Microsoft updates Windows Phone App Studio after developer projects soar

Microsoft is updating the recently launched beta of Windows Phone App Studio to improve performance and scalability after the new app development tool crossed 55,000 active projects.

The hosted service was launched two weeks ago in a bid by Microsoft to increase the number of applications available on Windows Phone by allowing users to create apps without writing any code. The service lets users choose from a number of templates to get started, then add content such as images, videos, RSS, and Twitter feeds.

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So far, the response has been well above what Microsoft expected, according to a blog post on Monday. In the first 48 hours, Microsoft saw more than 20,000 people from all over the world starting more than 30,000 projects, and on Monday it crossed 55,000 active projects. To help manage demand, the company implemented a temporary access code system, it said.

Microsoft is also making some fundamental changes to improve App Studio's overall performance and the scalability of the system. There have been a few hiccups in the first two weeks of availability, according to Microsoft. The company is also adding new functionality; users can choose from new templates and there are connections to more external data sources, including Flickr, which users have been asking for.

The company didn't provide any details on when Windows Phone App Studio would become generally available.

The availability of more apps is key for Windows Phone's continued growth, according to Anshul Gupta, principal research analyst at Gartner. Sales of Windows Phones to end-users increased to 7.4 million during the second quarter, which was enough to surpass sales of BlackBerry for the first time. But the OS still only has a 3.3 percent market share, according to Gartner.

"While Microsoft has managed to increase share and volume in the quarter, Microsoft should continue to focus on growing interest from app developers to help grow its appeal among users," Gupta said.

Send news tips and comments to mikael_ricknas@idg.com

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MLB At Bat 13 (for Windows Phone)

Pros Listen to live radio broadcasts of games. See live MLB scores. Watch video highlights.

Cons No Gameday view. No news articles. No stats. Bottom Line The Windows Phone version of MLB's At Bat 13 app lacks some features found on other platforms, but heck, it's free.

By Michael Muchmore

One of the go-to apps I missed when moving from an iPhone to a Windows Phone was MLB's At Bat. I probably place too much importance on the results of my local practitioners of the U.S. national pastime, but, if I can't get the latest scores, I'm not a happy camper. Being able to listen to the play-by-play radio coverage, watch highlight videos, and see current standings are big plusses, and the recently released MLB At Bat 13 app for Windows Phone lets me do all of that.

The icing on the cake? It's free. That compares well with the 10 bucks I shelled out for the iPhone version, but there's a catch: You don't get all of the iPhone version's features—sadly the case with so many popular apps making their debuts on Microsoft's new (and thriving) mobile platform.

Setup
Getting MLB At Bat 13 for your Windows Phone is a simple matter of visiting the Windows Phone Store. For this review, I installed the app on a spiffy new Nokia Lumia 928. I didn't need to sign into an MLB.com account to start using the app, though a Settings option lets you sign in. As with the Bing Sports app, At Bat lets you select your favorite teams, so they'll appear at the top of your home page.

Interface
At Bat 13 sports the characteristic (formerly known as Metro) design of a well-programmed Windows Phone app: You swipe side to side to move between functions, in this case Scoreboard, Video Clips, Teams, and More. The font isn't in the standard Segoe typeface most commonly seen on the mobile apps, but rather a more old-timey, baseball-y custom one. In all, the interface is as clear as you could want. As with the Bing app, you can pin a team's page of the app to your home screen.

Using and Features
First, let me quickly note the major missing features: You don't get the live Gameday view that you get on the iOS app and on the MLB website; and you don't get box scores, news, and stats. Those are awfully key features, but some of them—news, stats, are available on the MLB mobile website, and indeed, you get a lot of the missing stuff in the competing ESPN ScoreCenter Windows Phone app.

Now let's talk about what you do get: a full scoreboard, live game status, play-by-play audio from the team's local radio stations, highlight videos, and standings. You also get a live video under the right circumstances. In the following paragraphs I'll go deeper on each of these features.

The scoreboard does everything you'd expect it to do, showing not only the current score, but also the diamond indicating runners on base, and dots for balls, strikes, and outs. At first, I was a little disappointed in this feature, since it seemed to only show games for the current day, but I then discovered that pulling the list down loads the previous day's scores, and pulling up when you're at the end of the game list loads future matchups. If you get lost in the past or future, you can tap the Today button, or choose a date on a calendar accessible from another button.

Tapping on any game entry opens the line score, with the current pitcher-batter matchup indicated below. That's not much, compared with the Gameday view you get everywhere else; ESPN's ScoreCenter app offers a nice alternative to Gameday, if that's the most important thing to you. I also don't think it would be too much to ask to have a box score choice on this page, as is available on every other platform's At Bat app.

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Tube Pro (for Windows Phone)

Pros Windows Phone style interface with tiles and swiping. Upload videos. Save videos for offline viewing.

Cons Map feature didn't work. Ads. Video recording dicey, with no privacy choice on upload. Bottom Line A decent YouTube experience comes to Windows Phone, with the extra perks of upload and download capabilities.

By Michael Muchmore

There's been a lot of high-profile squabbling between tech giants Google and Microsoft lately over the Windows Phone YouTube app. To me, there are a couple of good reasons to keep calm and carry on in the midst of all this: First, you can do nearly everything YouTube on a Windows Phone's Internet Explorer browser by simply navigating to YouTube.com—view top popular videos, comment, rate videos, see your subscriptions, and more. In fact, there's a little third-party YouTube app that does nothing but redirect to the video-sharing mobile website; it's a top free download with 5-star rave reviews in the Windows Phone store!

