App

  • RTE News Reader pulled from the Marketplace

    RTE News Reader pulled from the Marketplace

    So I guess this was inevitable but RTE sent a cease and desist letter to me via the Windows Phone marketplace tonight. Their reasons for asking for me to take down the app were that I was using the RTE logo (fair enough) and for using the public RSS feeds which according to their terms are for personal use only....even though I never made a cent from the app.

  • New update for RTE News Reader app coming out shortly

    I've just submitted a new update to the Windows Marketplace for my RTE News Reader app. This update is only a minor update but includes a fix to a nasty bug that was forcing some news articles to not display.

    The bug was caused by badly formatted XML from RTE.ie - rogue ampersands to be precise. I was able to track down that it was badly formatted XML by using a simple XML validate checker - http://validator.w3.org/feed/ This checker highlights everywhere that the feed could be failing.

    Once I could see the issues I then had to put in a workaround. The problem with just replacing &'s is that they are also going to be used for valid html encoded values in the XML. I had to ensure that I was replacing single ampersands only. I was able to do this by using a regular expression to find single instances of ampersands in the text and replaced them with html encoded versions of themselves. This Stackoverflow article discusses how to implement such a fix: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/121511/reading-xml-with-an-into-c-sharp-xmldocument-object

    The app is now going through the usual approval processes in the App Hub. All going well, it should be available for download by the end of next week.

     

  • RTE News Reader hits the Windows Marketplace

    RTE News Reader App for Windows Phone

    Over Christmas I decided to dip my toes into making a Windows Phone app for my Lumia 800. If there's one app that I was missing when I moved over to Windows Phone from iOS it was the RTE app. There was no official app so I went about making a quick little app to pull in their RSS feed and make readings the news stories a bit easier to consume on the phone.

  • How to get ApplicationBarIconButton images to display

    I ran into an issue the other day where I wanted to use one of the default icon set images for my new Windows Phone app. I followed the guides online and took the images from the Windows Phone SDK on my computer and pasted them into my project.

    However, every time I ran my project I noticed the image was not displaying. I would just get a nice looking X in a circle (I guess it's the new "red X"!). To resolve this issue you need to right click on the icon(s) you want and select Properties. When the Property window opens change the Build Action to Content. For me, this was defaulting to Resource and was the reason that the image would not appear for me in the application bar.

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