During the last months, I used the few times of my spare time when I wasn’t in the mood for programming to read Geoff’s latest book for diving deeper into Azure Mobile Services. Geoff is well known in the community for his Azure experience, and I absolutely recommend to follow him! I am really glad he asked me to review his book and need to apologize that it took so long to get this review up.
The book itself is very well structured with a true working XAML based game that utilizes both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and connects them to one single Mobile Service.
Even if you are completely new to Azure, you will quickly get things done as the whole book is full of step-by-step instructions. Let’s have a quick look on what you will learn while reading this book:
Prepare your Azure account and set up your first Mobile Service
Bring your Mobile Service to life and connect Visual Studio
Securing user’s data
Create your own API endpoints
use Git via the console for remote development
manage Push Notifications for both Windows and Windows Phone apps
use the advantages of the Notification hub
Best practices for app development – some very useful general guilty tips!
I already use a Mobile Service with my Windows Phone App TweeCoMinder. I have already started a Windows 8 version of that app, which basically only needs to be connected to my existing Azure Mobile Service to finish it.
While reading Geoff’s book, I learned how I effectively can achieve this and also improve my code for handling the push notifications on both systems. The book is an absolutely worthy investment if you look into Azure and Mobile Services and has a lot of sample code that can be reused in your own application.
As this is my first book review ever, feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.
Microsoft introduced custom uri schemes or uri associations in Windows Phone 8 along with the ability to launch apps based on a file type.
Sadly, this feature is not used across a broad range of apps yet. Why am I so interested in that point? I am going to explain you.
First, there is one big issue: You can share any app via NFC, and launch any app from the Store via NFC tag that has a launch app record. But you cannot launch any apps from your app – just those that have implemented a custom uri scheme. On the other two big operating systems, sharing between apps is meanwhile a standard feature used by a lot of developers.
Most of the settings pages have one of those uri schemes, for example the Wi-Fi settings page can be launched with this simple line of code:
I don’t know if other developers just don’t know about this feature or if they don’t think it is necessary. I talked to a lot of users of my app NFC Toolkit for Windows Phone 8, and all asked me to add the possibility to launch a desired app at the end of my profiles (if you don’t know, my profiles launch programmable sequence of settings pages).
Searching for a solution to satisfy my user, I spent a few days with researching of all possibilities and talking to other developers. Some of them wanted use cases for adding that feature, here are three:
Every day I leave for work, I disable Wi-Fi, activate Bluetooth and switch the cellular connection from 2G to 3G/4G. I often use Nokia Music to listen to music while driving to work (about 45 minutes). This is one of the use cases.
The second scenario should be also familiar to some of you: I switch off all data connections because otherwise, my phone would ring very often during the night. In the morning, I switch them back on and check for news with a feed reader app. This would fit perfectly into a profile that I save on a NFC tag or launch via secondary tile.
Third one: there are a lot of blog reader apps out there. Sure, Windows Phone has social networks built in – but only Facebook (user only), Twitter and LinkedIn. What if I want to share to another network, for example Geeklist? Then I have to copy and paste instead of just hitting the share button.
There are more use cases, but I am leaving you with these three for the moment.
Back to the conversations I had with my users. They want and deserve a great user experience. This blog post is part of my efforts to provide users their deserved user experience.
Sadly, for a handful of developers it is not as easy to gain some attention for this. This is why I am trying to get DVLUP on board. By creating a challenge for this, more developers would join to earn the XP. The winners in this case are the users out there, because this way, their user experience will be improved. I know this should be done by Microsoft. In the meantime, it is up to us developers to improve. That’s why I ask you to vote for my idea case on DVLUP here: http://www.dvlup.com/Feedback?query=custom+uri+scheme+to+all+apps%21# (the first entry in the list is the one to vote).
There is one reason left why you should add a custom uri scheme to your app. This point is for you, the developer reading this article. You have a free possibility to promote your app across other apps. The most important point: it takes only 5 minutes to add a simple launch uri scheme.
