Windows 8 App Dev

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Develop Your First App #Windows8

Hi,
Hope everyone ready to start developing on Windows 8 ?? I'm sure it will be a great fun for you :)
Lets start from the base.

Requirements

Windows 8
Windows 8 SDK
Visual Studio 2012

Display Hello World on screen using HTML and JS

First of all ope Visual studio 2012 for start your windows 8 app development. And start a new project in Java Script.

Here some predefined templates are available, according to our use we can choose any of the template. Here i'm choosing Blank App.

Before you starting your project you should aware about the different interface and views of windows 8. The windows 8 is mainly developed for touch interfaces and it is compact able in all type of PC's or Tabs. For this Windows 8 sdk have some predefined features so we can use it for different alignments.

Now your VS looks like this. Your machine is ready for developing apps.

In the solution explorer you can see many files. Open "default.html" file for designing your app user interface (main page). Now you can see a page with pure html pages.
As same as a html page it has two parts.

Header
Body

Header is to declare style sheets, js file, add title etc. In the body par we are coding the designs,styles and events for our application.

Find out the <body></body> part

And add the message to be displayed. Here i'm adding my message in a heading tag.So i'm adding the code

<h1>Hello World #AppsLabs</h1>

in the <body></body> part.
Now you can run your app in your Local machine. Just click the Run button in the menu bar to run your app.

Your output will be like the following image.

Styling Your Message

Now the time to your message to your own ways.

For that we replacing the heading message (<h1>HelloWorld #AppsLabs</h1>) with

<div>Hello World #AppsLabs</div>

Now we will be able to customize our message. Here i'm placing the text to the center of the screen first.

For that i'm adding a style to the <div> tag. The code will looks like following.

<div style="text-align:center">Hello World #AppsLabs</div>

Now the output will be

Next step i'm going to increase the text size and changing the color of the text using div style.

<div style="text-align:center; font-size:55px; color:#b6ff00;">Hello World #AppsLabs</div>

Now the output will be like

More styling will be post soon :) keep in touch..

Download

Sunday 2 December 2012

Shortcuts #Windows 8

Win	Switch between the Start screen and the last-running Windows 8 app.
Win + C	Displays the Charms: the Settings, Devices, Share and Search options.
Win + D	Launches the desktop.
Win + E	Launches explorer.
Win + F	Opens the File Search pane.
Win + H	Opens the Share pane.
Win + I	Opens Settings.
Win + K	Opens the Devices pane.
Win + L	Locks your PC.
Win + M	Minimizes the current Explorer or Internet Explorer window (works in the full-screen IE, too).
Win + O	Toggles device orientation lock on and off.
Win + P	Switch your display to a second display or projector.
Win + Q	Open the App Search pane.
Win + R	Opens the Run box.
Win + U	Open the Ease of Access Center.
Win + V	Cycle through toasts (notifications).
Win + W	Search your system settings (type POWER for links to all power-related options, say).
Win + X	Displays a text menu of useful Windows tools and applets.
Win + Z	Displays the right-click context menu when in a full-screen app.
Win + +	Launch Magnifier and zoom in.
Win + -	Zoom out.
Win + ,	Aero peek at the desktop.
Win + Enter	Launch Narrator.
Win + PageUp	Move the current screen to the left-hand monitor.
Win + Page Down	Move the current screen to the right-hand monitor.
Win + Print Screen	Capture the current screen and save it to your Pictures folder.
Win + Tab	Switch between running apps.

Some tips and tricks #Windows8

Hope everyone using Windows 8 and i'm sure all of you noticed about the new interface of windows 8.

Here i'm posting some known/unknown features of Windows8.

Don't despair, though, help is at hand with the following Windows 8 tutorial. We've been investigating every part of Windows 8, uncovering many of its most important tips and tricks, so read our guide and you'll soon be equipped to get the most out of Microsoft's latest release.

1. Lock screen

Windows 8 has open on it's pretty cool lock screen but unfortunately there is no clue whats next ? It's all very straightforward, though. Just tap the space bar, spin the mouse wheel or swipe upwards on a touch screen to reveal a regular log in screen with the user name you created during installation. Enter your password to begin.

2. Basic navigation

No we can see a color full page with lots of colorful square and rectangular boxes. It's the new interface of Windows 8 , techies called it as Metro UI. And if you're using a tablet then it'll all be very straightforward: just swipe left or right to scroll the screen, and tap any tile of interest.

On a regular desktop, though, you might alternatively spin the mouse wheel to scroll backwards and forwards. And also you can use keyboard left and right arrow key to move from one tile to another and Enter key for tap the selection.

3. Find your applications

One of the best feature of windows 8 is finding installed apps/software's very easily. You can search any installed apps/software's/files by entering the name followed by a Win key press.

4. Easy access

Another advantage of Metro UI is you can pin any of the installed apps to your start screen very easily and can access it by a single click. To pin the app in your start screen just follow the steps below.

Press Win key.
Search the app which you want to pin in the start screen.
Right click on the app tile.
Click "Pin" option in the bottom app bar.

Here I'm pinned Cryptor RSA to my Start screen.

5. Shutting down

Shutting down your windows 8 machine is one of the main problem facing by a first user. To shut Windows 8 down, just move your cursor to the top/bottom right of the screen , click the Settings icon - or just press the Windows key and press I - and you'll see a power button. Click this and choose 'Shut Down' or 'Restart'.

6. App bar

App bar is one of the new feature implemented by Microsoft to avoid complex menu's and tool bars. It aims to make Windows 8 simpler to the end user.There will usually be a few options available on the App bar, though, so if you're unsure what to do then either right-click an empty part of the screen, press Windows+Z or flick your finger up from the bottom of the screen to take a closer look.

7. What's running?

If you launch a Windows 8 app, play with it for a while, then press the Windows key you'll switch back to the Start screen but your app will remain running, but as there's no task bar then you might be wondering how you'd ever find that out.

You can use Alt+Tab, which shows you what's running just as it always has.

Holding down the Windows key and pressing Tab displays a pane on the left-hand side of the screen with your running apps. (To see this with the mouse, move your cursor to the top left corner of the screen, wait until the thumbnail of one app appears, then drag down.)

And of course you can always press Ctrl+Alt+Delete to see all your running apps in the Task Manager, if you don't mind (or actually need) the extra technical detail.

8. Closing an app

Windows apps don't have a close button because it is mainly aimed to touch interfaces.Apps are suspended when you switch to something else so they're only a very minimal drain on your system, and if you need the system resources then they'll automatically be shut down. (Their context will be saved, of course, so on relaunching they'll carry on where you left off.)

The closing mode of windows 8 app is just drag and drop to the bottom. You can simply close any of apps by clicking the top of the app and then it drag to the bottom of the screen.

9. Internet Explorer

You can simply launch Internet Explorer by pressing "Internet key in the keyboard" or using the IE tile in the start screen. IE in windows 8 is completely based on Metro UI.

10. Apps running in the sidebar.

One of the best feature in Windows 8 is you can run two apps in the same window simply. To run app in the side bar just drag the app and drop to any one of the side (left/right).