It’s been now about three weeks since I published Simply.Write and I’m really glad I did for I have learned a ton.

Here’s a small report of some of my learnings about those bits and pieces of the Windows Store App that only devs really see!

Building that App

For Windows Store App, you can go with C# / VB (with WPF), HTML5 or C++ technologies. And it’s supposed to be the same experience either way. I’m not so much of a Javascript expert so I chose to go with what I know best: C# and WPF.

The XAML you can use is a subset of the XAML you can “normally” use… which makes it quite easy to handle… but also a bit tricky to manipulate at some points. For instance I wanted to provide a dark template in parallel to the light one, but somehow you cannot change the color of the caret (the marker indicating where you are typing) in the XAML available on WinRT so I had to give up.

In that regard, I read that the Javascript experience might be a bit richer due to the huge amount of JS packages and libraries available on internet. I guess I’ll have to give it a try to know for sure.

Other than this, the experience is quite painless. There are tons of tutorials on internet explaining you how to handle the life-cycle of the app and whatnot. Just go for it!

Publishing

Publishing is quite painless… at least when the WACK does not play dumb. The “Windows App Certification Kit” is a piece of software that runs tests against your application. It will check the macro features that your app should be handling (app is being terminated, app is being re-sized, tablet orientation changed etc.) and will provide you with a report saying if your app can be submitted at all or not.

This WACK is provided with the SDK (Software Development Kit – the piece of software you need to be able to create apps in the first place) and will be run during the publish cycle by Microsoft. So if your app does not pass on your machine, chances are it will fail as well the certification as well… or not.

I spent a few days troubleshooting why Simply.Write was failing on the 3D tests (although my app had obviously no 3D in it). In the end – after chatting with Microsoft’s support (see below) – I submitted my app anyway and it passed on their machines. Since then I never saw the WACK succeed on my machine… and I simply ignore this failure… :]

In order to publish, you first fill a bunch of fields, upload your package and pray for the best.

The certification cycle lasts from a few hours to a few days (the certification itself took one night for Simply.Write) ; and it takes a bit more time for your app to appear in the store (4-5 days for Simply.Write). In order to release an update you go the exact same way. The update certification is a bit faster though, it was done and the app was available in the store in a matter of hours.

The Dashboard

This was a point I was really curious about: How do I get feedback on my app? Users can leave reviews, but what other information does Microsoft provide in order to track what’s going on with my app? For this, there is a developer dashboard that provides a lot (or not) of useful information.

First an overview of your app, the number of downloads, the average rating and number or ratings (which I think is currently wrong) across all stores (there is no “global store” but one store per country), the current release number and the last release date. From there you can access detailed information views.

Download Numbers

The first interesting piece of information is the download chart. There you can see the download numbers per day. Simply.Write has been averaging close to 150 download per day in the last week… I cannot tell you how as astonished I am, really.

This graph was updated about a week ago by Microsoft. Before that, it used to also display the average of the Top5 apps in the category your app is in ; which was about 5000 downloads per day in the productivity category where my app is. This had the nasty effect of making “your curve” almost invisible (imaging shrinking the graph so that 5000 is where 200 now is ;  the current graph would then be compressed in the first half of what makes the 0-50 zone currently).

Quality Reports

One very important part of the dashboard relates to failures and crashes.

If you ticked the “I want to participate to the Microsoft Customer Experience Improvement Program“ option when creating your LiveID account (you can change it afterwards as well, just search for “Customer Experience Improvement Program” in Windows8), your computer will send some troubleshooting information about the crashes you might encounter back to Microsoft.

Those information are then prepared and made available to the developers in this tab. As you can see, about 0.1% of Simply.Write’s users experienced a crash during initial use (I’ve corrected that with the second release) and 56 users (that have MS CEIP activated) experienced crashes later on. The dashboard gives me so-called minidumps that I – as a developer – can download and use to troubleshoot what really happened.

It’s now been 10 days since I released an update, and I still haven’t got any crash report on the second release… finger crossed :]

Ratings

On the ratings page, you can see the ratings across all stores. As far as I can tell, I have 6 reviews, two of which got revised (that’s why I said earlier that 8 reviews on the overview was probably wrong ; it’s more likely 6).

