Cortana‘

As written, I have started to port my app Week View to windows phone 8.1. The API changed completely so I have to rewrite some parts of the code – porting from WP 7.x to 8.0 was much simpler to do. 🙂

One of the nice features of windows phone 8.1 is that the user can select a background image which „shines through“ the tiles, pinned to the start screen.

Week View does not use one of the templates, which are provided by windows 8.x (and now also windows phone 8.1) It creates it’s live tile dynamically. To support „background translucency“ the live tile needs to be saved as .png image with transparent background.

This is, how the result looks like.  The Week View live tile is below the build in calendar live tile…which still only shows 1 appointment.

WeekView81_WithBackgroundImage

According to the Build presentations windows phone 8.1 supports even larger live tiles – the same thing as windows 8.x – that’s what I will evaluate next. 🙂

As you can see on the screenshot there also is a „Cortana“ Icon – this is the electronical personal assistant for windows phone 8.1, quite similar to Siri from IPhone but much better. 😉

Of course I had to try it out. When you start it for the first time, you need to sign in with your widows live account, which I did. I was asked for my birth date, seems I did not store this in my windows live account.

I was asked how, cortana should call me in the future.

Cortana_1 Cortana_2

The next screen shows some examples, what you can ask cortana like „find next bars“ 😉 – maybe a bit early since it’s 10am, when I am writing this.

When you click „show more“, you can get many more examples, what cortana can do for you and *tataaaa* without changing any code: Apps that support voice commands – like Week View – are automatically integrated in cortana. 🙂

Cortana_3

This was nice to see. 🙂

Btw. this already works in windows phone 8.0 – you can say „start week view and show the next appointment“. The phone will start week view and read the next appointment to you.

But it’s cool to see this integrated in cortana automatically without any code changes. 🙂

Von admin | 4. April 2014 | Apps |

2 Gedanken über “Porting Week View to Windows Phone 8.1 and testing of ‚Cortana‘”

    1. admin Beitrags Autor

      Ich bin hierzu im Kontakt mit MS Support und berichte auf der Einstiegsseite meines Blogs über den weiteren Verlauf.
      Ich möchte Sie auch gerne darum bitten mich zu unterstützen, indem Sie mir mitteilen, wann das Problem das 1. mal auftrat, ihre Live ID und ob Sie die App im Rahmen einer Promotion erworben haben oder ob diese „normal“ gekauft wurde. Diese Daten werden von MS Support benötigt und ich möchte diese gerne weitergeben.