Infinite Codex

Disney Backgrounds for Windows 8

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 05:55:00 -1500

I have another Disney related app published to the store today! This one is very similar to my Disney Backgrounds for Windows Phone 8, but for Windows 8 tablets and desktops.

If you have a Windows 8 PC or tablet please visit the Disney Backgrounds for Windows 8 page to download the app. It is free, and has a lot of very high quality Disney images.

Lock Screen Experience

When you first power on your Windows 8 tablet or desktop you see a lock screen similar to the one below.

There is always a clock and date present, but users get to choose what other apps they want to show up on this screen. I have the weather, wifi, battery, and Outlook email count. Many different apps have the ability to be shown on the lock screen background. Pressing any key will slide the image up and allow you to login.

Most people may leave this image at the default Seattle image, but I prefer to put a little Disney in my day.

Disney Backgrounds Application

The application is pretty simple at this point. It shows you the HD quality images that are included by default in a thumbnail style display.

Each thumbnail also shows the image title, and a brief description of the image. Tapping any of the images will show an expanded preview mode.

The application bar (revealed by swiping up or down from the edge of the screen) lets you choose a random image, or pin the current image as your lock screen background image. The left and right arrows walk through the images in order, but you can also just swipe left or right on a touch screen.

Included Images

All of the 56 included images were taken my myself over the past year. I have a TON more images, but I wanted to keep it simple for this first release. I would love to be able to provide 365 images (one for every day of the year).

I actually spent about 45 days of nights and weekends sorting through images, cropping them to fit a lock screen and just obsessing over the images themselves. That was why I had to stop myself and just ship something. In the future I would like to include images from other photographers.

All of the images are cropped to 2560x1440 which is higher than HF resolution and ensures they look great even on large monitors.

If you like these pictures and would like to see more of my work please visit the Jason Short Flickr Photostream. I already have a Flickr group for Windows Phone Lockscreens, maybe I will add one for Windows 8 as well.

Next Features

I didn’t have enough time to put the random lock screen code for this initial release. I had set myself a hard date that I would ship the app no matter what state it was in, and I hit that date. So I will add a randomizer that you can just pin to the lock screen and have it automatically rotate images hourly, daily, or weekly.

Another nice feature would be to have the wide tile update to match the current lock screen. Let’s face it, you will see the live tile a lot more than the lock screen in most cases.

Saving the images to your local pictures is another feature that is probably really easy, I just didn’t have enough time.

Additional photo packs, pull from my flickr groups, etc are al things I can think would be nice to add in the future.

Disney Facts for Windows 8 Store

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 03:41:51 -1500

I have a new app for the New Year on the Windows 8 App Store!

What is the app?

Disney Facts is a quick fun app for getting random facts about Disney Trivia, parks, movies, characters, quotes, and more.

Download Disney Facts on the Windows Store

Snapped View

Snapped view gives you the ability to have the facts on the side panel while continuing to work. I think I should add a playback mode to change the fact periodically while it is running in this mode, what do you think?

Technical Information

If you are interested in Disney and don’t care about the technical stuff, just use the link above to go get it from the app store. The rest of this article will include some technical information about he implementation of the app.

Port from Windows Phone?

The first thing my friends asked me was if I ported this from Windows Phone. Well, not exactly. The facts are the same as the phone app. The backend Azure service that feeds these facts and allow me to periodically update them over the internet are all the same. That is about it.

UI design, well that is obvious. You have to redesign your UI for the much larger screen than on a phone.

Async / await broken everything

Most of my code though was totally broken and would not compile for Windows 8. The majority of the code changes were required due to the async await pattern in .Net 4.5.

Now to be fair, the new pattern actually made the code much, much simpler. I has a ton of really ugly multi threaded code in the Windows Phone version to make the UI stay responsive. I spun off threads to do most of the work parts, but then has to marshal the data back to the main thread to update the UI. With the new .Net 4.5 code I didn’t need to do any of that! So I guess the good news is that you get to write simpler code, the bad news is that I already have a lot of more complicated code that I have to redo.