Do you already have a custom uri scheme for your app? Great, then add it to this list: URI Association Schemes List – Nokia Developer Wiki. This way, other developers can use them to interact with your app and bring you new users, too.
To close this article, I want to show you how to add a simple custom uri launch scheme. I have done this with my app Mix Play & Share recently (update submitted, will add it to the list above as soon as it certified).
A simple launch uri – the code
First, open your WMAppManifest.xml by right-clicking on it and Open with… =>XML (Text) Editor.
After the </Tokens> Element, add the following code:
I hope after reading this post, you understand why I think it is important to add a custom uri scheme. With the simple code above, you’re done in 5 minutes.
Update 12/14/2013:
I needed to update the UriMapper class above, because without handling a scheme without parameters we will have no guarantee that the app launches. In my tests it works sometimes and sometimes not, but to make sure your app launches, please handle this case properly.
While development of my NFC Toolkit, I came to the point where I needed to launch apps from my code.
On Windows Phone, this is only possible via custom uri association and needs to be implemented by the developer of an app.
If you want your app to be launchable from other apps, you need to implement a custom uri assocation like descriebed here in the MSDN Documentation.
Users are demanding often apps to be launched from other apps – it is not much work to do, so I recommend you are implementing those features into your app(s). Over time, your app will be getting more recognition amongst users of other apps and improves the user experience a lot.
I am currently working on my NFC app, and I want to make it easier for the end user to search for the AppId which you need for the LaunchApp record. So I thought about a possible solution for this, and of course the easiest way is to search the app.
If you only want to search the Windows Phone Store and let show some search results, there is the MarketplaceSearchTask, which you can call as a launcher. The only problem is, you cannot get any values into your app this way. But I found a way to get the results into my app. This post is about how I did it.
The first thing you will need to add to your project is the HTMLAgilitypack. It helps you parsing links from an HTML-based document. Huge thanks to @AWSOMEDEVSIGNER (follow him!), who helped me to get started with it and understand XPath. Xpath is also important for the HAP to work with Windows Phone. You will need to reference to System.Xml.Xpath.dll, which you will find in
%ProgramFiles(x86)%Microsoft SDKsMicrosoft SDKsSilverlightv4.0LibrariesClient or
%ProgramFiles%Microsoft SDKsMicrosoft SDKsSilverlightv4.0LibrariesClient
Ok, if we have this, we can continue in creating the search. Add a TextBox, a Button and a ListBox to your XAML:
After creating this, we will hook up the Click-Event of our Button to create our search. We are going to use the search of windowsphone.com to get all the information we want. You can parse any information that you need like ratings etc., but we focus on AppId, Name of the App and of course the store Logo of each app.
First, we need to create the search Uri. The Uri is country dependent like your phone. This is how we create the Uri:
After that, we are using a WebClient to get the HTML-String of the search. I used the WebClient as I want to make it usable on WP7.x and WP8.
//start WebClient (this way it will work on WP7 & WP8)
WebClient MyMPSearch = new WebClient();
//Add this header to asure that new results will be downloaded, also if the search term has not changed
// otherwise it would not load again the result string (because of WP cashing)
MyMPSearch.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.IfModifiedSince] = DateTime.Now.ToString();
//Download the String and add new EventHandler once the Download has completed
MyMPSearch.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(MyMPSearch_DownloadStringCompleted);
MyMPSearch.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(searchUri));
In our DownloadStringCompletedEvent we now are parsing the HTML-String. First thing we need to do is to create a HTML-Document that loads our string:
//HAP needs a HTML-Document as it is based on Linq/Xpath
HtmlDocument doc = new HtmlDocument();
doc.LoadHtml(e.Result);
The next step is a bit tricky if you do not know Xpath. You need to got through all the HTML elements to find the one that holds the data you want to parse. In our case it is the class called “medium” within the result table “appList”.
var nodeList = doc.DocumentNode.SelectNodes("//table[@class='appList']/tbody/tr/td[@class='medium']/a");
Note that you have to use ‘ instead of ” for the class names in Xpath. I recommend to open a sample search page in an internet browser and look into the code view of the page to find the right path.
