Discussions

Debugger visualizers are not oficially supported in Windows Phone. However in that thread it was mentioned that Windows Phone seems to support some visualizers like HTML String, XML String etc.

So what I did was convert my audio buffer visualizer (List<float> or List<double>) to accept base 64 encoded strings such that I can wrap the buffer in a special class that will return the base 64 representation of the buffer.

However after doing this, I noticed that while you can use the HTML String etc, VS doesn't seem to recognize any new visualizers that specify string as their supported type. It works when debugging a desktop app, but not a WP app.

Does anyone have any experience with getting something like this to work for Windows Phone development? Is there any other approaches that can work? Not being able to see the waveforms when debugging a WP app that does a lot of DSP is pain.

Did anyone think about what this would do to all of those open source projects all over the internet that also includes a VS project option? So now those kinds of projects will no longer target VS (going forward) and I believe this was creating a halo effect for the paid versions of VS.

As someone said, you won't even be able to create a simple Hello World console application anymore without paying first. That will have some serious impact on VS popularity by hobbyist developers and VS adoptance in general, but I guess MS doesn't think about stuff like that.

Maybe it won't make a big difference to MS, but does MS really have to screw the hobbyists for what may not even add up to much, if any, additional profit?

And before someone says you can still get the current versions, how long is that going to last? One year? Two years?

I find it strange that MS talks about visual consistency but when I have some number of open applications all maximized, and then want to minimize those by clicking on each one's minimize button (yes I know about the Show Desktop button), all goes well until I get to...Zune.

I have to agree the new theme just looks unpolished, bland and very prototype-ish. I don't like needless chrome (especially when it tries to imitate something physical), but I think the Aero theme was minimalistic enough to be clean, non-distracting and pretty enough to work well.

I mostly get the Metro theme on something like WP, (I think the controls look a bit too prototype-ish as well), but for the desktop I'm just not "feeling" it. It feels more like this theme should have been a stepping stone between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95.

As someone else wrote somewhere, the geeks no longer own the computer, your average consumer does, so what we think no longer matters. But my question is whether this is really what the kids want these days?

9 hours ago, Ray7 wrote

*snip*

Wow. People keep telling me to ditch the contact lenses and go for eye surgery. Dunno. I hear that these things go wrong one in twenty. Those are good odds, but I wasn't born lucky...

I wear disposable contacts and they're no hassle at all, as long as you scrub your hands thoroughly before putting them in or taking them out.

How up-to-date are those statistics? I'm asking because I'm sure the failure rate has been decreasing over the years since they keep coming up with new methods and technologies.

For instance the machine that was used on us had a little red light at the top. So as you lie down and look up, you are instructed to look straight into that light. The machine tracks your eye position very accurately and if you look away from that red light, it immediately stops any further laser action. Pretty fool proof it seems.

Of course, failure can occur at other points too, like incorrect data being used on you (they do ask you to state your full name and some other identifying info as you lay down - don't want to get you mixed up with the next patient), or some mechanical/computer failure etc.

I have a feeling the failure rate is less than one in twenty these days. Also one has to define "failure". I guess one can call my wife's 1st go around a failure as she didn't hit the exact amount of required correction but the second time she did.

BTW this was the lasik technology that was used on my wife and me. I notice that different technology is used now so even that has been improved upon since then. Neither of us have experienced the so called night-time halo effects some people used to get from the older technology.

46 minutes ago, SteveRichter wrote

Interesting how you do not hear much about laser eye surgery anymore. 

My wife and I both had our eyes zapped about 6 - 7 years ago. Before that we both wore contact lenses and both hated it. By the end of the day my eyes would feel like I haven't slept for 2 days.

Anyway the laser surgery worked very well (although my wife had to go a second time because it wasn't quite right the 1st time). Since then neither of us needed glasses or contacts.

However what laser surgery can't fix is that your eyes lose their ability to quickly change focal distance. This happens  at around 40 years of age. Once this happens your eyes get "stuck" in their natural focal point and you are either going to need reading glasses or distance glasses (or both even). My "natural" focal point is roughly 2 feet so it is ideal for me since I work on a computer a lot. At some point I know I would need to get glasses because I'm having difficulty focusing very close and distance is also not quite as sharp as it used to be so my eyes definitely are losing their focusing ability.

One great thing about the laser surgery was that it fixed my astigmatism. At the time they could calculate about 100 points on each eye and adjust each point by a different amount. This allowed them to even out the curvatures on my eyes and hence fix the astigmatism. So even if I can't see quite as well as I used to, at least I don't have to deal with astigmatism.

Also for what it's worth, we have "lifetime" free follow ups for our laser surgery. So we could go back any time and have it redone but I don't think either of us would need that.

22 hours ago, Bass wrote

@BitFlipper:

Siri was incorrectly reporting some information....

No it wasn't. It just wasn't reporting the information Apple wanted. So it muzzled Siri. And now you are defending what essentially boils down to censorship by calling it a "flaw".

Strange.

@Blue Ink:

But they replaced it with something that is completely useless instead of "fixing" it by using a different source of reviews. As the OP notes, we call that being petty.

27 minutes ago, Bass wrote

Apple has a right to correct flaws in Siri's behavior, as "petty" as they may seem.

How exactly can this be classified as a "flaw"? It was returning results from four sources of reviews (not four reviews) which showed higher customer review results for Lumia than for iPhone.

So it was showing the correct results, it is just that Apple could not handle that and had to resort to censoring the result in order to make itself look better.

A "flaw" would be if it showed a different phone than the one that has the highest reviews. Not something that shows the correct result but doesn't agree with your point of view.

So if anything, now it *is* a flaw.

39 minutes ago, Ray7 wrote

*snip*

And yet in third place we had a discontinued tablet. Dunno, that doesn't strike me as all that accurate.

So you are saying that we should interpret the results and "fix" it untill it agrees with what we want it to say. Yea I don't see anything wrong with that.