Again, this graph got updated a week ago. Before that it used to display… well… nothing. You had to pick the countries one by one to see where you had some comments… that really sucked.

Ratings are an interesting animals. I got some really enthusiastic ratings, a couple of those from people that seem genuinely interested in the app (and actually really liked it). One of the users even suggested an additional feature and updated his comment when the update of the app brought exactly that feature.

But I also got two problematic comments. One clearly comes from a concurrent developer, someone that must have an app that does pretty much the same thing in the store and who just wanted to lower my rating. The other was an angry comment saying that the app was great but that the update screwed it up and crashes so the review gets the lowest possible score. Of course, he/she did not add any information on what didn’t go well and since he/she doesn’t have the CEIP activated, there is nothing I can do. I don’t get any bug report, I don’t have any mean to contact him/her. The only way for me to try to win that user back / get that review revised is

1. Hope that the review genuine and not another concurrent dev trying to sink my rating lower than his
2. Hope he/she did not uninstall the app yet (otherwise he/she will probably never bother looking back if the app got revised)
3. Release an update that will force a re-install of the app
4. Hope that it solves his/her issue
5. Hope that the user remembers that and updates his review

That’s a lot to hope… or I can just ignore that comment that is sinking my rating and go on with my life. Needless to say, seeing angry comments on something you created really pains the developer that I am (but that’s what I wanted to experience in a context where “it does not really matter”). But don’t mind if I say: don’t bother writing angry comments about crashes if you don’t have the MS CEIP activated… that’s just dumb.

Trends

The dashboard also wishes to let you explore store trends. There’s not much to look at but at least you can see the evolution of the download rates for paid and free apps in a given category. Here’s for instance the marked my app is competing in: about 80.000  free downloads per day in the productivity category, much much less in the paid market.

Getting help

If you ever need some help about the publishing procedure or have a question about your account or whatnot, don’t send an email to the Microsoft support, use their chat. Waaay more efficient I can assure you!

I contacted them three times already, never had to wait in line more than a couple minutes, got great answer in no time and a nice chat with people that actually knew their deal (and could type very good English without using pre-written sentences for a change). Kuddos for that Microsoft!

They’re located in the USA so you can only catch them in the afternoon or at night for us Europeans… but that’s when the “pet projects” wake up anyway right?

Conclusion

All in all, I saw what I wanted to see. I experienced the full development life-cycle, the frustration of getting bad comments, the joy of getting good ones and of seeing those download numbers steadily increase. And for those who – like me – have been working in some environments where the don’t release software every so often, bringing your work to the world really is a good exercise!

Whenever you click outside of the text area, some very-non-intrusive information will appear under the form of two context bars ; one at the top and one at the bottom of your screen. The top bar will tell you if your changes are saved or not. The bottom bar allows you to “save”, “save as” or “open” a text file (if you are using a keyboard you can of course also use Ctrl+S and Ctrl+O for respectively saving and opening). Additionnaly, the top bar is briefly displayed in green when you save, yellow when some unsaved changes are detected or red if an error occurs.

Finally, instead of using Copy/Paste (you can still do that if you like though), you can directly share the text created with any app supporting text input, like a mail app.

Even though the app visibility in the store really sucks and there are other apps of that kind in the store already, developping Windows Store Apps really is fun, and pushing an app to the store really adds some  kind of kick to it.

Here’s a how the App in the Windows AppStore looks like!

I have still two features I want to push to the store:

• Changing the size of the text
• Retaining the formatting of the text when pushing to a shared app (currently, the line returns are not retained so the text appears a one paragraph when trying to share it to the mail app for instance)

For the rest, it will depend on the feedback I get.

If you are using Windows 8 or have a WinRT tablet, give it a try and let me know what your experience was!

