It’s been more than a month since we last updated you on Windows Phone App Studio beta, and like you, we’ve been busy working with App Studio! On our end, we’ve reviewed your feedback, made some improvements, and yes, even took a little time to enjoy the last few days of summer. We hope you did too.
Before I go into details, I want to thank each of you for sharing your feedback and for your ongoing support of Windows Phone App Studio. You’ve downloaded the code and built some really compelling apps. Some are for personal use, but also hundreds have been successfully published in the Windows Phone Store as well.
I’m pleased to tell you today that we’ve updated App Studio beta, incorporating feature requests and suggestions you’ve shared with us so far. We improved usability and performance, and updated the quality of the code generated. (And some bug fixes too!)
Look around in App Studio and you’ll see that the menu bar now makes it easier to navigate. We enhanced the navigation buttons and made it much easier to edit collections after an app is created. We added dozens of new graphics elements: icons, backgrounds, and stock images you can use to enhance and sharpen the visual identity of your app.
In response to your feedback, in this newest version, we’ve integrated with SkyDrive, making it easy to access your pictures. (By the way, did you know that if you make your collections dynamic we keep all of your data stored in the cloud, and you can edit them without creating a new version of your app?)
We’ve also made a ton of progress enhancing the Visual Studio project template and the code that it generates. Our goal is clean and lean code that’s easier to read and which speeds up the app creation process. I invite you to review the source code and Visual Studio project template to experience firsthand some of our App Studio updates: improved naming conventions for consistency across your project, simplified projects and app manifests, and pinch to zoom.
If you’ve created an app with App Studio that you think is ready for worldwide availability through the Store, we’d like hear from you - your ideas, learnings, and experiences. We want to help you reach potential customers, and help Windows Phone users find you! We’re also eager to find out how you are using App Studio for your local or personal apps, and what types of scenarios you still need to help with.
Tweet about your Windows Phone App Studio experience, using #wpdev.