Tuesday, August 20, 2013
AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Microsoft’s Bing team is doing its part to help converge the software giant’s operating systems, launching a suite of Bing apps for Windows Phone 8.
Bing News
The new apps include Bing News, Sports, Weather and Finance—they’re similar to the ones that are already available on Windows 8. For now, Bing’s Health & Fitness and Food & Drink apps—both of which debut in the forthcoming Windows 8.1 update—haven’t made the leap to Windows Phone 8.
Bing News lets you read stories from partnering publications such as Associated Press, The Guardian, and Reuters. You can create a list of favorite sources, browse by category and watch videos. One thing that appears to be missing from the Windows Phone 8 version is the ability to add your own RSS feeds—a feature that arrived in the Windows 8 version of Bing News in April.
Bing Sports
Bing Sports shows headlines, scoreboards, schedules, and standings for all major sports. You can also designate your favorite teams and leagues for quicker access through the app.
With Bing Finance, you can keep an eye on stocks, bonds, currencies, and commodities, in addition to getting the latest financial news. The app also includes a currency converter. While the Windows 8 version now includes a mortgage calculator, retirement planner, and return on investment calculator, those tools haven’t made it to the Windows Phone 8 version.
Bing Finance
Finally, there’s Bing Weather, which shows hourly and daily forecasts from the locations of your choosing, along with historical data. Weather maps offer satellite imagery and provide information on temperature, precipitation and cloud cover.
All four apps take advantage of Live Tile shortcuts in Windows Phone 8. With News, you can pin your favorite sources or topics to the Start screen. Sports lets you pin your favorite team, Weather lets you pin a location, and Finance allows you to pin favorite stocks.
Bing Weather
As Microsoft tries to turn itself into a devices-and-services company, one of its major goals is to provide more consistency from one Windows device to the next. Seeing as Bing’s apps are included on Windows 8 devices, it makes sense for those same apps to be available on Windows Phones.
It’d be great to see even more cross-device features—for instance, having your news preferences and favorite sports teams show up on your Windows tablet after adding them on a Windows Phone—but this is a good start as Microsoft tries to bring its platforms together.
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 0
AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
Hoping to generate more apps for its mobile platform, Microsoft has launched an online tool that could allow even non-developers to create new programs for Windows Phone 8.
The tool, called Windows Phone App Studio, is free to use and in beta now. Microsoft designed it to be as easy to use as possible, even allowing people to create mobile apps without writing any code.
MicrosoftWindows Phone App Studio
“We’ve heard from many potential Windows Phone developers who have great ideas, but who might not have the coding skills to create an app using standard development tools,” wrote Todd Brix, Microsoft general manager for Windows Phone Apps and Store, in a blog post announcing the new tool.
The App Studio runs in a Web browser and is optimized for Internet Explorer 10. It has a number of templates that can serve as launching points for creating apps. Users provide addresses to data sources, such as image galleries and Twitter feeds. They can create new sections and then order those sections by dragging and dropping them across the visual interface. They can also customize the app with a color palette and uploaded images.
Windows Phone App Studio provides pre-built functionality for many common app tasks, such as saving data and sharing it with other parties. The software provides a depiction of the app on the right side of the browser as the app is being built.
The Studio can generate the app so it can run directly on a phone, or provide the source code so it can be further developed in Visual Studio or some other advanced IDE (integrated development environment).
To further aid in app creation, Microsoft now allows developers to unlock and register one phone in order to load two apps, so they can sideload and test their apps.
Developers need a Windows Phone Dev Center account to publish their apps in the Windows Phone Store. It will also let them test up to 10 apps across three different phones. Through Aug. 26, Dev Center accounts are priced at US$19 for a yearly subscription.
Microsoft is no doubt trying to make it easier for developers to create new apps in order to make Windows Phone devices more appealing to potential users.
Microsoft hosts more than 145,000 apps in its Windows Phone app store, while Android has more than 819,000 apps and Apple has counted more than 900,000 apps for its iPhone and the iPad.
Sales of phones running the Microsoft Windows Phone OS seem to be picking up, though they still trail Android and Apple iPhones by a wide margin. In the second quarter of 2013, 182.6 million Android phones and 31.2 million iPhones were shipped, compared to only 8.9 million Windows phones. That was up from 5.6 million Windows phones in the same period last year, according to data from Strategy Analytics.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for the IDG News Service.
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