Write a file from a resource

This is the routine I use to create a file from a resource. I had to totally redo it because things like the isolated storage routines are not the same on Windows Store apps. That along with the async requirements made me rewrite it. I followed the same pattern in the classes, but the underlying code looks very different.

public async Task CreateFileFromResource(string resourceName, string fileName = null)
{
    try
    {
        var file = 
              await StorageFile.GetFileFromApplicationUriAsync(
                    new Uri(InitialDataResource + resourceName));

        Windows.Storage.ApplicationDataContainer localSettings = 
                  Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.LocalSettings;

        var localFolder = Windows.Storage.ApplicationData.Current.LocalFolder;

        string targetFile = fileName;
        if (fileName == null)
        {
            targetFile = App.FactsTextFilename;
        }

        StorageFile disneyData = await localFolder.CreateFileAsync
                    (targetFile, CreationCollisionOption.ReplaceExisting);

        await file.CopyAndReplaceAsync(disneyData);

        UpdateFileStoredDateTime(targetFile);
    }
    catch (Exception ex)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.ToString());
    }

Download a JSON file from Azure

This was a pleasant surprise to me. Downloading is now always async of course, but the code is actually much simpler than the previous delegate approach I had implemented.

The download routine went from 73 lines of code down to this.

HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();
HttpResponseMessage response = await 
               httpClient.GetAsync(AzureBaseUrl + "DisneyWorldFacts.json");
string responseData = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();

return await WriteDisneyFacts(responseData);

That is a huge difference in readability of the code.

Disney Backgrounds for Windows Phone 8

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Thu, 20 Dec 2012 16:49:00 -1500

There a very cool new feature in Windows Phone 8 that allows an app to be the lock screen provider for images (and other things, but I only cared about the image for this app).

I am an avid Disney parks fan, and photography has been a hobby of mine for most of my adult life. I wanted to make a wallpaper app for Windows Phone 7, but you just couldn’t do it with a good user experience. You could save the images to the users photos and then they could go set them as the wallpaper. Not what I wanted.

The app was approved for the store on December 20, go download Disney Backgrounds now.

Windows Phone 8

All that changed with Windows Phone 8! Now from the lock screen settings page you can set an application for the background. That app can then set the wallpaper, and run periodically in the background to update it. This is exactly what I have done for this app. The background agent runs about every 30 minutes (there are not guarantee of exact runtime from the phone). I took a very simple approach in just randomly picking a photo from one of the collections.

I have included two photo collections as a start. One is from Walt Disney World (in Florida), the other is from Disneyland (in California). I have been fortunate enough to get to visit both of the parks in the past year and took some great pictures.

Disney Backgrounds App

The result of running this app is to have an awesome lockscreen image like the one shown below. I have been running the app since late November and have been really happy with unlocking my phone!

All of the images were taken by me over the past year and are stored within the app in HD resolution. This means you don’t have to worry about the app grabbing a bunch of data while running, and it looks awesome on the new Windows Phone devices.

Wide Live Tile

You can also get an awesome wide tile on your start screen that looks like the following. It animates like the default photo app using the new Cycle Tile Template. This was very easy to add to my app, and I think it makes a great addition.

Panorama main screen

I have never figured out how to take a good screen shot of a Panoramic phone screen, so I am just going to post the images side by side below. They will look a little weird because when you use it on the app you get a cool parallax scroll. See the video further down for a better look.

Disney Background Video Demo

Here is a quick video I did of the entire app. This is all running on my desktop in the phone emulator used by developers. Don’t worry, you don’t need this. The app should be available in the Phone Marketplace around Christmas.

Watch the Disney Background demo video on Screencast.com

Proceeds to go to Make-A-Wish

A fellow Flickr Disney photographer is working on a project for another mobile platform doing something similar. I decided to do this project as a quick proof of concept (could I do it). Once I got to the point where I knew it was possible I decided to give the proceeds from this app to Make-A-Wish. They are a great cause, and thanks to my employer workplace contribution matching I can boost the amount of money given to the charity.

The first time I saw a child from Make-A-Wish at Disney I literally stopped and cried, then hugged my kids to count my blessings. The work of this group to make a child happy while under going a life threatening health condition is amazing. Even if you don’t like my app, I hope you go donate on their site.

What’s next?

I would like to add the ability for users to select a single image and save it to their photo library. And an option to tag only those photos you want used in the lock screen rotation. Maybe there are some images you don’t care for, and you should be able to flag them so you don’t see them.

I am also working on a Windows 8 application that does the same thing. It will be interesting to see how that works on the larger form factor.

