From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 17

Today we start yet another day but for me it is all down hill from here on out. Today's big challenge is to make another build and see if my customer can install it without it prompting for my developer account. I also need to explorer ways of installing a Windows Store app outside the store to make sure the Microsoft documented way is the only way to get it to work. I also need to get layer filtering to work with the latest mapping engine build. On this very raining cold day I am expected to get a lot done. In general I need to hurry up as I have a week until the next full moon day and we all know what happens on those days. Before jumping into it, I have been re-listening to the music of Roy Buchanan while working this week. Yet another unknown talented guitar player who met his early demise. It just seems like the most creating people always have the biggest problems and Roy Buchanan killed himself in jail many years ago after yet another drunken state. So sad for me to read this again.

I started the morning by double checking all of the anchor points for the images I created yesterday to make sure it was exactly the same for each one. That was a bit time consuming. I then had to create white versions of each icon as that is what the mapping engine requires to color the values by height. It was time again to learn a bit about ImageMagick and how to do this in an automated fashion. This required using a trick where you pass an opaque color and the fill color. I preferred to ignore all pixels except the transparent color to do the fill that way:

convert +opaque transparent -fill 'rgba(255,255,255,255)' A.png A_white.png

I learned this trick by going to one of the great tutorials that explains how to use ImageMagick for this purpose called Color Basics.

I wish there was more to write about today but it was just a tons of coding and debugging. Nothing new or exciting to write about. All in all a good day as I got most of what I wanted done. I did not get time to look into how to deploy the app outside the Windows Store as that will have to wait until tomorrow.