developers

WPGeek launches Marketplace for Windows Phone app development components

May 23, 2012 | By bmiloshevska

WPGeek Ltd, the company behind WindowsPhoneGeek.com – the leading Windows Phone development community, today announced the launch of the invitation-only beta of their new Marketplace for Windows Phone app development components.

The WindowsPhoneGeek Marketplace for Windows Phone app development components is the place where developers can buy and sell UI controls, development tools, SDKs, application templates, source code and all kind of components and tools that can be used for Windows Phone application development.

The purpose of the Marketplace is to help developers to build better apps, and more quickly by offering the components they need, but don’t have either the time or resources to build themselves. On the other side, developers that have already built reusable pieces of code for their projects will be able to share them with others and make more money from existing code. Both paid and free components can be published to the marketplace for FREE.

Boryana Miloshevska, Founder and CEO of WPGeek Ltd: “… Our purpose is not just to list thousands of low quality components, but to list those that really can bring value and can help developers to build better apps. So, quality and not just quantity is what we aim to achieve with the WindowsPhoneGeek Marketplace! ”

“We decided to make this an invitation-only beta so that, together with members of the Windows Phone development community, we can create the perfect environment for developers to share their tools and components with others. We expect to start the public beta in September 2012.” – said Yordan Pavlov, Founder and CTO

About WindowsPhoneGeek.com

WindowsPhoneGeek.com is the leading community web site for Windows Phone Development. WindowsPhoneGeek.com provides high quality development articles, tutorials, source code, examples, forums, tips, resources, demo videos, latest development news and more. WindowsPhoneGeek.com is a valued community partner and is listed on the Microsoft Windows Phone developer portal at create.msdn.com/en-us/resources/partners .

About WPGeek Ltd

WPGeek Ltd based in London, UK, is the company behind WindowsPhoneGeek.com. The founding team has many years of experience in building reusable components and is constantly looking for ways to help Windows Phone developers build great apps.

For more information and screenshots see windowsphonegeek.com

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Visual Studio 11 Express For Windows Phone Coming Along With WP8 Launch

May 22, 2012 | By Pradeep

Microsoft’s Visual Studio team yesterday announced the product lineup for their upcoming major release Visual Studio 11. Visual Studio 11 Beta is already available for download, but Windows Phone developers were waiting for Windows Phone tool support in Visual Studio 11 Beta. Now Microsoft has announced that to make sure customers have the latest tools with the latest platform offering they’ll be releasing Visual Studio Express for Windows Phone with the next release of Windows Phone.

So, developers will be able to download Visual Studio 11 Express for Windows Phone along with Windows Phone 8 platform release. We guess that will happen next month during Windows Phone developer event organized by Microsoft. For now, developers should be able to free download the Visual Studi0 2010 Express and the Windows Phone 7.5 developer tools for Windows Phone development.

Source: Microsoft

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Space Weather 2.0 for Windows Phone released

May 19, 2012 | By TechnoTim

The original Space Weather app for Windows Phone! We have just released Space Weather 2.0 and we know that you will find the fast and fluid UI both fascinating and functional. With Space Weather app for Windows Phone, you are only a glance or a few taps away from real-time space weather.

Here’s a quick description of what space weather, in general, is.

Space weather is the concept of changing environmental conditions in near-Earth space or the space from the Sun’s atmosphere to the Earth’s atmosphere. Space weather affects our planet, our technology, and all living things in many different ways. Solar flares, geomagnetic storms, and solar radiation are a few ways space weather can wreak havoc on the earth. It can also create beautiful auroras can that be seen near the poles and sometimes much further.

Space Weather app includes the following:

Real-time solar storm status
Live Tiles
Reports and displays over 50 real-time measurements, reports, and readings or data
RSS Feeds
real-time alerts, reports, and predictions for space weather
real-time web cam images from around the world
real-time images of the sun
real-time location of satellites
UV Index maps
real-time images and mapping of near Earth objects
real-time images of the Earth as seen from space
real-time images of the aurora oval
beautiful artwork, animations, transitions, and fades
real-time solar movies
animations, transitions, fades
plus more

Check us out!

www.SpaceWeatherApp.com

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Life Goals Free Now Available in the Marketplace

May 17, 2012 | By Kevin Schaefer

LifeGoals

WinPhone Info
Life Goals will allow you to easily track and reach your goals that can span a lifetime, as well as goals that don’t have a specific end date. Examples include eating healthy, exercising daily, and stopping smoking. When you do something positive towards your goal, tap the + button; do something negative, tap the – button.

Life Goals QR Code

Life Goals automatically keeps count and updates the background color of your goals – green: you are succeeding; yellow: you are not succeeding or failing; red: you need to work harder, because you are falling behind. See how you are doing on your goals at a glance and live a better life.