I also have thousands of Disney photos that I need to go through and pull more gems. Not all of them work for lock screen or backgrounds. Digging through the photos and cropping, sizing, etc takes a lot of time. But it was also a lot of fun to go back through my images from this year.

Other photographers

As I mentioned above, there is a similar project going on for another platform. That photographer managed to get a bunch of us Disney Photographers together for his app. Maybe after he sees this he will want me to make an app for Windows Phone 8 for his collection of photos. That would be a lot of fun. I will add links to his project once it goes live.

WP8 Multiple Screen Resolutions

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 14:34:00 -1500

I am working on a lock screen wallpaper app for Windows Phone 8 and had some interesting findings to share with the community at large. The lock screen is customizable in Windows Phone 8 for the first time! You can have custom PP app specified wallpaper, notifications, and icon tiles. See the MSDN Lockscreen Article for more information.

More Resolution!

First lets take a quick look at all three of the emulators running at 50% resolution. You will immediately notice the two on the left are larger (duh). They are the new resolutions, with the one on the far right being the WVGA of the WP 7 resolution.

Name	Resolution	Device Example
720p	720x1280	Lumia 920
WXGA	768x1280	HTC 8x
WVGA	480x800	Original WP7

This does complicate things a bit if you have existing apps that you want to look pixel perfect on Windows Phone 8. Your XAML code will just scale and look correct. But if you have images (like a splash screen) that you want to take advantage of all that resolution there is a bit more you need to know.

Now the reason you don’t have to worry too much as a XAML developer is that all of the elements on the screen get scaled by a factor to make them look correct on the new phones. This actually works really well, but there is one case you have to be aware of: the 720p resolution ends up with a few extra pixels due to the change in aspect ratio. As long as you used stack panels with an * for the height your page will resize to fill in the new area. If you hard coded the sizes you will end up with a little black band at the bottom of the page.

Splash Screen Changes

Of course these new resolutions need new splash screens! You can make just one splash screen and let the OS scale it for you. If you provide one image at 768x1280 names SplashScreenImage.jpg in your XAP that will be used for all of the resolutions. But where is the fun in that? You can provide a custom splash screen per resolution by using the chart below.

Resolution	Screen	Filename
480 x 800	WVGA	SplashScreenImage.Screen-WVGA.jpg
768 x 1280	WXGA	SplashScreenImage.Screen-WXGA.jpg
720 x 1280	720p	SplashScreenImage.Screen-720p.jpg

Add these files to the root of your project as Content files.

That’s it. The OS will automatically take care of showing the correct image at startup.

Football Apps Experiment Update Nov 2012

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Tue, 13 Nov 2012 12:29:00 -1500

I started this little experiment for Windows Phone as a test. First, I am a football fan and love to get news on my favorite team. But I wanted to see if a team specific app approach would work with NFL teams. I only did a few of the teams based upon their social network popularity.

20% trial conversion!

This REALLY surprised me. I had previously only built and released apps for free. The total amount I made on those apps was quite disappointing. I was half expecting to only see a few dozen downloads of a trial to paid app after all the information I had read about free app vs paid app downloads. Maybe that is true for games, but in my sports apps the paid got a lot of trial downloads.

949 Trials generated 190 paid users. That is something I did not expect. I made way, way more money from the paid app that I ever would have made from ads running in those apps. If I look at a similar app that is free and has about the same number of sessions for this period (one of my non football apps) I only made $3.65 for that period. Compare that to the $283.10 I made from the NFL apps.

I have been selling apps for mobile devices since the late 90’s and this is the best conversion rate I have ever had. Of course the Windows Marketplace makes that possible. You would never have been able to get 1,000 people to download your trial after finding you in some search engine. I did have good success on Blackberry in the early days, but it all points back to having a store is key. I think this is why app developers on Windows 8 (PCs, not phones) will do so well. Imagine having a market of 400+ million users to find you in the store.

Time to get paid

Yep, I have made $283.10 before Microsoft’s cut, which should equal $198.17 after the store fee. Guess how much you have to make before Microsoft will cut you a check? $200! WTF!?!? I honestly could not believe that number. I am sure the vast majority of Windows Phone apps never make $200, so why is that value set so high? I remember getting checks for my Palm apps that were in the $40-50 dollar range every month and being happy every time they arrived.

