developers

Monster Cam : Monsterify your world…

May 9, 2012 | By Naya.application

So, you got yourself this brand new wonderful smartphone, with one thousand megapixels camera and…. getting already tired of taking the same old pictures all day long?

Let some thrill into your life and transform easily your friend, dog, teacher, girlfriend (yet…) or boring neighbour into a real freak!

With our Monster Cam even your own hand will look like an ET’s best friend…

Have some fun and share your Monsters on Facebook!

You can found Monster Cam for free in Marketplace here.

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Developers: Verious Adds Windows Phone Developer Components To Their Marketplace

May 8, 2012 | By Pradeep

Today, Verious announced the addition for the support of Windows Phone development in their online marketplace. They have added hundreds of pre-built mobile app components, open source projects and SDKs for Windows Phone development to their leading online marketplace for mobile app development. It provides an one stop solution for Windows Phone related development components.

Find more information about this here. Read the full press release after the break.
Continue reading →

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Windows Phone Design Series From Arturo Toledo Coming As Free E-Book

May 8, 2012 | By Pradeep

Windows Phone developers have one happy and one sad news to digest. First, Arturo Toledo, Senior User Experience Designer at Microsoft for the Windows Phone Design Studio is leaving Microsoft. He was the person behind the 31 weeks of Metro Design for Windows Phone series of blog posts. The posts by Arturo were amazing and really helped many Windows Phone developers to streamline their app designs. And even though he is leaving Microsoft for personal reason, Arturo has announced that he will be completing the series and release all those blog posts as a free e-book as well.

You can still read his previous blog posts on Metro design and his work history at Microsoft working on various teams from Expression Studio to Silverlight, etc, on his blog here. We would like to thank Arturo for his contribution to Windows Phone developer community and wish him all the best for his future work.

Image Credit: Ready Designs

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Windows 8-style Metro apps confirmed for Windows Phone 8

May 5, 2012 | By Surur

Its no surprise really, but mere confirmation that the Windows 8 Metro apps will be supported on Windows Phone 8. The news come via an October session at the SiliconValley Codecamp_12 hosted by Microsoft MVP Lino Taldros.

Microsoft has made it clear that current Silverlight and XNA apps will be supported in Windows Phone 8, but given how Silverlight is not supported in the Windows 8 Metro environment most feel that this is clearly not the future for developers in Windows Phone 8.

It would be interesting to see how close compatibility will be between Windows 8 applications and Windows Phone 8, but in all likelihood it will be a case of the same technology but having to redo the user interface.

Microsoft is expected to unveil Windows Phone 8 at a Developer summit in June, which should answer most of these questions.

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Mole Hit–a new whackamole game for Windows Phone

May 5, 2012 | By fjourde

Mole Hit is the best "hit a mole" game on Windows Phone 7. In addition, it is free.

The main goal is to hit the different kind of mole that appeared on screen, without hitting the rabbits, and the foxes.The game contains 25 stages and 10 kind of monsters to hit (or not).

The game has a nicely colored interface and is very addictive due to the incoming rhythm of monsters. Below you can see some screenshots of the game .

Download Mole Hit

You can download Mole Hit from the marketplace, visit the dev blog www.molehit.com.

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Taptitude developer share the secret of their Marketplace success

May 3, 2012 | By Surur

With the size of the installed Windows Phone 7 base finally growing to the point that developers can extract real money from Windows Phone 7 users, it would behove every developer who are serious about getting a return from their investment to listen to the above Channel9 interview with Taptitude developer Brandon Furtwangler, one quarter of the independent company Four Bros Studio LLC.

Their game has been doing incredibly well in marketplace,and has recently crossed the $100,000 per year revenue mark, and in the above video he shares the secret to their success.

Taptitude can be found in the Windows Phone Marketplace here.

Via Channel9

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Windows Phone Web Marketplace Expands To 22 New Countries

May 3, 2012 | By Pradeep

Microsoft launched the web version of Windows Phone Marketplace back in September last year. And its now becoming the only destination where you can buy a Windows Phone app other than in your phone as Microsoft is pulling the support of marketplace in Zune client. Today, Microsoft announced that the web Marketplace is expanding to 22 new countries around the world.

The following countries now has access to web Marketplace

Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Croatia, Estonia, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine, Venezuela, UAE, Bahrain, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kazakhstan, Israel, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Source: Windows Phone Team

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Microsoft Announces Twilio’s Voice And Messaging APIs For Azure Customers

May 2, 2012 | By Pradeep

Twilio, a cloud communications provider today announced a relationship with Microsoft to make its voice and messaging APIs easily available to Windows Azure customers. As an introductory offers, the developers will receive a starting credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes with sign up.

Using Twilio’s APIs, developers can develop apps which require features such as interactive voice response, mobile app distribution via SMS, call automation or two-factor authentication, etc,. Many leading apps such as Microsoft Skype’s GroupMe, eBay, etc, rely on Twilio’s APIs. You can find more information on Twilio’s free offer for Windows Azure developers can be found at ahoy.twilio.com/azure.

Source: Twilio

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Nokia has given away 17,000 Windows Phones to developers already

May 1, 2012 | By Surur

FierceDeveloper spoke to with Nokia’s Senior Vice President of Developer Experience and Marketplace Marco Agrenti about their Windows Phone developer initiatives, and Marco revealed the company has already given away 17,000 out of a promised 25,000 Nokia Lumia handsets to developers to stimulate the growth of Marketplace.

