Windows Phone 8 has a very nice version of Internet Explorer v10 built in, and does an amazing job with HTML5, video, pinch/zoom, tabs, pinned tiles, and a bunch of other great features. One nice feature is that under Settings, you can tell IE10 on Windows Phone 8, to pretend to be the full desktop version of IE10. This is done simply by switching a user agent for every request.

This video shows (using Fiddler as a reverse proxy) exactly what happens to the user agent when you switch between Mobile and Desktop mode.

Mobile User Agent: (Notice the IEMobile/10.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

Desktop: (Notice the WPDesktop)
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0; ARM; Touch; WPDesktop)

[Read more…]

Betwext is an online service that is all about SMS texting. Text your customers, group text each friends or family or colleagues. And it has this little hidden gem of a service named “REMIND”.

It does …. well …. exactly that. Reminds you. You send a text with a note to yourself, and the date and time you want it to remind you, and it’ll then send that note back to you on that date and time.

It’s a service that I use on a regular basis, and is the subject of today’s Windows Phone Screencast.

[Read more…]

If you ever wanted to see the traffic back and forth to your phone, this post will show you how. This is a must know trick, if you’re a mobile developer, and is something I use on a very regular basis.

Abstract: Open Fiddler, which listens on port 8888. Then change your phone wifi connection, to the proxy of the machine IP you have fiddler running on. BAM … you’re watching traffic in fiddler on your machine, for data flowing through to your phone. #MasterDebugger

[Read more…]

Text While Driving? You know you do it — sucka …. and you shouldn’t. Keep your phone in your trunk, and do all your communication hands free. Using the Windows Phone Voice to Text techniques, you’ll be able to easily safely message without ever taking your hands off the wheel.

This also works great for taking and making phone calls, though we didn’t demo this in the video.

[Read more…]

A few days ago, I wrote about the Windows Phone 8 Facebook application being broken. Last night, I rec’d an update from the Marketplace, and my (or my Wife’s) main concern was the Events page wouldn’t show any information about the event.

Here is a link to The Verge, which has many more details on the update.

Thank you!

Next: Please add the ability to see historical events. As it is now …. events as close as yesterday are ‘historical’, and can’t be seen on the phone 🙁 #babysteps