Microsoft needs to pay out faster to developers

I honestly think Microsoft is missing the part of the enjoyment as a developer when you see MONEY come in from your work. I think they should drop that amount to $25 if you have an ACH account setup for a quick transfer, maybe higher if you want a physical check. But no where near $200.

Breakdown by Team

Which team has the most number of users? It is pretty close between Cowboys, Steelers, and Seahawks.

I don’t have a chart to show it, but the Cowboys users actually ran the app about twice as much as any other user. No real point to that, just interesting to note. Cowboys fans love their team.

Windows Phone 8 Plans

So, what’s next? I am working on an update to all of the apps for Windows Phone 8. It allows the user to set the lockscreen wallpaper to their favorite team! I am also trying to figure out how to make the teams W-L record and next game on the lock screen. I think that would be a pretty good update to celebrate the Windows Phone 8 launch.

Windows Phone NFL Fan Update after week 1

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 03:14:00 -1500

OK, another week has flown by and I wanted to update the app numbers. Mostly because I am dying to know myself how things went, and partly because I have an update for all of my football apps in the marketplace pipeline.

Waiting for the marketplace

I personally really hate that time between when you have added a new feature and can’t wait for users to get their hands on it, and when it actually happens. For me it seems to be about 8-10 days. There is the 5-7 day app review, and then once you are certified it still takes another 2-3 days before people get the update.

But this is really a small delay, it is just the desire to see users with the latest and greatest that makes the waiting period so hard.

Interesting Information about Downloads

I find it interesting that the Cowboys are the most international team, with most of their trial downloads coming from outside the US (surprised me).

Team App	Trials	Paid
Cowboys Fan App	37	12
Seahawks Fan App	37	8
Steelers Fan App	35	10
Packers Fan App	22	3
Saints Fan App	22	3
Bears Fan App	20	6
Patriots Fan App	15	5
Giants Fan App	3	2
Raiders Fan App	2	0

What can we draw from this? Nothing really. But it is just interesting numbers to note. I think that some teams have a higher Windows Phone market (like the Seahawks being in Microsoft’s home town).

Global Fan Base

I was really surprised at the Cowboys Fans truly being global. I guess they are not just America’s team. Out of the 37 Cowboys Fan trial downloads only 5 were inside the US. The rest coming from Mexico, Brazil, Franch, Japan, and Germany.

Maybe the key takeaway from this is that you never know where your users will come from. I assumed that football was an American only sport. I almost only submitted to the US thinking why bother anywhere else. Glad I didn’t as about half of my total downloads have been from outside the US.

Paid Distribution by App

Again the Cowboys top the list, with the Steelers being number 2. See the third column in the chart above for the exact numbers. Only the Raiders have 0 paid users (maybe because their home is too close to Apple headquarters?).

So how much have I made?

49 Total sales at $1.49 equals $73.01 total revenue.

Microsoft takes 30% ($21.90).

Net take home $51.10.

Of course now I have to pay Bing their $20 per month access fee, and the Stats fee. I will pocket about $15. Not enough for a football ticket yet. But you never know about the future! I use the app every day to check up on my favorite teams and am having fun.

What about the ads?

Don't forget that all of the trials have ads in the app, and the Jaguars app doesn't have a paid version. For the same time period through ads I have made $0.33. Not a rousing success. The ECPM was $0.30 during this period. Which is good for ads, but not nearly as good as paid users.

NFL Windows Phone Apps Update

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 10:18:00 -1500

It has been a few weeks since most of my NFL fan apps for Windows Phone have launched in the marketplace. I thought it would be a good time to go through some numbers and show what I am seeing in the marketplace for downloads and purchases.

If you are not sure what the heck I am talking about, please read the post NFL Fan Apps for Windows Phone.

NOTE: The apps came into the marketplace in waves as they were approved. The Raiders Fan app has zero downloads in this because the reporting from the marketplace has not caught up yet. I will come back and make another post later.

All of the downloads and reports in this post are from August 18 – September 6. That is just before opening weekend in the NFL. I expect to update this in a few weeks with better numbers.

I made some money

What’s the good news? Well over 100 people downloaded my apps. And 19 paid for them!

Interesting to note that the one paid for the most was not the first one released.