He also said Nokia has held or will be holding about 600 developer events worldwide from January through June this year, with more than 100 developer events for Windows Phone in North America alone. He said Nokia had hundreds of people with local offices in several countries fully dedicated to developer support.

Marco said Nokia’s focus was locally relevant apps by which he meant apps that are catering to specific users, specific brands, specific contexts that are unique locally. He was also looking for apps which leverage the unique features of the Windows Phone platform, like Live Tiles.

In terms of monetizing apps he noted that Nokia had operator billing support with 146 operators in 50 markets and that this increased monetization and conversion rate by 300 to 500 percent.

Read more about Nokia’s Developer Initiatives at FierceDeveloper here.

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Microsoft Improving Windows Phone Marketplace App Quality

April 30, 2012 | By Pradeep

Today, Microsoft announced their ongoing efforts to improve the Windows Phone Marketplace app quality. It will be most welcomed by both consumers and developers. Microsoft listed some important points such as avoiding trademark or copyright violations.

On bulk publishing of low quality apps which we keep on complaining, Microsoft says the following,

First, we’re seeing developers submit the same app to multiple Marketplace categories, a violation of our policies. Instead, you should pick a single category that best reflects the content and function of your app. This not only helps customers find your app but gives all developers an equal opportunity to have their app discovered where people expect. Developers who submit the same app across multiple categories will have it removed from the catalog.

Second, when you create multiple closely-related apps—say, a series of quote apps that vary by theme—the Marketplace tile images must reflect the unique features of each individual app. They cannot be duplicates or near duplicates of each other. Your branding also shouldn’t dominate the tile

Another issue in marketplace is that some developers have been entering more than the five allowed keywords for an app which makes their apps listed at inappropriate places when an end user conducts a search in marketplace. Starting this week, Microsoft is going to start enforcing the five keyword rule for all current and future Marketplace apps. Any app that exceeds this number will have all its keywords deleted.

And finally on the content which are “racy” or sexual in nature. Microsoft will now tackle that by a more stringent interpretation and enforcement of their existing content policy.

Source: Windows Team Blog

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Developers: Tired of iOS-style web apps? Microsoft releases Metro-theme for jQuery Mobile

April 30, 2012 | By Liwen Guo

Many mobile-optimized websites have iOS-like designs – and there’s a good reason for that: Most mobile UI frameworks were initially targeted at the iPhone, and its visual style does work pretty well, for the most part. But Windows Phone looks very differently and, arguably, cleaner and fresher, so such web apps usually don’t quite fit in with the Metro look. To remedy this situation, Microsoft has recently released a Metro-style theme for jQuery Mobile, which makes Metro easily available for web developers.

We checked out the demo page (also pictured above), which shows off some of the features of the theme. For the most part, it looks and works pretty well, although there are a few issues: animations (predictably) aren’t quite as slick and smooth as you’d expect from native apps, and the supposedly fixed header doesn’t keep its position at the top while scrolling, but does jump back after the scrolling is finished (though this appears to be a general issue with jQuery Mobile). An app bar is also implemented, which actually animates nicely, but doesn’t make much sense since the browser itself also displays an app bar.

Still, the Metro-theme is a welcome addition for Windows Phone users, and since the code is open source, there’s nothing stopping other developers from forking and improving it (interestingly, the theme appears to be sponsored by Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary focusing on open source work that was only founded two weeks ago).

For developers interested in implementing the theme in their own web app, check out the post on MSDN for more details and download it on GitHub.

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Microsoft Advertising celebrates another Windows Phone Marketplace success story

April 27, 2012 | By Surur

We recently heard about the Taptitude developers making $1400 per day using Microsoft’s Advertising solution for Windows Phone.

Microsoft Advertising have now highlighted another developer who is doing very well on Marketplace.

Geekworks, the developer of Shuriken Ninja, has also found great success on Windows Phone, earning $245,000 in a year from their ad-supported game.

Mat Newport and Matt Williams are the two-man development team for GeekWorks LLC., based out of Minnesota, USA. They’ve had several games in the top 100 apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Shuriken Ninja was originally released as paid game for $1 in April 2011, but did not do very well. A few months later they switched to Microsoft Advertising’s monetization solution and have not looked back since.

“We were pretty floored that Shuriken Ninja has been so popular. We were obviously able to make more money as a free game with ads.” said Mat Newport of Geekworks.

Geekwork’s other Matt, Matt Williams said:

“Microsoft Advertising seemed like the right choice. It was easy to get started, and then go back to doing what we love, programming the games. …the return we get from utilizing pubCenter cannot be discounted. It is what allows us to devote a significant amount of our time to planning, designing, and coding. ”

Their game currently receives 900 to 1,200 downloads a day with a total of 436,349 downloads of Shuriken Ninja since its launch. Across all of their games, they’ve reached 145M impressions, at an average of $1.69 eCPM.

Have our readers heard of any other developer success stories? Let us know below.

Via WPCentral.com

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Photograffiti V1.2 Update Out Today

April 26, 2012 | By fizzypopapps

The latest version of Photograffiti with the all new “Bling” stamp pack is out now.

As well as customizing your photo’s with comic book style effects such as speech bubbles, text, and freehand drawing, the latest version introduces the all new “Bling” stamps pack – featuring 22 photo realistic images of sunglasses, hats, baseball caps and facial hair.

Photograffiti features:

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

For a limited period Photografitti is half price with Trial and Free versions also available.

Photograffiti V1.2 is out now and available here.

Follow us on Twitter: @fizzypopapps

Join us on Facebook: facebook.com/FizzyPopApps

Visit us at: www.fizzypopapps.com

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