In most of the mobile and tablet application that we use every day we can see the application notifications and news services which helps the developers and data providers to be more engaged with their users and make it much more pleasing experience while using the application. These notifications can be categorized to few types base on the way they are working.

The first type and most expensive type is push notifications which usually hosted on a cloud service and pushed to user mobile device by special event which triggers on specific time or happening. These notifications mostly pushed from a web or cloud service to the mobile device and it would increase the cost as the number of the users grow.

The second type of notifications are less flexible as the it only triggers when the users open the application and it makes a request to the server or web service to retrieve the unread messages. This method also requires a database and web service to transfer the messages to the application. With using this method the developer also can keep track of the users and the notifications.

The last type is the most easiest and cheapest among other types of notifications. This method is very similar to the second type of the notifications and basically it’s a simple news or message delivery where it trigger by lunching the application and retrieve all the existing messages and display it to the user.

It’s been a long time I had an idea to turn my coke (coca cola) addiction to a fun and educating application where you can store the history of the cokes you have ever drank and in return get a full statistics of how much sugar and calories you got from the drink.

I though for long time that it might be a good idea for those who need to keep track of their health issues like the people with diabetes or other sicknesses and for those who are healthy and living a healthy life to keep an eye on the calories they get from each drink. So they can do more exercise to burn the calories and maintain their healthy life style.

As for me and I think quite number of the developers, drinks with sugar like Coke is essential when our brain ran out of the juice. It’s like having a nitrous on your car and when you feel like falling behind, just get a shot of N₂O into your engine and get an instant boost.

With saying all of that, I always wanted to build something for fun use and also make it useful. The good news is that I just started building the web-service powering this app idea and hopefully in next few days I can show you something cool.

Cheers

Last week I attended to Windows Phone 7 Development workshop at Taylor’s University which was from Nokia Developers and Microsoft Malaysia. The event starts with an introduction about Windows Phone 7 platform and its amazing features. The first feature and the most unique one among the other phone platforms is the Live Tiles which shows the applications and the number of the pending notifications of each app. It also updates base on any changes in the application and its content. For example, you can create an application for the weather to display the current weather, as the weather changes the live tile will changes and displays the current weather condition in form of graphic and text.

Comparing to other phone platforms, Windows Phone 7 use the simple and flat images as the Tiles (Icons) but you still can choose an image as your application’s tile. The simplicity of the live tile will prevent any confusion for user to understand the app content. One of the criteria of developing and publishing an app to Windows Phone Marketplace is to choose the best image (should be related to app) as the tile.

In Windows Phone 7, the user experience improved a lot even when you compare it with other existing phone operating systems, you will find out it’s very easy to use Windows Phone. As managing and arranging the contents on the phone size screen is very difficult and important, in Windows Phone there are different layout controls which are flexible and simple to use for developers. If the existing controls are not enough, you still can add more by downloading the Silverlight for Windows Phone Toolkit.