Articles by KENNETH

Creating Beautiful Effects for UWP The Composition APIs allow you to enhance the appeal of your Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app with a wide range of beautiful and interesting visual effects. Because they are applied at a low level, these effects are highly efficient. They run at 60 frames per second, providing smooth visuals whether your app is running on an IoT device, a smartphone, or a high-end gaming PC. Many visual effects implemented through the Composition APIs, such as blur, use the CompositionEffectBrush class in order to apply effects. Additional examples of Composition effects include 2D affine transforms, arithmetic composites, blends, color source, composite, contrast, exposure, grayscale, gamma transfer, hue rotate, invert, saturate, sepia, temperature and tint.  A few very special effects go beyond the core capabilities of the effect brush and use a slightly different programming model. In [ more… ]

Windows 10 Tip: Updates to the action center Did you know that you have an action center that lets you monitor and interact with notifications and settings? And did you also know that it recently got an upgrade with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update? Here’s what’s new with the action center: You can find the action center by clicking the dialogue box at the bottom right corner of your screen, by using the keyboard shortcut Windows key + A or by swiping left from the screen edge on touch devices. There you’ll see the new, fully customizable quick actions – settings you can change quickly, without going through the settings panel. The action center is also your one-stop shop for notifications to see what’s going on with apps and other programs from across your device. Plus, now you can also [ more… ]