Cowboys fan were #1, Bears Fans #2, and Seahawks #3. Despite the fact that the Seahawks were out for almost a week before the Bears. The Patriots and Raiders apps both came out after the reporting date (yes, we have about a 7 day delay in the reports for the dev center).

How much money?

So, how much money did I make so far?

19 x $1.49 = $28.31

Microsoft cut is 30%, so I made $19.82.

Some people might view this as a failure, but I don’t. First is that I don’t write these to make a huge profit. But I do want to cover my costs for the data market and Bing feeds that I have to buy (about $20 a month).

What about ad based versions?

The trial of each app generates ads. The total take from the ads (for just my football apps) is $0.12 for the same period. This has been my findings with all of my apps. The ad market is flooded right now and advertising is not having to pay as well as it used to.

I have several baseball apps that generate a lot more traffic than these apps. For this same period they only made $2.16. And that is with 14,629 sessions of my baseball apps.

I personally feel the Windows Phone market is just too small for ad based products to really make it. If this were another OS, maybe it would do better. If your app is one where users are going to spend hours and hours viewing ads, then maybe it works out. In my case I built these apps to be quick in and out once or twice a day apps.

Over the complete baseball season my baseball apps have had about 3,000 users with tens of thousands of sessions and I have made less than I did this week on the football apps. The total I made off baseball advertising this summer is $7.87. That was one of the main reasons I didn’t make the football apps free.

Cost of app

So what is the cost of these apps? Hard to quantify the labor side of things. I spent approximately 15 hours on each app making the artwork, curating the list of feeds, testing, etc. The Bing API and Stat service cost me about $39 per month right now. I am also using Azure for my CDN delivery of the updates, but I have not incurred any costs yet (still within the free tier). It will be interesting by the end of the season to see if I break even or not.

I am working on Windows 8 versions of these apps as well. It will be interesting to see the market forces for those with the new Windows Store. I expect higher numbers because it will be new and people will be in a buying mood for their new Surface or Windows 8 machines this fall. I will report back on that as it happens.

NFL Fan Apps for Windows Phone

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Tue, 04 Sep 2012 01:01:00 -1500

OK, I have been writing Windows Phone apps for a while now. I have a few baseball apps that have been pretty popular. Recently I have been focusing on up coming NFL Football season, and of course I did the Jacksonville Jaguars first. Almost immediately after showing my first app to some friends here at Microsoft they wanted their favorite teams to have an app. Living in Seattle I had to do the Seahawks, and then the order has pretty much been from the Roosevelts Most Popular Football Teams according to the Internet.

Each app is unique in terms of graphics (and YES I drew all of the graphics for these apps), and the feeds that are included for the team. But there are of course many common features across all of the apps. Scroll to the bottom of the article for a complete list of those teams I have finished to date, and links to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Common Features

Each app has the same basic features.

Teams schedule this year
Tweets from the team and it’s players
Team news
Directions to stadium
Call for tickets
Official Team website link
Ability to deep link to the tweets and news pages (forms a unique double tile on your home screen)

Main Screen

The main screen is a panorama showing the tile buttons to select Tweets and News pages, the team schedule, and links for this app.

Team Schedule

The schedule is pretty self explanatory. You can see the teams playing, where they are, what TV network carries the game, and the time for kickoff.

Links

Include things like calling Ticketmaster for tickets (You do remember this IS a phone right?). Get directions to your team stadium. This is one of my favorite little features, it launches out to Bing maps on the phone and shows you how to get from where you are to the game.

Yes, that would be 3,064 miles from my current location to EverBank field. I seriously doubt I will be making any home games in Jacksonville this year! But on the bright side that means I should never fall into the local blackout rules either.

Tweets

This is the heart of the app for most users. You can view tweets about your favorite team, and there is a config page in the paid version that lets you turn off sources you are not interested in seeing.

These lists are hand built by myself, and they took a lot of time to curate. The basic team lists were easy, but getting sports writers, cheerleader, players and fan sites took a lot of work. This list is maintained on the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN). The app checks for updated lists every 7 days and automatically adds in new sources.

Right now I have a minimum of five fields for each team, then about 30 that are in every team (The official NFL tweets, StatSheet, NFL Buzz, etc), and I have a few of the most popular Fantasy Football sources as well.

My goal is to continue to curate these lists, and maybe even make some apps for just NFL players, or just fantasy football, etc.