Now that we have a NodeList, we can parse the data we want:
foreach(var node in nodeList)
{
//get AppId from Attributes
cutAppID = node.Attributes["data-ov"].Value.Substring(5, 36);
//get ImageUri for Image Source
var ImageMatch = Regex.Match(node.OuterHtml, "src");
cutAppLogo = node.OuterHtml.Substring(ImageMatch.Index + 5, 92);
// get AppTitle from node
//Beginning of the AppTitle String
var AppTitleMatch = Regex.Match(node.InnerHtml, "alt=");
var StringToCut = Regex.Replace(node.InnerHtml.Substring(AppTitleMatch.Index),"alt="",string.Empty);
//End of the AppTitle String
var searchForApptitleEnd = Regex.Match(StringToCut, "">");
//FinalAppName - cutting away the rest of the Html String at index of searchForApptitelEnd
// if we won't do that, it would not display the name correctly
cutAppName = StringToCut.Remove(searchForApptitleEnd.Index);
}
As you can see, we need to perform some String operations, but this is the easiest way I got the result I want – within my app. As always I hope this will be helpful for some of you.
This post is about styling our WebView or WebBrowser in our app. Until now, we only got the HTML string that we are displaying in our WebView or WebBrowser. It looks like this:
The content we receive from our WordPress post content includes already all kind of HTML tags like paragraphs, lists, links, images. That is the advantage for this solution: no parsing is needed, the string can be displayed as is. Both the WebView and the WebBrowser framework element (no, they are not controls) are able to read and render CSS code. And this is how we can match the whole element for our app.
HTML Pages can be styled by using a so called cascading style sheet (CSS), which is similar to XAML code. With a little bit of searching on the web you will be able to style “translate” your XAML properties into CSS.
Every CSS string has to be surrounded with “<STYLE type=”text/css”> </STYLE> “. Between those two Style tags, you can set different properties for each kind of HMTL tag:
body = the whole page is embedded in the body. this is where we set the background of our content as well as the width and the height
p = paragraphs. paragraphs can contain text as well as images or other multimedia content. Mainly used for text like in our blog post, we style how the user is able to read our blog post.
h1 – h4 = different kinds of headers. you can define four styles of headers
pre = is for lines of code
blockquote = if we quote people or other sites, we use quotes to clarify this aren’t our words. should be styled a bit differently than the rest of our blog (e.g. Italic)
a:link = how hyperlinks will be styled
li = this is how our list will be styled in this view
img = how we want to see our pictures in our post
Hint for using CSS in code behind:
If you just C&P the CSS string from above, it will result in some errors from Visual Studio. Visual Studio does not like the new lines in strings, so you have to add it as one line. Also is it not possible to use ‘”‘ within a string declaration. It has to be “escaped”, which we are doing with a simple before it: ‘”‘. I mentioned it because I learned it the very hard way by trying to solve it for 2 hours.
Only thing we now need to do is pass the CSS String together with our HTML string from our JSON to our WebView or WebBrowser element:
After navigating to this both strings, our content is now displayed like native:
One last tip:
I recommend to set the Visibility of your WebBrowser or WebView to “Collapsed” until the whole rendering has done. Once the “navigation” has finished, set it via code to visible. This way the user does not recognize that we are rendering the post content for him. Just display a loading animation until that is done. Both elements have a “LoadCompleted” event. Once the rendering (= the navigation to our string) is done, the content of our blog post is shown as it would be natively in our app.
As always, I hope this is helpful for some of you and feel free to leave a comment below.
When it comes to display the post content on a blog reader app, it starts to become a bit challenging. The post content is formatted to look great on your website. But when we pull our posts into an app, there is only the naked, HTML formatted string.
As developer, you have to think about several things now:
What part of the content do I want to be displayed?
How do I get the images there?
What if there is a video in the post?
Where do I put the Links in?
How can I handle enumerations?
and so on…
There is the HTMLAgilityPack out there, but I never got a satisfying result out of it. The next method would be to write a custom parser. This is what I have done before, in the old version of the app for my WordPress blog. It did work, but I had to invest a real big amount of time in it before I got a result that I was able to live with. I was also not too experienced with RegEx (and I am still not) that I could set up a perfect parser.
