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Sep

30

Windows Phone Radio 44

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Here we are again for another Windows Phone Radio episode! Exciting week as Mango started to make to phones all over, we are excited to hear what you think. This week we talk about the update, new pricing for the Zune Pass music subscription service, updates to apps for Mango, launch of the suggestion box and much more! You can find Windows Phone Radio in the Zune Marketplace, in iTunes and streaming direct here.

thanks for listening!

Brian (@brianseitz)

Sep

30

Your PC and Football

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

If you know me even a little tiny bit, you’ll know I’m a big New England Patriots fan. I like to spend Sunday afternoons sprawled out on my couch watching Tom Brady and the boys give it everything they have. I’ve been doing this weekly since before the days of Drew Bledsoe. I can’t help it. I love football.

Given that we are in week four of the season, I wanted to talk about Football and your PC. Wait, you are thinking, who uses a laptop while watching football? Aha, I say back, those who love fantasy football. That’s right - the legions of fantasy football fans watch the Sunday games with their PCs at the ready.

I prefer the slick little Dell Vostro V131 because it’s red – one of the Pats colors- and its lightweight, perfect for sticking into my purse when I watch the game at friend’s house. Oh, and it’s just sassy enough for me to have a little bit of edge when talking smack about the Dallas Cowboys, the Indiana Colts or any of those other teams that aren’t the Patriots.

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Not to mention I keep it in a really awesome laptop sleeve with the Pats symbol on the front. You can find laptop sleeves with your favorite football team from Bing Shopping for your PC.

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You can find a whole slew of cases for your teams here: http://www.diehardfans.com/product-patriots-laptop-case-36434.html or you can just admit that you love the Pats too and buy the same one as me. ;)

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Or if college football is your thing, check these out and buy them here: http://www.coolcomputerbags.com/laptop-bag-brands/centon-electronics/centon-electronics-mlb-laptop-sleeve-13534.html

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What’s your fantasy team? What PC do you use and what kind of super fan bag do you own? Share in the comments below or @kristinalibby on Twitter.

Sep

29

IE9’s faster, more capable Compatibility View List… now on Windows Phone!

Category: Vista News | Leave a Comment

Windows Phone 7.5 is coming very soon and with it we will enjoy a fast and more beautiful mobile web experience powered by IE9! This is very exciting for us since it represents a huge leap forward not only in new features but also in support for web standards that make for a more compatible and interoperable web.  As a side effect of these changes we know some sites designed specifically for IE8 and earlier may not work correctly which could end up affecting the browsing experience for visitors to your site.

To help minimize this problem, we added support for the Compatibility View List to Windows Phone!  This feature will allow us to address compatibility issues rapidly and give developers enough time to update their sites on their own schedule. There is a lot of great information on the IE team blog about this feature but in a nutshell, the CV List is a collection of domains and their corresponding browser settings that gets updated every two weeks ensuring that IE9 works with the maximum number of sites possible.

Compatibility with IE7 Mobile

By default IE9 will try to load any site using the most standards compliant mode, this is great because it allows us to interoperate well with other browsers but it could cause compatibility problems on sites written specifically for IE7 Mobile.  By using the CV List we can address most of the issues by forcing IE to use the IE7 compatible mode on the sites that need it to keep them working and looking great!

As an example we can use the Sounders FC Soccer team’s portal for Windows Phone, on the left is the site loaded on IE9 using standards mode where the score is not on the location it should be, and to the right is the same site loaded using the IE7 compatibility mode which addresses the layout issues.

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Standards Mode

IE 7 Compatible mode

Alternatively developers can also proactively instruct IE which mode to use when loading any site by using the X-UA-COMPATIBLE meta header as described here.

Addressing layout problems introduced by our text optimizations

Providing a full desktop browsing experience on a mobile device does not only require having a modern and compatible browser engine, it also requires special optimizations to the original layout to ensure the site is ready for consumption on smaller screens.  Our ultimate goal is to do it without negatively affecting the site’s original style or flow!

We accomplish this by changing the site’s layout in subtle but effective ways, the areas more likely to be affected are text blocks but we do some other small things here and there.  We built the rules used to make those changes based on  data gathered from the most popular web portals from all over and  I’m happy to say that for the most part our changes work great, but for a small number of sites, the changes can end up negatively affecting the layout  and degrading the experience making the end result far from what the designer originally intended.  The good news is that on IE9 mobile we can change the optimization parameters to fix those issues by using the CV List.

One great example you can try is http://reddit.com where on NoDo you will quickly notice that the headlines don’t look quite right and while the site is completely functional the experience is somewhat affected by this.  On IE9 mobile on the other hand the page looks much better as it renders closer to how it is it looks when you access it using a desktop browser. 

 

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Windows Phone 7

Windows Phone 7.5

 

Fixing incorrect or missing mobile optimization

Another compatibility problem that the CV List allows us to address which is also one of the most common is the incorrect use of the mobile optimization settings. This generally has a direct impact to the end user experience as it prevents desktop sites from being rendered correctly or makes mobile sites too small to be used without zooming in.

The most common case of this problem is having an incorrect width on the viewport META tag, sometimes the value is 100px, others is 800px or even device-width which SHOULD be fine except when used on a desktop site.  By using the CV List we can override the viewport settings making the site functional once more but once we do this the new values CAN’T be overridden by the developer!

One quick example of this can be found on http://mobile.airfrance.com where the site’s missing viewport settings causes the site to load all the way zoomed out.

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Original site

Fixed by the CV List

Actions you can take to ensure your site looks and works great on IE9 Mobile

Jorge Peraza
Windows Phone Browser

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