Just submitted the latest update to Calendar Calculator to the Windows Phone Marketplace. This update includes a couple of features that I’ve been getting plenty of requests for:

• Added a “Countdown Details” page that comes up when a user taps on one of their Countdown items. The page defaults to showing the number of years, months, weeks, and days to or since the event. The display is configurable though by simply tapping on the various cells to toggle them on/off. This is useful for those folks who’ve been requesting the ability to see just the number of weeks remaining, etc.
• I know of two users who lost all of their Countdown items as a result of the theft protection feature that wipes your phone after too many incorrect pin attempts. While I’m not providing a backup to the cloud feature, this version includes a new “share countdowns via email” feature that can be used to send yourself your countdown items for backup or to share them with a friend.
• It also included a couple other minor changes but nothing anyone would really notice.

I have worked with several KVMs in the last 15 years and have always been left wanting more. I pretty much got to the point where I just avoided them as much as possible. That changed a few days ago when I got a new laptop that I want to sometimes use with my larger display.

My setup is simple but does have a few things that made the search a little bit more difficult. I have two displays my Windows 7 desktop: a Dell 30″ and an Acer 27″. My plan was to find a KVM that allowed me to connect my laptop (2011 MacBook Pro) to the Dell 30″ monitor. One of the first things I noticed when reading reviews for the myriad of KVMs there are out there is they’re still quite a flaky slice of hardware. I also noticed many people having trouble getting high resolutions working well; the Dell 30″ runs at 2560×1600 and it was a deal-breaker to not be able to get that on both machines. Read more →

I just traded my old Acura MDX for a new 2011 model. One of the features I was most excited about was the fact that it had a hard drive that I could “record” my music to instead of having my favorite music spread across a bunch of MP3 CDs. My wife’s car, a Cadillac SRX, had similar features and I was assuming (what’s that old saying again?) that my brand new shiny car would do at least as well as hers. Unfortunately, not so much. Read more →

I just submitted the latest version of Meds Tracker to the Windows Phone Marketplace; it should be available later this week. This one includes a much requested new feature that I’ve ended up calling “fixed” schedules as that’s how most users who emailed me asking for it referred to it as well. Read more →

Testing your Windows Phone 7 apps is pretty straightforward in general. The tools support is great, the emulator is solid, and it’s very simple to deploy to your actual device to see how it works there. What wasn’t as clear to me was how to test app updates when changing the data structure I’m saving to isolated storage. Read more →

I’ve been made aware of a bug in the currently posted version of Meds Tracker on the Marketplace. There’s a very good chance of data loss *if* you don’t do anything to cause the app to commit any changes to the database during the first run following the update. Read more →