When I was creating the Windows 8 version of my app, I wanted to achieve a good reading experience. On the other side I wanted the code to be as reliable as possible, because there are often changes on WordPress that can have impact on my app.
As I mentioned above, the post content is already formatted. It is formatted in HTML. I decided to render the content string instead of parsing it.
It is pretty easy to do that. Just pass the content string to your desired details page, and use a WebBrowser on Windows Phone or a WebView on Windows 8. Without any parsing, just by “navigating” to the passed string, we will get a result like this:
So we have already a readable result, and if my app has only white background, I could leave it like it is and go on. Without any additional line of code.
Using the WebBrowser/WebView brings also additional advantages:
Pinch-to-Zoom support
Orientation support
automatic image downloading without any additional control
WebView on Windows 8 embeds videos automatically
I don’t want to hide that there are a few points that we need to handle, which will be subject of additional posts:
styling of content to match our app colors
Navigation to links (including a solution for video links on Windows Phone)
Scroll direction in Windows 8 WebView
I know it might be not the best practice for displaying web content, but I am really satisfied what I achieved by using the WebBrowser and WebView element in my apps.
I hope the upcoming blog posts will be helpful for some of you to create also a good user experience by using these elements. Of course these posts will contain some code. Before starting the posts about it I just wanted to share why I used these elements.
Now that we have a full WordPress JSON class, we are able to download our recent posts from WordPress into our apps for Windows Phone and Windows 8. I am still not using MVVM to keep it simple (and because I have to dive into it more deeply).
The first thing we need to do is to download the JSON string for the recent posts. The Uri scheme is pretty simple: {yourblogadresshere}?json=get_recent_posts
I declared a public string in my MainPage for that, so it is very easy to use it in our app.
The second thing we are going to do is to download the JSON string into the app.
For Windows Phone I used a WebClient, as I want to keep it compatible with the Windows Phone 7 OS. I will update the App with an dedicated WP8 version later, for the moment it is working on both OS versions. Add this code to you Page_Loaded event:
WebClient GetPostsClient = new WebClient();
GetPostsClient.Headers[HttpRequestHeader.IfModifiedSince] = DateTime.Now.ToString();
GetPostsClient.DownloadStringCompleted += new DownloadStringCompletedEventHandler(GetPostsClient_DownloadStringCompleted);
GetPostsClient.DownloadStringAsync(new Uri(RecentPostJsonUri));
We will also have to add the Handler for GetPostsClient_DownloadStringCompleted:
Both the Windows Phone and the Windows 8 apps are downloading the string asynchronously, the UI is reliable all the time. You may have noticed the additional Header that I request. This way, we are able to integrate a refresh function into our app. If we leave this out, our app uses the cached string, and users will have to exit the app to refresh the list of our posts.
You will have to declare a public static string variable for the downloaded string in App.xaml.cs, that keeps the downloaded string accessible through the whole app.
Until now we have only downloaded our JSON String, which looks like this:
Side note: The WordPress JSON API has a dev mode. Just add “&dev=1” to your above created Uri, and you will be able to see the whole JSON string in a readable form in your browser.
Back to our topic. Off course this is not a good format for users. They want to see only the content, without all the formatting and structuring code around.
What we need to do, is to deserialize our JSON String. This is possible with Windows Phone and Windows 8 own API, but I highly recommend to use the JSON.net library. You can download and learn more about it here. To install the library, just go to Tools>Library Package Manager>Manage NuGet Packages for Solution, search for JSON.net, and install it.
After installing the package, we are able to use only one line of code to deserialize our JSON String to our data members:
var postList = JsonConvert.DeserializeObject<Posts>(App.jsonString_result);
Now we need the deserialized data to be displayed to the user. The desired control for Windows Phone is a ListBox, for Windows 8 you it is called ListView. We need to create an ItemTemplate in XAML and bind the data we want to show to the user (Just change ListBox to ListView for Windows 8 in XAML):
As you can see, we have set some Bindings in the code above. This Bindings rely on the DataContract Post, as every ListBox/ListView-Item represents one Post of our postList.