Team News

Tweets are great for that social spur of the moment, but I usually like to read news about my team during the week. The news is curated from calls to the Bing Azure Data market for sports news, and the team name. The teams official NFL RSS Feed is also used, but I have found those stories are not usually as in depth, or as timely. The Bing news is amazing at how quickly it picks up stories from a lot of different sources.

The interesting part about the news is that it will show breaking stories for the entire NFL if they rank high enough in the Bing sports stories for the NFL. This is actually why I needed to charge for the apps though, the Bing API is not free. It’s not crazy expensive either, and I think the service is worth the price. Take a look at the Bing API on Azure Data Market for more information.

Deep links and wide tile

Of course in Windows Phone 7.x you can’t make a double wide tile. But that doesn’t mean I can’t simulate one with two deep links into the apps. If you pin both the tweets and news pages you end up with tiles like those shown in the screenshots below.

I am thinking about adding wallpapers that users can save to their phone (you can’t set them for the user).

I would have to move the @NFLFanApps banner (maybe to the top), but I think they make great wallpapers.

List of Apps as of September 1st

These are the teams that are in the marketplace today, or are already approved (just waiting for them to show up in the store).

You can also check at the Infinite Codex publisher link to see if I have other apps you might be interested in using.

What’s next?

I am actually thinking about blogging about how I setup the basic list management in Azure, and how the auto download every xx days works. I think a lot of developers could use that pattern for their apps.

Windows 8 Apps?

Hmm, this is tricky. I am working on Windows 8 apps. But since you have so much more screen to work with I am rethinking the entire app pattern to be more social. I want users to be able to tweet from within the app, and to smack talk during games with other players over twitter. Don’t have a lot of free time right now, but we shall see how far I can get on them. It is a fun side project.

PhoneApplicationService.Current is null

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 06:17:05 -1500

I just ran into this on one of my Windows Phone projects and thought I would share a little insight into why it happened, and how I fixed it.

This is a project that I have had existing for quite a while, but I copied it all to a new folder and renamed the assemblies. That is when things went bad.

Clean up project files first

I remembered that you need to change the namespaces in all the pages (even the XAML), and that you have to remember to go to the project properties and set a new Startup Object.

Clean before you build

Make sure everything is building at this point, but even if it is take a little extra time and right click the project and select the Clean option. It will remove ALL the files in the obj and bin folders. This was the actual problem in my case. There was an OBJ file that had not been correctly rebuilt. After running clean, the build then went smooth and the PhoneApplicationService object was happy.

Building a Disney Facts phone app with Maya

jasonshort@infinitecodex.com — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 07:12:00 -1500

Take a quick look at the photo here for a really simple Disney Facts App. Now, how hard do you think it was to build that app? Now how hard do you think it was for a 12 year old to build that app? Context changes things a bit.

Nokia has an ongoing program where developers who build their first app (has to be your first) can get a free token to submit to the marketplace, and a free Nokia phone. How cool is that?

Maya designed an app!

I talked to Maya about it and told her she could get a free Windows Phone just for building an app. She and I have gone back and forth about a Disney Facts app for literally a year or more. I was hoping this would be the push she needed to get it done.

We sat down with some paper and she designed what she wanted the app to look like. And then came the hard part… She had to write down all those corny facts we used to talk about when we went to Disney on an almost weekly basis. It took her a while to get them all written down (longer than building the app). Once she got to 50 facts we were ready to go.

Take a look at the app

Very simple. Category at the top, and the fact at the bottom. I had to help her with the data binding (getting the facts she had to show up on the screen), and with the random number generator. We used Telerik RadControls to build the pages. It makes it really easy for a novice to add an About page (prebuilt with a photo and everything).

Maya with her phone

Here is a photo of Maya with her Windows Phone – in PINK! It is a Lumia 800, and she is very happy with it. I hope she will continue to get good feedback from users and want to build more apps.

Get Disney World Facts for Windows Phone 7

Here is the direct marketplace link to the Disney World Facts app for Windows Phone 7. We even setup a website for the app at DisneyFactsApp.com.

Maya even got mentioned on the Windows Developer Podcast Episode 78!

How to join the Nokia program?

Contact our good friends over at the Windows Developer Show, they have a form you can fill out to get started.