BlogBlog

My second  Windows Phone app, What I Eat, has been published to the Windows Phone Store. What I Eat is a simple food journal for Windows Phone. I put it together at Andrea’s request so it is primarily designed as a tool for her, but I hope others find it useful as well. Her complaint about all of the other food journaling apps in the store was that they all were too granular as far as calorie tracking. The existing apps all tie into a calorie database that works well if you go out to eat regularly, but not so well if you cook for yourself. As a result, What I Eat was designed to give greater flexibility in entering information while putting more responsibility for monitoring trends on the user. Check it out and let me know what you think! What I Eat is a free, ad-supported app in the Windows Phone Store.

This year, for the Rockies’ home opener, we took Ethan to his very first Rockies game. It was so much fun! He just loved every minute of it; from picking out the Rockies players, to the huge American flag, to the fountains in center field, he had a ball. I haven’t had that much fun in a number of years. After leaving the game, he was already asking if "we could go to his very first Rockies game again.” It was so adorable. Go Rockies!

Wow. It’s hard to believe that it’s been two months since I last wrote something on here. In the interim, I’ve been some minor architecture work under the covers here at s-church.net. I moved the site to ASP.NET MVC 4 and .NET 4.5 and upgraded to Entity Framework for database access. The site is also now hosted on the new Windows Azure Web Sites with a SQL Azure database. I was very pleasantly surprised as to how easy it was to get up and running on Azure. Publishing the completed site to Azure was as simple as downloading the publish profile for my Azure site and then selecting that profile as the destination from the Publish command in the Visual Studio 2012 Web Application project menu. The publish process updates the database connection string as necessary to connect to the associated SQL Azure data store.

I’m also in the process of building a couple of new Windows Phone apps using the Azure Mobile Services backend. It’s not quite as straightforward to use Azure Mobile Services in Windows Phone 7.5 because I have to use the REST interface directly instead of the packaged clients available for Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, and iOS apps, but it’s still a big step forward from the Microsoft Sync Framework backend that I’ve used in the past. Sync Framework requires a dedicated server where I can do binary installs, which is quite a bit more expensive from a hosting perspective.

Once completed, the whole setup should be considerably cheaper than the hosting combination of Amazon Web Services and CrystalTech/The Small Business Authority that I’ve been using for over a year now and should also be more reliable since everything is co-located again.

I am presenting “Pick Your Poison – Mobile Web, Native, or Hybrid?” as part of Denver Startup Week today at 10 am at Uncubed in Denver.

If you are tweeting the presentation, please use the hashtags #effectiveui and #denverstartupweek and let me know if you have any comments or feedback in the comments here. I’m really excited about it and I look forward to seeing you there.

Stirling Money has been updated to version 2.0 in the Windows Phone Marketplace. The new version contains a whole host of new features including:

• Budgets
• Set budgets for weekly, monthly, or yearly expenses
• Set budgets for specific categories of expenses
• Goals
• Set savings goals for specific accounts and track your progress against those goals
• Visualize your financial health with a series of charts including:
• Net income by month
• Spending by category
• Spending in a given category by month
• Performance versus budgets

Check it out and don’t forget to rate it highly in the Windows Phone Marketplace!