I have submitted Paid and Free versions of WordMaster app. It’s a simple word game that involves the use of frequency words lists. The characters are listed and the users need to drag and drop them to form the word.
I dont think this will count towards Microsoft UK’s reward program – The email said any apps published by end of today – i submitted it today but that doesn’t matter. We will find out next week.
I think i got my HTC Mozart 7 some time in March 2011. After using it for a week or two, i registered myself as a Developer and started writing my first app Scribble in April. I think I spend 2 weeks writing it.
This was the first time i was coding Silverlight and its been fun.
Scribble: Initial effort – 2 weeks. It was my first try at Silverlight app and it was a simple drawing app – having used the word simple, it did a lot of things – use photochooser task, save to Photo Library etc. It even supported multi-touch – It was a great learning experience.
Alarm Clock: I spent a good 2 / 3 weeks writing this and yes i love this app – I use it as my Alarm clock – especially since Mango update as i can now have alarm without app running 🙂 –
LearnToWrite: 1 week – this was the simplest app i have written. Just features simple alphabets and numbers.
Sliding Keyboard: I wrote the above 3 apps trying not to write Sliding Keyboard. I just couldn’t get it out of my head and no matter how hard i thought, i wouldn’t figure out how i would achieve it. However I got it running in 2 weeks. And it went live in June 2011. Publishing v1.0 was a big mistake – it got slated on so many levels. Over the next couple of months, i cursed myself enough number of times. I have spend weeks and weeks since initial release – now it stands at version 3.2. It has taught me the most – it taught me humility – i am good at what i do and i realised that customer doesn’t care about how hard you are trying – they just want the product to work. I also learned that no one reads the description 🙂
The total downloads stand at 22,822 – Paid downloads are just over 1216. Here’s the download chart
I think it has been a very trying year – as a WP7 user I love the phone.
As a developer – I have mixed feelings – I love and hate the fact that API is restrictive. Microsoft have been fantastic in testing the apps – Everything has been as smooth – they test the apps better than i ever do. Thank you.
As of 2012, I am writing a couple of apps. Let’s see what this year holds.
I submitted Slydr 2.6 Friday the 6th Jan as i though i’d better update NoDo users with latest changes. I branched current Mango code base and made changes to revert the code to NoDo compatible code. I didn’t realise it but i left Mango version of Silverlight Toolkit and 2.6 didn’t pass certification as the app crashes when you navigate to Settings page. This is what consumes the Silverlight toolkit based controls.
So what did i do ? Well to start with I pushed 3.2 (which is update to 3.1 Mango version and contains some bug fixes) and its currently in testing. I have also downloaded NoDo sdk to get my hands on NoDo Emulator so i can thoroughly test 2.6 when i push it for certificaiton in coming week.
Apart from that Cool Cam is close to completion. I have the photo viewer working correctly and all i need to do is get effects application code working correctly. I plan to finish it tonight and then hopefully i will polish it a bit (for example displaying a count down when using timer mode). Then comes the annoying part of localisation. I am keeping the text very simple and so i hope localisation is easy / more accurate.
Last week i also published entire word lists i have generated. I have uploaded 50k zip, entire zip and log file which details file count / word count etc etc.
I finally got around to uploading the new word lists. These are more precise as the code now checks for more than one subtitle and only picks one set rather than everything. In addition to existing languages lists, i also uploaded lists for Indonesian, Serbian (both latin and my conversion to Cyrillic), Macedonian, Malay, Albanian and Simplified Chinese.
I hope the lists are useful.
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