So what can you not do in the mobile YouTube site on a Windows Phone? You can't upload videos. But this too is not an inextricable hardship: You can still upload videos by emailing them to your YouTube upload email address from the mobile shown on your YouTube account page. And plenty of Windows Phone video apps let you upload to YouTube. I'd originally intended to review the excellent YouTube HD app, but that suffered the same unfortunate fate as the official YouTube app, with the search advertising behemoth blocking even the playing of videos. Luckily, a very similar app, TubePro, does it all, too (so shhhh! Don't tell Google).

Using YouTube HD
After downloading TubePro from the Windows Phone store to my Nokia Lumia 928, I wasn't required to create an account or sign into my YouTube account, but it's much more functional if you do sign in. When I did sign in, the Google sign-in page had me approve a "This app would like to Manage your YouTube account, similar to a Facebook or Twitter app authorization. The app does show ads on some pages, but you can buy the $1.29 SuperTube, which is just an ad-free version of TubePro.

Unlike a lot of YouTube apps in the Windows Store, this one uses a real Windows Phone-style interface, with the expected tile and swiping navigation between app pages. Many of the other apps simply use Google's mobile video site. TubePro's gray tiles with large red icons let you navigate among Hot videos, your Subscriptions, your Favorites, and more.

Swiping to the right from the home screen shows you Top Rated videos broken down into subcategories. Another right swipe takes you to your subscriptions, and at the bottom is a search button in the form of a magnifying glass. One cool-seeming option was Map Tube, which shows a map with options for view count, and time ranges, but I didn't see any data on the map.

Watching a Video
Once you've tapped on a particular video either on Hot, Top, or from your subscriptions, you'll see its Details page with a large thumbnail of the video's poster image, with the thumbs up and down icons, view count, user name, and description. Below the thumbnail, you get choices for LQ (low quality), HQ, and HD. But next to this is the really verboten item: Download. Buttons on the bottom let you add the video to your Watch Later list, favorite it, subscribe to its creator, and share it through email or social networks, or SMS—all the stuff you can do on YouTube itself.

Right-swiping form the video details page moves through pages for Related videos, Author's videos, and Comments. During playback, you can change the aspect ratio (from 16:9 to 4:3 and back), fullscreen, or skip ahead an back. There's also a scrubber that lets you jump ahead and back anywhere in the video you want and you can pinch on the screen to lower the volume or unpinch to raise it.

Uploading Video Shot on Your Windows Phone to YouTube
As I mentioned in the intro, uploading your own mobile videos is one of the only things you can't do simply by opening YouTube.com in Internet Explorer. TubePro makes both uploading from your camera roll and from video you shoot on the spot possible. Tap the "Recorded" tile on the home screen, and you'll see two icons at the bottom: a movie camera and and upload button.

Hitting the movie camera starts the camera view, with the same icon for starting recording. This was a little hit-or-miss with me; sometimes the screen just turned black for a while before the recording started. I wish I could start recording by tapping the screen, as I could in the default camera app. Speaking of that default app, I'd like to see a TubePro upload option added to that, as Vyclone and other apps do.

Once the timer started and I was filming, I could hit the Pause button, which let me directly upload the video to YouTube after entering a title for it. I would have like to have been able to choose the privacy level: My test upload was public.

After recording some video clips, the Recorded page is populated with a list of them, but oddly this doesn't show thumbnails, just a date.

Downloading
One thing that Google made Microsoft take out of its official YouTube app was the ability to download videos from the site. For now, anyway, this Tube Pro app doesn't suffer from that restriction. Just tap the Download link on any video's Details page, and you'll be taken to a black Downloading page with a progress bar showing percent downloaded. You can pause the download, and a setting lets you enable background downloading. Once the video's in your phone's storage, you can head to your My Download page from its home screen tile and watch it at your leisure, without the need for a data connection. 

Which Tube Is For You?
If you just what to watch the top YouTube videos or those you've subscribe to, the sites' mobile Web version is all you need. Tube Pro adds the useful abilities to upload videos right from your phone and to download videos for later viewing. It also offers a more Windows-Phone-characteristic interface than the mobile Web site. Despite a few minor drawbacks like finicky video recording and not-too-obtrusive ads, I can recommend Tube Pro as a decent YouTube experience for Windows Phone users—at least until the almighty Google decides to cut it off, too.

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Kitchen Toolkit — A Cook’s Best Friend for Windows Phone 7

And you thought we were only about restaurants and food photography… TastingMenu just launched it’s first app! Kitchen Toolkit is several tools in one for the home cook. The app includes a kitchen timer (to remind you when your dish needs to come out of the oven), a unit converter (handy for various recipes with different measurement units than you have at home), and two meat charts detailing the cuts of beef and pork. Think of Kitchen Toolkit as the “Swiss army knife” for the home chef.

Kitchen Toolkit – A Cook’s Best Friend, is the first food and cooking related app from TastingMenu and your friends at Jackson Fish Market. It’s available today for Windows Phone 7 Series Devices at the Windows Phone Marketplace for only 99 cents.

Download Kitchen Toolkit (You must have the Zune client software installed on your Mac or PC for this link to work.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 11th, 2010 at 9:25 am and is filed under Kitchen Toolkit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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