Enhancing the Win8 Slider experience

This article describes a way to enhance the user friendliness of a standard slider control in a Windows 8 Store App. Problem in a touch oriented application, we often allow -or force- the user to set the value for an integer or an enumeration through a slider control. In most cases this is more comfortable and less error prone than working with the soft keyboard. Unfortunately it’s not always ideal: if the range of values becomes too huge, or the slider becomes too narrow (e.g. when in portrait or snapped mode), then it becomes too difficult for the user to position the slider at the correct value. In this scenario, a textbox is a much more appropriate input control. This article proposes a UX design –and implementation- that offers the best of both worlds, and lets the end user decide on it.

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Using OAuth 2 in WinRT using C#: it has never been easier before

WinRT has a built-in authentication client that can be used to authenticate users through Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Google, etc. This post covers the process of authenticating users with Google. Architecture Before I start explaining how the OAuth process work, I'd like to talk about the architecture. While it's possible to write inline OAuth code in the code-behind of your View, I personally find it a nice and clean way to create an 'OAuth2Service' class for this. In this class we can place methods to request tokens, and that kind of stuff. We can then inject this 'service' into our View or ViewModel, or any other class.

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Using Live SDK in Windows 8 – C#

Live SDK provides a set of controls and APIs that enable applications to integrate single sign-on (SSO) with Microsoft accounts and access information from SkyDrive, Hotmail, and Windows Live Messenger on Windows Phone and Windows 8.

Live SDK support several platforms such as: iOS, Android and of course Windows Phone and Windows 8 applications using C# and JS.

In this demo I’ll show how to use Live SDK with Windows 8

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BootMetro – Web Framework For Metro-Style Websites

We probably all know Twitter Bootstrap, the exciting, feature-rich framework (by Twitter) for easily/quickly building websites. BootMetro is another one, which is built on top of Twitter Bootstrap, for creating Metro/Windows 8-styled websites.

Compatibility: All Major Browsers
Website: http://aozora.github.com/bootmetro/
Demo: http://aozora.github.com/bootmetro/hub.html
Download: https://github.com/aozora/bootmetro