For more screenshots and a link to download the free, ad-supported version, please click here or scan the QR code.

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OpenXLive social gaming service for WP7 boasts more than 100,000 daily users, SDK updated

May 16, 2012 | By Surur

Microsoft does not share the bounty of Xbox Live with regular developers, leaving Windows Phone developers wanting to add leader boards, achievements and other social gaming features needing to either roll their own or look for alternate services.

One such service is OpenXLive, and they are doing pretty well, boasting of 3000 games, 430,000 installations, and more than 100,000 daily users.

They have recently updated their Windows Phone SDK to version 0.9.8, which brings the following new features:

Supports the login with SNS accounts which involves Facebook, Twitter and Sina Weibo.
OpenXLive Push Notification Hosting service added. Quite a few developers want to add the notification pushing service in their applications but they are not able to make it happen as they do not have their own server supports. OpenXLive provides the service of Push Notification Hosting and developers can push the notifications from OpenXLive Server
UI Framework in Silverlight is upgraded with more background pictures and the supports of both landscape and portrait mode
There is game creation guide added into Visual Studio 2010 and developers then can use their own start page.

The service is free to developers and users, and is clearly a great addition to any game with a leader board.

Read more about the latest announcement at Openxlive.com here.

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Microsoft Releases Face SDK For Windows Phone Developers

May 16, 2012 | By Pradeep

Microsoft Research has released three different Face manipulation apps in Windows Phone Marketplace so far. Face Mask, Face Touch and Face Swap are the apps you can now find it in marketplace. Now, Microsoft Research has released an SDK that developers can use to process Face images, etc,.

The Microsoft Face SDK provides many state-of-the-art algorithms to process face images, such as face detection, alignment, tracking, and cartooning. The SDK makes it easy for developers to create interesting, face-related Windows Phone applications.

I expect some cool apps from Windows Phone developers using this SDK. Download the SDK here.

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Microsoft’s ‘30 to launch’ contest winners announced

May 15, 2012 | By Surur

Microsoft has announced the winners of their ‘30 to launch’ developer contest, which challenged developers to go from picking a concept to publishing a Windows Phone 7 app in less than 30 days.

The 4 grand prize winning apps are Brain Cube Reloaded, Play the Hunt, Social Mints, and Surf Info.

Social Mints is an app that allows you to easily monitor the Web and Social Media for interesting and trending content in real-time. You can track & measure what people are saying about a topic that interests you, get the latest on a celebrity or event and keep tabs on your favorite sports teams.

Play the Hunt is a treasure hunt game played in the real world using your Windows Phone.

In this game, you have to figure out the next location from the given clue. When you arrive at a location, you have to play a mini game on your phone and upload a picture before you can move on to the next clue.

The Surf Info shows the current conditions at various surf spots around the U.S. All of the data backing the score is similarly presented in a concise and colorful form.

Brain Cube Reloaded is a Rubics Cube type game with great graphics.

Their developers will receive a state-of-the-art entertainment package that includes a La-Z-Boy© recliner and a Lenovo^®IdeaPad U300 Ultrabook.

Read more about the apps at 30tolaunch.com here.

Thanks Ran for the tip.

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Aviary Releases Its Windows Phone SDK, Popular Apps To Make Use Of It Soon

May 14, 2012 | By Pradeep

As Aviary announced few months ago, it released its image editing SDK to Windows Phone developers today.

It features,

Redesigned SDK from the ground-up to take advantage of the Metro design principles of Windows Phone
The same, easy integration process: add our editor to your project in as little as 15 minutes, with just a few lines of code
Customizable color theme
Controllable output size based upon developer preferences — you decide what makes the most sense for your app or service
… Not to mention that Aviary for Windows Phone has all the standard features as the rest of our mobile SDKs

Another good news is that popular Windows Phone apps like 4th & Mayor, Rowi, etc,. are already working on integrating Aviary’s image manipulation SDK into their apps which we may see it in marketplace soon.

Developer can download the SDK at aviary.com/wp7 and read more about it at Aviary blog.

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New app People search is free tomorrow (Monday)

May 14, 2012 | By RonnyGydar

Gydar Industries, the developer behind the popular game Trine’s Hangman has published a new app in Marketplace today.

The application is called "Finn folk" in the Norwegian Marketplace, and "People search" in the rest of the world.

The app has English and Norwegian texts, support international smart-dialing characters, and is available in all countries in Marketplace.

People search on Windows Phone – SO EASY YOUR MUM CAN USE IT!

The application was created due to a 65 years old mum who complained about how much complex it was to call with her Nokia Lumia 800.

There are several smart-dialing apps for WP, but they were all a bit to complex for Ronny’s mum, or did not find everything she searched for since they did not search all fields.

Or they just did not provide enough options when the person was selected.