[DataContract]
public class Post
{
[DataMember]
public int id { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string type { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string slug { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string url { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string status { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string title { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string title_plain { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string content { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string excerpt { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string date { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string modified { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public List<Category> categories { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public List<object> tags { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public Author author { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public List<comment> comments { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public List<Attachment> attachments { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public int comment_count { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string comment_status { get; set; }
[DataMember]
public string thumbnail { get; set; }
}
Choose the fields you want to display to create your own DataTemplate to show only the data you want. Last but not least we have to tell our app that the ItemSource of our ListBox is the deserialized list, which is also done easily:
PostListBox.ItemsSource = postList.posts;
If you now hit F5 on your keyboard, the app should be built and the device/emulator should show your recent posts in a list. You don’t need to add additional code to download the images, as the image source points already to an image and will be downloaded automatically.
Pro-Tip:
The thumbnails from the our DataContract Post are looking really ugly sometimes. To get a better looking result in your ListBox/ListView, I recommend to use the attached images. To do this, you will need the following code:
foreach (var item in postList.posts)
{
var postImagefromAttachement = item.attachments.FirstOrDefault();
if (postImagefromAttachement == null)
{
item.thumbnail = placeholderImage; //add your own placeholderimage here
}
else
{
item.thumbnail = postImagefromAttachement.images.medium.url;
}
}
This code checks your list of attachments in your post, takes the first image, and downloads a higher quality (medium/full). I am using medium to get best results on quality and download speed.
I hope this is helpful for some of you to get forward for to create a WordPress blog app on Windows Phone and Windows 8.
I did not plan this post, but as I received an email yesterday from another developer, this changed. This post will be an Editorial about the relationship between developers and users.
Users and developers do have a problem. Users have expectations for our apps. We developers have to fulfill these expectations. Here is an image I found on the web, that describes the situation quite well:
Of course, this is a funny Picture. But in the last few weeks sadly this image turned out to be kind of true. I talked also to other developers, and they made similar experiences. I will try to explain why feedback is important to us developers.
It all starts with an idea. The idea can come from a friend, a family member or from a situation your life. For my very first app the situation was simply the app I searched was not out there in the marketplace and it is no pleasure to use the mobile web in some situation (e.g. while fishing). For another app a discussion on my primary work was the reason.
If you are an app developer, you now sit down and create a concept. You have to think about a lot of things:
which features do I want in my application?
do I already know all to get this features into my app?
where can I learn about features that I want but do not know how to code them?
How does the UI have to look?
How much time will it cost to create a first running application?
what are the limitations of the OS I am coding for?
how can I promote my apps?
and certainly a few other things
Until now, we do not have written one line of code, but already spent a few hours if not days only in planning phase. At some point, of course we start coding. The coding and designing process is followed by ups and downs, where you have to reconsider features, sometimes even have to rethink your whole attempt on how to create the app.
I have a very good example for that. Initially I tried to use animated gifs in my app “fishing knots +” . It turned out that Windows Phone does not support this image format natively. So I searched a way to achieve my goal and let Windows Phone learn it within my app. There are some solutions out there, but I was not satisfied with the result. So I started to search for alternatives and found one that suites it very well: a storyboard for each animation. But then I had another problem: For a storyboard animation, you need single images, not a finished gif animation. Luckily one of my co-workers could help me out and created the images for me, so I was able to use it. But it took also some time for him to create the images (12 knots with at least 10 images). I created the basic images, and he did his magic. The result was great.
Now we have a very basic version of our app that runs, and can also be shown to some people. And of course, friends, coworkers and family are your first “customers” that give you some feedback. You should be grateful for the feedback they provide, as it often offers you sights on which you do not think while developing the app. Also if that means you have to rewrite a bunch of your code. They are no developers (in most cases). They are just users. Let them play around with your app (best on a real device!), and do write down every single point they tell you. Feedback is good, and helps you to evolve.
