Adding a search contract to the Windows 8 Calibre frontend

In this post I will show how simple it is to add a search contract to a Windows 8 Store app. This contract allows the user to search within your application from anywhere in Windows 8 using the search charm.  We will use my Calibre frontend app to show this. Check this video to see the raw action of what we are making.

What we are building: the search in action after querying for books with “brown” in the authorname.

This is the second post of my quest on writing a Windows 8 Store app for Calibre. The previous post can be found here. Read more of this post

Writing a Calibre frontend for Windows8/WinRT using ‘SQLite for WinRT’

While developing a Windows Store frontend application for the Calibre ebookmanager, I’m hitting several bumps along the road. In this post I’ll explain some of the bumps and how I’ve tried to tackle them.

Basically they can be summarized as follows:

• How to access a Sqlite database in a WinRT application
• Circumvent file access limitation of SQLIte for WinRT
• Load cover files of each book
• Create incremental-loading Gridview using ISupportIncrementalLoading

Calibre is a great open source and free to use ebookmanager. It allows me to manage my ever-growing ebook-library and it supports lots of ebook-filetypes, including the ability to convert between the types.

My goal is to write a simple Windows Store application that acts as a frontend for the Calibre database. It will show my library in a visual appealing manner (aka TDPFAM, “The-design-principle-formerly-known-as-Metro”) and allow the user to rapidly query his database from anywhere in windows. At least that’s the idea. We’ll see where we end up (check here for a little video demonstrating the application I’m building).

Future follow ups on this project might be found here on the Calibre developer forum.

Early alpha of Calibre frontend, simply demonstration what can be done (check out the youtube movie). Note the layout that is based on one of the existing VS2012 WinRT project setup.

The original Calibre program

With this post I hope others get triggered to create their own Calibre frontend, because, knowing myself, I’ll get bored of the project pretty soon once I have to tackle the UI/UX stuff …which I don’t like.
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