Back in 2013, for the first time I have seen the heavy air pollution caused by forest burning and start to hear "Haze" often from the news broadcasting companies and over social media. I have never knew the dangers and side effects of the haze on human lives and especially on our health. While I was away from the affected area and I was spending my days and nights far from the people who suffer from the polluted air, I have decided to start developing a simple application on Microsoft Windows Phone platform to display the latest updates, so the people can adjust their daily activities and take necessary precautions.

In the beginning getting the data was not simple and I always had my worries about getting reliable data for my app. But in the same days, I get an opportunity to know a group of motivated people at Evozi who have been working and dedicating their time to build an API to deliver seamless data and they agreed to give me an exclusive permission to use their back-end service with my new upcoming application. In the beginning the structure of the application was as simple as it only display the air pollution and weather details of a single location and allow the users to choose a different location from the list.

In past decade with improvements in internet infrastructure and enhancement of internet browsers and advances in the web technologies, the web design and development industries have changed and no longer designing a website is as simple as designing a plain page with Microsoft Expression Web or Adobe Dreamweaver.

During the past couple of years we have seen incredible improvement in website designs thanks to HTML5 and CSS3 and of course creativity and hard work of the designers and developers in the web community. Nowadays, website design and development is not same as before and no one starts any web project from scratch as there are many frameworks, UI kits, and even ready to use Content Management Systems (CMS) out there which can be used easily. The website design and development is transformed from designing the front-end from an empty paper to ready to use UI kits and UI frameworks and the backend development from coding in notepad to just running installation.php.

The new modern website is all about integration with services, social networks and other websites. Most of modern websites somehow preferred to use other services and websites instead of developing the very same feature the other offers. For example, most of website due to high interactivity of social networks, they prefer to have the comment section provided by Facebook and Disqus. By using their comment plugin, no longer they have to be worried about handling the user data, comment data and even analytics and most importantly the maintenance.

In most of the mobile and tablet application that we use every day we can see the application notifications and news services which helps the developers and data providers to be more engaged with their users and make it much more pleasing experience while using the application. These notifications can be categorized to few types base on the way they are working.

The first type and most expensive type is push notifications which usually hosted on a cloud service and pushed to user mobile device by special event which triggers on specific time or happening. These notifications mostly pushed from a web or cloud service to the mobile device and it would increase the cost as the number of the users grow.

The second type of notifications are less flexible as the it only triggers when the users open the application and it makes a request to the server or web service to retrieve the unread messages. This method also requires a database and web service to transfer the messages to the application. With using this method the developer also can keep track of the users and the notifications.

The last type is the most easiest and cheapest among other types of notifications. This method is very similar to the second type of the notifications and basically it’s a simple news or message delivery where it trigger by lunching the application and retrieve all the existing messages and display it to the user.

It’s been a long time I had an idea to turn my coke (coca cola) addiction to a fun and educating application where you can store the history of the cokes you have ever drank and in return get a full statistics of how much sugar and calories you got from the drink.

I though for long time that it might be a good idea for those who need to keep track of their health issues like the people with diabetes or other sicknesses and for those who are healthy and living a healthy life to keep an eye on the calories they get from each drink. So they can do more exercise to burn the calories and maintain their healthy life style.

As for me and I think quite number of the developers, drinks with sugar like Coke is essential when our brain ran out of the juice. It’s like having a nitrous on your car and when you feel like falling behind, just get a shot of N₂O into your engine and get an instant boost.

With saying all of that, I always wanted to build something for fun use and also make it useful. The good news is that I just started building the web-service powering this app idea and hopefully in next few days I can show you something cool.

Cheers

Last week I attended to Windows Phone 7 Development workshop at Taylor’s University which was from Nokia Developers and Microsoft Malaysia. The event starts with an introduction about Windows Phone 7 platform and its amazing features. The first feature and the most unique one among the other phone platforms is the Live Tiles which shows the applications and the number of the pending notifications of each app. It also updates base on any changes in the application and its content. For example, you can create an application for the weather to display the current weather, as the weather changes the live tile will changes and displays the current weather condition in form of graphic and text.

Comparing to other phone platforms, Windows Phone 7 use the simple and flat images as the Tiles (Icons) but you still can choose an image as your application’s tile. The simplicity of the live tile will prevent any confusion for user to understand the app content. One of the criteria of developing and publishing an app to Windows Phone Marketplace is to choose the best image (should be related to app) as the tile.

In Windows Phone 7, the user experience improved a lot even when you compare it with other existing phone operating systems, you will find out it’s very easy to use Windows Phone. As managing and arranging the contents on the phone size screen is very difficult and important, in Windows Phone there are different layout controls which are flexible and simple to use for developers. If the existing controls are not enough, you still can add more by downloading the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.