Now that we have done this, our app at some point reaches the state of being submitted to the Marketplace/Store. You should never start with a final version number like 1.0 for that. 1.0 suggests a user that it is a finished product with nearly no error. And they errors will come. I did not see a single app that was without issues on the first release, neither on the following updates. This counts for my apps as well as for apps of other developers. But that is not a bad thing. Once you have published your app, you have the possibility to obtain more feedback. This time from real end users.
To achieve this, you should offer a way to give feedback within your application. Here is my attempt that I have in every of my apps:
As you can see, I integrated a few ways to obtain feedback. I created a twitter handle, where users can give feedback and follow for actual announcements for my apps. Nowadays a Facebook page is also an advantage, and then users have the ability to send me an email to provide more detailed feedback. And one thing you never should miss: a direct link from your app to the review section of your app in Marketplace.
So from our part, we did all to get some feedback. Now to you, user of our app! We want you to give us some feedback! What we want is feedback that helps us to understand what you expect.
Sadly a lot of users are rating an app with less stars, providing no feedback or only harsh words for the app. A rating for an app was delivered with less than 5 stars because the app is not free. Another one gave me 1 start and as comment: “great”. That is not feedback that can be used to improve the app.
Another example is glƏƏk! for Windows 8. It is an really fast and fantastic twitter app. I use also their Windows Phone version, and I am absolutely happy with it.
The first versions of the Windows 8 app had some problems and was crashing a lot. Users, of course, wrote that into their reviews. But how many of them did give them feedback to improve the app? As I am in contact with the developers, I know that they did not get a lot of feedback to iron out all those issues. Feedback is important to us developers. We need to know in which cases you, the users, have the issues. We have to reproduce the error, but that is nearly impossible without your feedback.
I understand that you give a bad rating to an app if it crashes a lot or if you are constantly facing other problems. And we developers try to iron out every single point you tell us. If you see that the experience has improved, you also should honor the work we do for you and update your rating and review. glƏƏk! had some issues like all other twitter clients on Windows 8, too. In the meantime, glƏƏk! was updated nearly every day to iron out other issues, and finally we have a non crashing version. But no one updated their reviews and ratings. Sure, some may have uninstalled the app, others are having it still but do not updated their rating/review. This is frustrating for developers who do not get a lot of feedback via email or other channels but only via the ratings.
Please, do not take this as advice to not rate our apps. We want your ratings. But be fair. If something is wrong with one of our apps, please tell us! But I beg you to understand that we only can work with quality feedback, so please use twitter/Facebook/email, whatever we offer you. Give us as much information as you can, answer to our questions if we have them to you. And please update your ratings after we have ironed out your issues.
Please not also that we are no aliens. We are humans like you after all. And we are also users.
As I announced already yesterday, this post is all about must have photo apps for Windows Phone. The selection and this post is reflecting my own opinion about the apps. If you are using other apps or have another point to mention on the apps I write about, feel free to leave a comment below.
First, photography and social networking seems to be “modern” and “cool” at the moment. Before I did not give much about it, but over time, the community and the fantastic camera of the Lumia 900 I currently use have made me kind of addicted to it (and also my wife ).
Thumba Photo Editor
Thumba Photo Editor was one of the first Windows Phone apps when the platform was launched in 2010. Since then it made a really big evolution, providing tons of features to edit your photos. Check out a few here:
Once you choose an option, you will get a preview screen with a before/after view. Depending on the chosen option, you may have the option to adjust some settings before applying finally:
And here is final result of the above set options (yes, that´s our cat):
The app has built in sharing feature for Facebook, Flickr and Twitter. You can download the app right here from Marketplace. The App will cost 99 cents and comes with a free trial.
Lomogram has only predefined filters. You can add some light effects, choose from filters and add some frames. The app can load already taken pictures or take one immediately.
Although there are only those predefined options, results are pretty good, as you can see:
Once you saved your pictures, you can share your pics directly to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr and vk (Russian network).
You can download the app here at the Marketplace for free.