MICROSOFT PARTICIPATED IN THE BETA

Several employees from Microsoft was among the 100 BETA-testers of the app, a handful from Microsoft Norway, and even the lead for the Windows Phone team in the US was in the BETA.

It seems like Microsoft really want to implement some of these features into WP itself. Until then, you have People search

1-DAY-SPECIAL; FREE ON MONDAY 14. MAY

The app costs 0.99, and have trial-option. The trial is identical to the paid version, except that it after 24 hours will show a "please buy the app"-message on startup.

As a one-day-special, the app is free tomorrow (Monday 14. May), so grab it for free while you can

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Swift Note for Windows Phone Released!

May 13, 2012 | By lewis.dodd

Swift Note is a simple, quick and easy to use note taking application for your Windows Phone device!

Key features include:

Extremely simple, user friendly interface means you can create and read your notes quicker.
Note title automatically created from your notes first line. No need to spend extra time writing a separate title.
Upload your notes to Simplenote, the cross platform note reading service. Read notes created in Swift Note on PC/Mac/iOS/Android.

TRIAL MODE: Swift Note has a trial mode that allows full use of the application apart from a 3 note limit and being ad supported.

You can grab the trial version of Swift Note today by clicking on the badge or by using Bing vision on the tag.

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We’ve seen Taptitude’s success in ad revenue. What about entertainment apps?

May 12, 2012 | By His_Shadow

We’ve seen how successful games like Taptitude fare in the marketplace, but how about entertainment apps? Meme Viewer is exactly what its name describes. The user can view countless memes in a easily consumable way.

The app was released to the marketplace on December 21, 2011 for free with ads enabled, and since then Meme Viewer has accumulated over 300 ratings from all markets and has maintained about a 4.5 star rating. While Meme Viewer’s stats are not anywhere near as impressive as the success of Taptitude it is still interesting to see the other side of the spectrum.

Meme Viewer - Downloads

Here we see the daily (green) and cumulative (orange) downloads from December of 2011 to May of 2012. The first spike in the graph was after being featured on WMPoweruser and the other two spikes are from being featured on other mobile phone oriented blogs.

Since then we can see that the daily download rate has levelled out at around 55 downloads a day.

Meme Viewer - Revenue

Let’s see how that correlates to ad revenue. In the above graph we are looking at week to week revenue from December of 2011 to April of 2012.

Meme Viewer - Impressions

The above graph shows impressions over the same time period.

Meme Viewer - eCPM

qrcode This graph shows eCPM over the same time period.

Hopefully these statistics gives anyone looking to develop for the platform an idea of the kinds of successes the normal Joe can have.

You can find the Meme Viewer in the marketplace here. In order to have access to an endless supply of memes be sure to go into the settings and agree to the Terms of Service.

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PHOTOGRAFFITI hits No. 1 spot in the UK Marketplace

May 12, 2012 | By fizzypopapps

Photograffiti – the photo editing app for Windows Phone has hit the number 1 spot in the Photo category of the UK Marketplace.

Released just five weeks ago, the photo app that allows you to customize your pictures with text, comic book style FX and photo-realistic stamps has seen a huge surge in popularity driving it straight to the top of the UK Photo chart and into the Top 50 in the US chart.

Version 1.3 out today introduces the new "Face FX" stamp pack featuring 24 photo realistic image stamps of cuts, bruises, black eyes, stitches and facial hair to really freak out your friends.

Photograffiti features:

Photo customization, integrated facebook tagging and comments, twitter and SkyDrive upload, send via email / sms, word stamps, press pack stamps, bling stamps, new fonts including a custom comic book style font and picture hub integration.

For the next week only Photografitti is half price with Trial and Free versions also available.

Photograffiti V1.3 is out now and available here.

Twitter: @fizzypopapps

Facebook: facebook.com/FizzyPopApps

Web: www.fizzypopapps.com

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Great Windows Phone Development events in Greece

May 11, 2012 | By sofoklis

There will be great events related to Windows Phone Development events at TEI of Larissa in Greece.

The Department of Computer Science and Telecommunications, NOKIA Hellas and Microsoft Hellas are arranging a two day hackathon for students in May 24-25, 2012. At this two days event, students will have an opportunity to design, develop and demo complete applications. There will also be a beginner opportunity that will help first-time Windows Phone developers become familiar with the basics of the Windows Phone ecosystem. The Department launched the "Windows Phone Developer Challeng"e and students can participate by submitting 3 apps to the Windows Phone Marketplace and may win a free Windows Phone 7 device.

The Department also is hosting the "Windows 8 hands-on Workshop" on June 7–8, where students will have a chance to meet & interact with Windows 8 Metro app experts as they would be mentoring both on the technical and business aspects.

More information can be found at www.cs.teilar.gr/MS , a web site that has adopted the metro style and functionality.

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