1. Back button. UI relies on the back button to navigate back through pages. However unlike software back button on iPhone, HW back button is located in the right bottom corner which makes it hard to access with one hand.

2. Download notification UI. I spent 5 minutes looking for a way to save attachment in gmail just to find that the item goes to notification queue. Completely undiscoverable.

3. What exactly is home button. My expectation is that home screen is the whole area where I can put my icons and widget. Home button is designed so it navigates to one particular page on the home screen.

4. App install is not designed for the scenario when I want to use the app immediately. Why app is not places to the home screen? Why do I have to look for an app in the long list of apps which I cannot even re-arrange

5. Kind of minor but why can’t I associate picture with a contact? I added a shortcut for contact to the home screen but the shortcut is displayed as the default icon. By the way, HCT contact widget is completely useless piece of junk; cannot even make a call to a contact number which works in other cases.

6. Why so many applications are asking to access Geo location and why there is no way to install and app but still block access? This is really an issue with Android ecosystem in general. I expect that the owner of app marketplace (Google) to work with developers at submission time to not require unnecessary rights. Otherwise we get bunch of apps which “prevent device from sleeping” as a side-effect.

1. Property for data binding have to be defined with setter and getter; for example

class Customer {
public String Name { get; set; }
}

2. Setters are not called during binding. If you want to know when property is set, you have to handle this in notification for dependency property

3. Binding of complex objects across child objects is hard . Here is an example. Data contains of two classes Bar and Foo


class Bar {
public String Name1 { get; set; }
}

class Foo {
public String Name2 { get; set; }
public Bar Child;
}


I would like to bind Foo object to the parent control and pass Bar to the child control. It works by itself but fails when I try to bind Name1 in the child control. The reason seems to be following. In order for child control to perform data binding of Name1 we have to set DataContex for Bar object. But the DataContex has already been set by binding performed of the parent control. There is an article on about proxy binding which might help. The simpler option seems to be to avoid binding for Foo.Child in the parent object and just set DataContext manually.

Con:
- Terrible keyboard navigation. Most of actions require mouse even after keyboard shortcut customization
- No support for customizing the environment. Xcode UI elements or actions are not exposed programmatically

First of all – documentation. XUL documentation almost does not exist. There are some pages on the MDC site, but a lot of them are placeholders which do not explain anything. The best documentation is source code itself but reading code requires a lot of time at least on initial stages. In some cases documentation and source code is out of sync plus there are differences between firefox and base implementation.

Second is debugging. Nothing in XUL world come even remotely close by the functionality to the Visual studio debugger. The amount of time which VS debugger saves makes it worth to spend time digging into SL or C#. I am not a big fan of VS in general; for C++ development I am using WinDbg but even VS is infinitely better than Firebug.

Another great factor speaking for Silverlight is designer tools. The only way to edit XUL files is notepad which again is not very productive. In Blend one can create a UI for an application in a fraction of time required to implement the same in XUL.

Platform wise Silverlight runs on Windows and Mac which is sufficient for reaching the majority of audience.

eval("object.method =" + object[method].toString().replace('{', '{ your code here ;'));

In case if code is event handler for XUL object, you have to create a handler with the same event and return false to prevent further processing

  <binding id="my-id"
           extends="chrome://browser/content/id_to_extend">
    <handlers>
      <handler event="event to override">
      <![CDATA[
        your code here;

        return false;
      ]]></handler>
    </handlers>
  </binding>