So over this past weekend I participated in my first and I believe Tucson’s first hackathon. Overall, it was an awesome experience and I met some really cool and interesting people. I saw some cool hacks/apps created in a short amount of time. Tucson desperately needs this kind of curation of tech and tech culture. To be honest, I had no idea that so many like-minded people called Tucson home.

However, in contrast to the awesomeness of the event, I can say with complete honesty, I failed at the hackathon. I failed hard. This is partly the reason I am writing this, so I can look back and remind myself what not to do in the future.

What I wanted to detail in these upcoming posts was how I implemented a paginated view for the “card deck” on each platform. To sum it up, Android and iOS provided better better controls out of the box to implement this functionality. Windows Phone 7 was kind of a pain so we will start with that first. So what was the end goal? The end goal was a fluid image-gallery type experience that allowed users to swipe through the cards with touch rather than buttons. This type of functionality is extremely common on mobile apps so I imagined there would be built in controls in the frameworks. Well I was half right..

Today I started my porting the simplest app in my catalog over to iOS. The app is Critter Cards- Toddler. Admittedly, it is not a complex app, just flash cards with the ability to overwrite the built in narration with your own. So I need a control for displaying a launcher of sorts to choose your deck, a control to navigate between cards and some pages to set settings.

As of today I have completed the initial design of the front page of launcher icons for navigating around the app. So how did the process compare from WP7 -> Android -> iOS? Let’s take a look.

This is the look I wanted to achieve on each platform-

WP7

Since this was the first platform I started on, I decided the launcher should be “metro” grid of tiles to choose your card deck. This is where the power of UIElements and DataTemplates in SilverLight and WPF comes in handy, and made this task really simple. See below for an example-

First post! I went all out and started an Octopress based blog. This was partly just to challenge myself as Octopress is not your average wordpress blog. However, if you are used to the command line and somewhat familiar with ruby or git, you will feel right at home. Check it out here. The theme I am using Slash. Anyways why this blog? I wanted to provide a place for me to organize my thoughts and ramblings on programming, working in IT and specifically working IT in non-desirable places, like a basement. So I don’t know how much I will have to say, however I will post as I learn new and cool things about my adventures in coding and/or life. Enjoy!