Making of a Software Application from Zero – Part 1 of n

The Problem

I have a few Garmin devices to track my outdoor activities. During an activity, each device shows different screens, each screen having 1 to 10 data fields like speed, distance, power, rode grade, around 100 different data fields.

When it comes to changing these data fields, the only available option is to do this on the device and this is quite tedious especially when you have only two or three physical buttons and no touchscreen and you need to scroll and scroll through tens of fields and screens.

It would be nice to have an application on the PC or on the mobile to edit those fields but Garmin doesn’t offer one. Googling around didn’t reveal anything useful, only more people wishing there was one.

Motivation

Motivation is a key factor not only for starting to work on a new software application but even more for getting it done.

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Expandable WPF ToolTip

A colleague of mine came to me the other day with a challenging thing: the UX team is requesting to have some tool tips that, when pressing Ctrl key, should expand and show more details, more content.

This is tricky because of a number of reasons. First of all, tooltips don’t get focus so they can’t subscribe to any KeyDown events. Second, tooltips don’t inherit the DataContext from the parent control so the communication between the parent and the tooltip is a bit harder.

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