How do I use DarkIcons.dll in a Windows Phone 8 app? - xaml

Building my first Windows Phone 8 app and I am bringing in a few icons to use in the appbar. As I am picking the icons in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Icons\Dark I see that there is a file called DarkIcons.dll.
Can I use this dll as a resource file and then bind to icons in it?
If so how does that binding work? What does the binding look like?

For AppBar icons, you should use the white "dark" icons in that folder or from other resources like modernuiicons. Add these to your project as a resource and set the icon to be this image. If your application is used on a device that has a light theme, the phone will turn the icons black for you. No need for you to do anything!

Well. You need not to do anything with .dll file for App Bar icons. You need not to worry about that dll file. Because while you create the new project, all dll files will be initiated. This dll is the primary file. Windows sdk will care about more than you
Simply copy and paste the desired icons from "dark" folder in the solution explorer.
Simply call that image and you can use all icons like this.
If your phone theme was dark, then the colors of icons will be light and vice versa.
Hope this could be useful to you. All the best.

Related

Photoshop to unity

Hello I made a spritesheet in photoshop. The process to make the spritesheet was fairly easy. The issue is when importing to Unity I get a white background and I don't know how to remove the white background from my spreadsheet in unity. I have taken the following steps to resolve this issue
First unchecked the background in photoshop.
Second I tried to remove background from each individual image in photoshop.
But no luck can someone help.
You can select the asset and change its type to Sprites, instead of Default (in the Inspector); if you've already done that, how about trying .png files?
In one of the updates to Unity of last year, they removed the option to use the image transparancy as alpha when using .psd files. The option was a checkbox in the import setting of the image, which is no longer shown.
You can however use an import preset with a preset that still has this option set.
What you can do is:
Create a preset when in the texture-importer panel. How to make a preset? What is the texture-import panel?
Open the file which was created (e.g. myimporter.preset). You could use a file explorer in your project and search for the name
Then set these values to 1:
propertyPath: m_PSDRemoveMatte
propertyPath: m_PSDShowRemoveMatteOption
Apply this preset to all your psd files inside unity.
Now, importing a .psd file should work fine with transparancies.
Note: Unity's intent was for users to import .png files when dealing with transparancies. But I found it annoying to manually re-import all my .png files when i made changes to the .psd file.

Xamarin Forms UWP - Display PDF

Please, help me and tell me what am I missing.
My goal is to display simple PDF file (stored locally for example) in the WebView control. Can I bind path of the file to the Source property of the WebView? Or what is the correct way to show PDF in UWP?
P.S. and if the only option is to do like here - how must I add pdf.js to my project??
My goal is to display simple PDF file (stored locally for example) in the WebView control.
If you want to display pdf in WebView control, then the methods in Display a Local PDF File in a WebView is most like the only way to solve your problem.
You can follow the steps in the xamarin official document, and here are some additional tips we need to pay attention to:
After downloading pdfjs, for UWP app, you need to copy the entire folder into the Assets folder, make sure that the folder is named "pdfjs", otherwise you will need to modify the code to change the path.
Your .pdf file should be stored into the Content folder under the Assets folder, it means you will need to create a new folder named "Content" under Assets and copy your .pdf file into this folder. Otherwise, you will also need to modify the code to change the path.
After copying your .pdf file into the "Content" folder, don't forget to change the Build Action of this file to Content like this:
Or what is the correct way to show PDF in UWP?
In uwp app, you can use Image to show PDF file, you can refer to the official PDF document sample. But I don't know if PDF can be displayed as Image in Android and IOS apps, since you're developing a cross-platform project, I think it's better to use the built-in method to solve such problem.
If a demo for xamarin UWP is needed, you can leave a comment, I will upload my demo later.

WinPhone 8 AppBar icon size

The guide for Windows Phone 8 app bars states that AppBar button icons should be 48x48px. It also says that a bunch of sample icons can be found in C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft SDKs\Windows Phone\v8.0\Icons.
But the images in there are 76x76px. And they work fine, at least on the emulator they do.
So what's the proper size?
So what's the proper size?
76x76, because then you support higher resolutions. If you use 48x48, it'll be scaled up for WXGA and 720p, rather than down (for WVGA), with the quality being slightly worse.
The factor is roughly 1.6, which is the same as for the Tile Sizes
And to prove the point, here's our application, using 76x76 application icons: Skype | Windows Phone Store
They are 48x48px as the people above have said, but the 76x76px ones you are seeing are for devices with a different screen size from that set by Visual Studio as default.
If you are looking for any additional icons do check out Templarian's open-sourced icon project http://modernuiicons.com/. The .zip includes light and dark themes icons as well as the initial Expressions Blend .design file and the .xaml coding of the icon.
They have to be a minimum of 48x48, you can have a bigger (square) size and it will scale down accordingly.

Changing OS file icons using AIR app

I am building an AIR app which will be kind of like Dropbox. It will allow users to sync their files between various OSs. What I would like to know is that how can i change the default file system's file icons (add an overlay for eg) for states like - Synced and Syncing, the way Dropbox does it ??
On Windows i found out that Dropbox edits the registry files to insert the overlay icons..not yet sure how they do it in MAC OS X though.
I saw some threads here asking similar questions about AIR, but none referencing how to change file's icons. Hoping to get a solution for this from the various experts .. Please suggest any ideas if you know how it can be accomplished. Much thanks.
A simple yet effective solution would be to use icons that are only internal to your application : just embed in your application files some transparent pictures representing the various states of your files (with only the small part telling in which state it is, with the rest totally transparent), that you will add at runtime above the displayed icons.
Since you can get the actual icon of your files, just draw them into a BitmapData (if needed) & add an overlay with theses custom images, using the one related to your file's state in your application.
And one step further could be to store in your AIR application folder any resulting icons for future use (check what types of files you already have, and if your new file type isn't in thoses, export the various icons with your custom overlays to PNG files directly on the user device, for re-loading them the next time the application is opened).

How to use a custom font in Xcode's attributes builder

Can someone outline the procedure to use custom fonts in Xcode's attributes builder. I was hoping to use the .storybuild file (not using code) to create a UILabel with the custom font "Delicious". I downloaded the .otf file, added it to the Font Book, copied the font file into the project folder in Xcode, added "Fonts provided by application" with the font name to the -file.plist. But I still cannot see the font in the attributes builder drop down font list. Do I need to do anything else?
PS: I am using Xcode 4.5.
I don't believe you can get custom fonts to show in the dropdown in interface builder. IB only shows fonts available on the device OS you are targeting. If you want to use custom fonts, you will have to set them in some code.
http://kgriff.posterous.com/45359635