I am still chugging away at my Conversion app.  I even have a working title for it: ConverterPlus!  The “plus” part is the fraction arithmetic functionality.  I know how fractions is everyone’s favorite (not), so maybe this will help.  Don’t let on to your math teacher than you have this app.  It will add, subtract, divide and multiply fractions.  It was fun to code, let me tell you.  I plan to make a video of it when I get a few minutes.

The word is, Microsoft is starting to put sample devices in the hands of developers!  I have put my name in the hat, and I really hope I can get one fairly soon.  It would really help my screen real estate planning to actually have a device in my hand.  I keep wondering if the buttons in the app are too small, spaced too closely together, and so on.  My ZuneHD has a calculator app, and the buttons seem pretty small and close together on that, yet it is still convenient to use, so perhaps I am worried too much!

I was fighting with the WP7 TextBox, trying to make the thing show up nicely when set to IsReadOnly=true, but there didn’t seem to be a way to override the readonly style, which really made the thing hard to read.  Reason I need it set to ReadOnly is this: I don’t want the Input Module popping up when the user touches the text box — because for one thing, I don’t want alphabetics and other non-numeric characters in there!  I could prevent this with a ReadOnly textbox, but the Beta version of the WP7 OS doesn’t have a ReadOnly style that is good enough, display-wise.  The CTP version was barely workable, but not the Beta.  So I’ve compromised: tossed out the TextBox and created my own control.

The control I created is a combination of the Border and the TextBlock control.  And it works very well, so I’m pleased!  I’ll be showing this off in my next YouTube post.  Maybe in a couple of days.

More work yet to do!

I’ve also now come up with about five or six new ideas for apps!  I hope I have enough time to build a few of them before WP7 goes into general release.