The first 10% are already behind me, so here’s a first report. Until now, all of the pictures were taken with my iPhone. The outdoor-by-daylight quality is just outstanding… and the practicality of having it all the time with me far overrules its low-light-drawbacks. I see 3 kind of pictures until now:

1. The oh-shit-I-still-don’t-have-my-picture-for-today pictures, those are clearly the least interesting and you’ll see very few of those here. Most of them are quite dark and noisy… well… you can’t have some ideas everyday.
2. The landscape panoramas that I love to take with that iOS 6 feature (see my posts about it here and here). Those are double edged, they can be gorgeous or their geometry can just screw the picture. Nevertheless, I love their look and feel (for instance the first picture here under) and will definitely try more of those until I really understand what makes or breaks them.
3. The “weekend pictures”, mostly taken with Mlle V. as a subject. Those I find particularly challenging but always more interesting. You’ll see more of those as well…

A hackathon is an event in which computer programmers [...] collaborate intensively on software projects.[...] Hackathons typically last between a day and a week in length. Some hackathons are intended simply for educational or social purposes, although in many cases the goal is to create usable software.

That’s what I attended to last friday. Hosted in the neat open space of the company Coworking Nürnberg, co-organized by Microsoft and the .Net User Group Franken I spent the night (from 6pm to 5am) coding a Windows Store App (Windows 8 application) along ~40 other young fellow developers.

The agenda was pretty loose. Some kind of introduction to Windows Store App programming and… go! At 4 am, we got together and presented our results. At 5:30 I was in my bed… exhausted but still pretty excited by what I  had achieved.

In short, I came to the event with two simple ideas, one of which was to implement some kind of “Fog Of War” for GoogleMaps or BingMaps in this case. The idea is simple:

I want to see where I’ve been, what I’ve already discovered in the world and what I still miss. Wherever I’ve been, the map is visible, everywhere else it’s darkened (or even maybe completely dark in a later version).

That would typically be a mobile phone app that I could pocket when I’m visiting some other city more than a slate or PC app… but the exercise does not hurt ;] After a mere 5 to 6 hours of coding I finally deployed the app on a slate and went out for a run in Nuremberg at 3 o’clock in the morning to test it in “real conditions”. And it worked!!! It burned the battery but it worked fine :] I was amazed. And here’s what it looked like at the end on the Visual Studio Simulator (changing the position of the simulator per hand).

It all started with Visual Studio not wanting to compile. At 8:30 pm, my setup was finally working… during the first two hours, I brainstormed my two ideas and decided on going with the Geo-localization one. During that troubleshooting time (reinstalling Visual Studio 2012 a couple times and installing a few SDKs) I stripped down the features to a bare minimum and made some kind of plan how I could go on with it. The features I needed to implement were the following (in order):

1. Display a map
2. Display my location
3. Display a rectangle over the map
4. Display multiple rectangles
5. Variate the opacity of the rectangles
6. Find out which database I can use with Windows Store Apps
7. Create, read and write to the database
8. Save the new coordinates into the database
9. Identify where (in which rectangle) each coordinate is
10. Variate the opacity of the rectangles correspondingly
11. Tweak the size of the rectangles

If I believe my tweets, I reached step 6 at 11:30 and was done with step 10 at 2:55, time at which I went running for a few minutes with a Samsung Slate under my arm :] My final presentation was a little catastrophy. My laptop refused to connect to the beamer and the slate refused to find back the database I had created so I had nothing to preview than a map with our position and a white square around it. But the other apps were fun to watch.

From a learning point of view, it was not really more for me than working alone at home. My neighbor helped me a couple time with the XAML and the Microsoft evangelist that was there provided some really good feedback but beside this the only real effect was to get me working 8 hours straight on that topic with some pressure to deliver… what I would never have achieved at home.

I gathered some important intel for the company and we’ll probably be coding our first Windows Store App soon but moreover I’m looking forward to the release of the phone SDK end of the month and see where I could take this idea further…

Fall is a magic time, full of colors and promises that you know won’t last. One is sure… winter will be one of a kind this year and we just cannot wait!

My heel issues didn’t get much better. Still that pain somewhere in the middle of the heel. I gave it time to heal and then some more time. I did all the exercises that internet can provide for heel pain, plantar fasciitis, plantar aponeurosis and so on… but after 2 months it hasn’t much improved.

After some more research I found another potential culprit called a fat pad contusion (usually appears after a blow under the foot which would coincide with the time it appeared – right after the Frankenweg Run where I hammered some downhills in my 5Fingers, not always landing on my forefoot). The symptoms match pretty well and the solutions internet provides me all hint toward a “it should be resolved already”. So I decided to pay a visit to a podiatrist.

