I'm glad to annance that the v2.0 has been released to marketplace:)

V2.0 Relase Note
* App upgrades to Mango
* digital zooming
* pin camera to start and live tile update
* support new cameras: TP-Link, COMPRO, Level One, WansView,LogiLink
* new language: Swedish
* gesture support for pan and tilt scan
* Alarm and IR toggle for foscam, light toggle for axis

the new version is now based on the Mango WP7, that's why you will have those cool features like pin to start and live tile.

Recently I received a couple of great ideas from users (thanks, really!):

• Live Tile support
  haven't made up the details, but one thing for sure is that the snapshot could be pin as icon or background
• Pin the camera you created on IP CAM Controller to start screen
  this is really cool! Extremely fast to access to your camera, it's really one tap does the job. Moreover, you could use the camera snapshot as the back tile backgroup. (In Mango, each Tile has front one and back one, they are dynamically switched by the phone automatically)

However, as some of you may or maynot know, the current app is developed on earlier SDK (what we called 7.0 version) so that it's compatible with Mango and non-Mango (such as NoDo) devices. The above two features cannot be supported until the project is upgraded to SDK 7.1 (Mango SDK).

Once the project has been upgraded, the app is still available for non-Mango users, but they will not receive any update nofitication from marketplace, in other word, their IP CAM Controller will stick with existing version (v1.13) and not able to upgrade to any newer version until their phones are being upgraded.

I don't know how many people are still using earier version of Windows Phone, so I made a poll here, to collect your opinions and what phone you are using.

Please click here for the vote

Finally, IP CAM Conotroller becomes the no. 1 IP Camera software in the Music & Video category, or ranking at top 18 in the category (US market) today. In the meanwhile, v1.13 has just been released.

I want to say thank you to all users (most likely they are parents like me). I'm so much appreciated for all your support in the past few months. As a result, I removed the time limitation on free trial from v1.13 version. Instead of having 3 minute limit on viewing for free trial users, there will be an ad bar showing up. The ad will be completely removed plus capacity of accessing multi view afte purchase. I hope this is acceptable for you.

The v1.13 starts to support multiple languages: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, German and Spanish (beta). Swedish will be coming in the next release, and maybe French:) If your language hasn't been listed, and you are happy to become an volunteer, please do contact me!

I'm currently working on the localization of my app (IP CAM Controller), the next release of the app would at least support English and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

In fact, I wish to support as many languages as possible. So I would like to invite any one of you could help me out. If you are interested to be a volunteer, please click the "Contact" link at the top, and leave me a message with details such as what language you could do. I will reply you as soon as possible, thanks!

Although the Nokia officially annanced that the pre-order starts from Dec 2, I have just verified by myself that Nokia Lumia 800 pre-order could be made right now at Nokia's local store at HK. You need to pay HK$300 deposit for each phone you order. The deposit is un-refundable if you decide to cancel the order while it will count into the total amount when you pick up the phone and pay the rest.
 
According to the staff, the free earphone offer is available per phone if you place the order now. However, it won't be shipped with the phone at Dec 12, it will be provided later instead.
 
In case you are wondering, I ordered 3 lumia 800 myself at the Nokia store which next to Time Square at Causeway Bay.
 

• Price at HK$4,398
• online pre-order starts from Dec 2
• deliver at Dec 12
• free Nokia WH-920 Purity earphone offer to the first 2000 orders
• 3 colors available: Blue, Pink and Black
• built-in local Apps include WhatsApp (well, this is not local), OpenRice, MyTV, TownGas, AAStock, HK Weather (mango update)
• Internet Sharing will not be available initially, but will be avaialbe through update or download

First of all, here is a high level briefing how push notification works and what have been involved.

Parties:
1) your phone application: register push service; receiving notifications
2) your server: sending messages
3) the so-called "Windows Azure": microsoft server (MPNS, Microsoft push notification services), assignning token to your application; forwarding alerts (sent from your server) to your application

Now let's see how it actually works.

step 1) Your application will first register with Azure, and will be assigned back an URI (token) if the registration is successful. P.S: the token is unique per application per device, so that one token would be able to tell the Azure which app on which phone.

step 2) Your application must tell your own server that what URI has been returned (by calling a web service would be classic). It's your job to maintain the subscriber list on your server side. Once a condition is met for sending out an alert to a device, your server application will then use the URI (that previous notified by your app) to send a message (which its format is pre-define by Microsoft) to Azure service.

step 3) Eventually the message will then be transfered to target device via Azure service.

For the details of implementing these steps, I'm pretty sure you would be able to find a bunch of samples and resources via Mr. Google. So, go for it

Next, there are 3 types of notification currently supported by WP7.0 and 7.1:

1) Raw. Custom format, maximum 1KB for the message. The message will be discarded ("Suppressed" status) by Azure if your app is not currently running on the phone.

2) Tile. User must "pin to start" your app, otherwise, the message will be discarded ("Suppressed" status) by Azure. The image URI could be pointing to remote (internet) or local (within the phone), as long as it's valid. For remote image, the size must be less than 80KB and the download time has to be less than 1 minute.

3) Toast. If the phone is switch off, the message will have the connection status "TempDisconnected"

What else you may need to know? Here you go...

1) MSDN: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff402558(v=vs.92).aspx

2) 500 messages per application per device per 24 hours if your server doesn't use SSL to communicate with Azure. By using SSL, you will need to upload your cert via your developer account, and then this limitation is not applicable on your apps. details: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff941099(v=VS.92).aspx. Last but not least for this issue, a very stupid action is required that you must upload the cert every 4 months if the post here is ture (which most likely is): http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/85207.aspx

From v1.11 version, the IP CAM Controller will support free trial, and what's more? Price drops to $2.99 for sale

You can actually try if the app works for your camera without paying in advance.

As always, in case it doesn't work or has any question, click the "Contact" link above to leave me a message.

Whatsapp just released its beta, it's private beta however, so you are not able to download from market. However, you could directly download from here if your phone is dev unlocked:)

WhatsApp.rar (873.45 kb)

It's not quite stable however. It directly access to all your phone contacts and add those who already used whatsapp to a "favs" list. Then you could send message from people in that list, but it seems couldn't locate my overseas friends whose phone number have a country code prefix. You can also see all your contacts in an "all" list, but sometimes it crashs when I scroll down the list.

what's new?

• directly access to your phone Contacts (address book), no need to import from Live account anymore
• faster load and search performance
• FREE TRAIL

Search "Jerry Huang" in Marketplace to download