Hi everybody! I’m Rushmi Malaviarachchi, lead program manager for the Windows Phone Dev Center. I work on the engineering team that’s responsible for the Dev Center website, the Dev Center app, and the app ingestion system that gets your apps into the Windows Phone Store. I’ll be posting here on a regular basis to share improvements that we’re making to Dev Center.
Over the past few months we’ve had the opportunity to meet with some of you in person and discuss what’s top of mind. We’ve also been reading the posts in our UserVoice forum to understand what you’d like to see from Dev Center. This week we updated Dev Center with several features to address your feedback.
Canceling submissions
Previously, after you clicked the Submit button on an app submission in Dev Center, you couldn’t edit it again until it had finished processing. After clicking the button, if you realized that something needed to be changed or there was one more bug that you needed to fix, you’d have to wait until the app submission completed before you could address it. Frustrating.
Providing a way to cancel a submission is one of the top-ranked requests in our UserVoice forum. I’m pleased to announce that now from the lifecycle page you can cancel an app submission, make changes, and then submit again. Here’s what you’ll see in Dev Center:
After you click cancel, you’ll see the following confirmation. You can click the Edit submission link to make changes and submit again.
Rotating screenshots
Dev Center already supports both portrait and landscape screenshots, but sometimes we receive landscape screenshots in portrait orientation. This may not be such a big deal when viewed on the phone, but it certainly makes a difference when customers browse apps on the web Store. Instead of rotating screenshots in an image editor, you can now rotate them directly in Dev Center after they’ve been uploaded. Here’s what it looks like:
Automatic screenshot resizing
For apps that support multiple screen resolutions, you can now choose to upload only screenshots with the highest resolution and let Dev Center automatically create the others. If you want the flexibility of submitting a set of screenshots per supported resolution, you still have that option. Here it is in Dev Center:
We really appreciate your ongoing feedback; please keep it coming! The Windows Phone Dev Center UserVoice forum is the best way to do that. You’ll be hearing from me again soon when we have more news about Dev Center improvements to share with you.