After pulling on my foot, she decided I didn’t have a Plantar Fascitis and ruled out a heel spur as well (with an x-ray). What came after, I kind of expected. She then basically said that no matter what I have, I shouldn’t be running barefoot, my feet need support day-in-day out. I questioned her further in the direction of a fat-pad contusion, to which she vaguely answered that I could use small fluffy pads to put in my shoes until it heals-but-I-should-really-think-about-insoles. I paid a visit to another podiatrist (one that had more experience with barefoot running, who also has a shoe store that sells 5fingers, Inov8 and Merell shoes…). He confirmed that I did pretty much everything he would have done. Short of ideas, he also suggested I wear some insoles to lift the pressure on my heel until it heals.

So I taped it and am trying using it the least as possible. I guess my october report won’t be impressive either…

As you can see here under, the stitching algorithm succeeds in making really smooth images ; I am still searching for mis-alignments that could particularly occur on highly geometric pictures like the first one. It also manages to capture moving objects quite well. Of course, the closer/faster the objects, the harder it gets. But walking people at 10-15m distance is absolutely no problem.

The camera does really well on the luminosity side as well. Either with a broad spectrum of light like on the first and second  pictures or with a more dimmed light like on nr 3 and 4. As you can see, number 4 – with a very white sky and some very dark trees – and number 5 – with a very nice flare – are a bit hard. But all in all the camera performs really well.

Well, I let you judge the result of those iOS-made Panoramas: you can click on the titles to get the full resolution (up to 20Mpx) on Flickr.

1. Sunset rooftops

2. Pathways strabism

3. Down that valley

4. Leading somewhere

5. Down that road

One big limitation of course is the height of the picture. You cannot make panoramas like the ones I did from Paris here under (stitched in Hugin from 8 original pictures), but the ratio result/effort is close to maximal with the iPhone version (it took me a couple hours to get the two panoramas from Paris stitched correctly without any easy-to-spot artifacts compared to 10 seconds taking the panoramas with the iPhone).

Here are two panoramas taken from the top of the Eiffel Tower with a Panasonic Lumix Lx3, respectively looking North-West and South-East.

Zombies have appeared. Billions of people succumbed to them and are now wandering the street in search for brain matter to suck on. For the living, life as we know it is no more. A group of people is fighting for survival, torn between living as humans and fighting like beasts.

This comic book stands out for many reasons and first & foremost for its treatment of the people-relationships. The central key of this story is clearly how people are loosing their humanity and falling back into a quite medieval way of thinking and acting.

In 2010, AMC produced a TV-Serie full of special effect and barely a hint of  humanity. Not sticking to the book, breaking the tempo of the story and adding some more action to suck life out of the licence as much as possible, they managed to screw the thing that made the story a fantastic piece (I just realized it has a 8.7/10 rating (by 150K votes) on IMDB so the second season might actually be better than the first one).

In 2012, TellTale studio produced a video game of it. They did not use the main story, but chose to make a side story instead. This story takes place in the same world and is released per “chapter” (at the time I write those lines, chapter 1, 2 and 3 – from 5- are out). This game is like a storyline that you can influence. As your character evolves in the world – trying to survive – you are asked to make decisions that influences the storyline (save this or that guy, go this or that way). Although the story seems to be pretty linear (there’s always a twist somewhere to bring you back into the main storyline), there are some notable differences between the different paths you can take.

Pretty easy to play (although the controls are sometimes a bit clumsy), the whole game is centered on the people. Whenever you make a decision, the system tells you “Irene will remember this” or “Kenny noticed you chose not to take side”, and I assume the choices you get down the line really depend on this (I’ll have to play the game once as a total egoistic motherfucker to be sure of that). No matter what, this is really the human side I was talking about. They really managed to make that one central and you sometimes really feel pretty emotional when you realize you can save only one guy or when another dies in front of you.

One other thing I love is the decision summary at the end of an episode. There you get what your decisions looked like compared to that of other people:

This bit of creepy peeking in other people’s mind adds a lot to the story and the feeling about the game in general. I’m really amazed by this game and am really looking forward to the next episodes!

Just. Wow. I’m impressed by the quality. PADC 13 you can come ;]