My Comic
This is a very simple app. you choose a picture, and you will be able to add some comic-style text-bubbles to it. As you can see you have the option to position the bubbles, edit the text and its size.
Sadly there are two points that are negative about that app:
– there is a watermark with the icon on every photo you make (you can overlay it with a bubble)
– the app is not ready for multitasking. If you are going away from the app and return, you will have only a black screen and all edits are gone.
Currently the developers run the app for free, it is a nice gimmick to have so head over to the Marketplace to grab it! GetMeRated!
GetMeRated is a social network where you can get your photos rated via “photo questions”. If you want to have a look on their website, go to www.getmerated.com. They released until mobile apps for Symbian and Windows Phone first, Android and iOS apps are in the works.
Once you have finished the registration process, you are automatically following 11 people to assure you can test the network. This is how the photo feeds and the photo details are looking like:
Posting a photo question is also very easy done. You choose a photo, ask you question, choose if you want a rating ore a vote and post your photo. Votes can also be edited.
What makes this app outstanding are real-time push notifications about ratings, votes and messages and Live-Tiles. Don’t wait and head over to the Marketplace and join the fun!
They have also a translation program, so don’t hesitate to offer your help for translation via the contact form or their contact mail.
fhotoroom (upcoming V2!)
fhotoroom is another social network that is exclusive to Windows Phone. Their Windows Phone app is also a really fantastic photo editor. They are providing a ton of filters and options to edit photos.
As I am absolutely enthusiastic about this app and did mention it on Twitter, the devs contacted me to offer me to take part in a beta test in the last few weeks.
The images you now will see are exclusive and the first that are out in the wild!
When you start the app, you will see like before the “#recent” feed. It shows you the latest photos were posted by fhotoroom users worldwide. The UI has been completely reworked to match the Metro guidelines (Yes, I said Metro!). Also the profile is no following this new UI. The pics are now loaded really fast, even with a low EDGE connection you don´t have the feeling that you have to wait a long time.
In their first versions you had to switch to another page to choose your edit option. That has completely changed. Now you have a one page editor that lets you choose your option and adjust its setting.
In V2, you can easily switch between the edits, styles and frames without leaving the one editing page. That is really great and is a big step for usability and makes me love the app even more.
Another huge feature is the own camera part of fhotoroom, which lets you set a ton of options and really takes all the best from your camera.
The app lets you save your finished pic to the phone or to your SkyDrive so you can use it anywhere else. I for myself post them from time to time also to GetMeRated! to obtain some feedback.
As most other apps fhotoroom has also a connection to Twitter and Facebook, where you can share your pics as well as the pics from other users. Additionally you can post them to Tumblr and Flickr.
What do you wait? Head over to the Marketplace and join fhotoroom for free, while having a great photo editing app! Do it now!
Photosynth
We were really waiting a long time for Microsoft´s Photosynth app on Windows Phone. And the app is great, really great. First: The app does not really need a gyroscope. I tested it on a Lumia 800 as well as on my Lumia 900.
Photosynth lets you take 360 degree panoramas with your Windows Phone and upload them to www.photosynth.net (if you have an account). You can share them also via social network or view the ones you have already uploaded to this site. You can also view highlights if they were saved in a Photosynth.
While editing, the app helps you to take the right position, it is really intuitive to use:
If you like panoramas, head over to the Marketplace and download it for free.
Nokia Camera Extras – Panorama
If you have a Lumia Windows Phone like me and the latest software installed, you can download Nokia Camera Extras to your phone. It is an camera extension that lets you also take panorama shots – but they are static, not 360 degrees like the ones from Photosynth.
The app guides you easily through the steps to take a panorama:
Due to the fact that the screenshot tool I used is not able to see the built in camera view, we can not see photo on the screenshot while taking them. But you are able to see how it the app helps you to get your static panorama. If you have a Lumia, you can download the app here at the Marketplace.
So this is my personal selection of photo apps, and I think it is a great one. You can do a lot of things with all these apps.
If you know any other app or just want to share your opinion on the apps above, leave simply a comment below.