DailyHoroscope for Windows Phone 7 gets beautiful screen transitions

Posted by Max on Sep 23, 2010 in DailyHoroscope | 0 comments

We have added screen transitions to the DailyHoroscope that should go hand in hand with the main system UI screen transitions.

The system screen transitions are not immediately accessible to developers but developers are welcome to imitate them according to the user interface/user experience guidelines. And it is relatively easy to do so since all the power of SilverLight is at the developer’s fingertips. We have almost no experience with SilverLight and also very little experience with C# – these are the main technologies for Windows Phone 7 development. But with great tools Microsoft released, which are quite intuitive and easy to use and with the great help from the samples and the developer forum, we were able to dive into straight into the open waters of Windows Phone development.

So for the screen transitions, we were referencing this walkthrough by Jeff Brand.

You can see the end result in this video:

P.S. We think the video does not do justice to how it actually looks, as it looks so much better on the simulator and will probably look even better on the device!

Vote for birthdate dialog button placement for Chinese horoscope

Posted by Max on Mar 20, 2010 in DailyHoroscope | 7 comments

We are adding the date selection tool to our mobile daily horoscope application on Android — DailyHoroscope, so that people who are not sure what animal in Chinese astrology corresponds to their birth date could easily enter their birth date and we will calculate their corresponding animal sign. To bring up the date selection dialog that looks like this (this is the smaller screen – QVGA device which has the least real estate and thus is the most problematic from user experience point of view)