Re-designing Alphabets4Kids app

We have 2 apps in the marketplace, and the downloads are progressing. Good news.

But we think we could do a much better job in designing the  layout of the apps. We took Alphabets4Kids app as a guinea pig.

To make good movies, you need to watch good (and bad) movies. To write a good book, you need to read a lot. To create (I intentionally did not use the word "develop") a beautiful app, you need to look at other apps. So, I took time to read and wander around to see other apps. And that gave me a new perspective of designing apps. Windows Phone 7 gives a wonderful ecosystem which we could leverage and put in our creative brains together to come up with top-notch apps.

I went ahead and did (and re-did) a re-design of Alphabets4Kids. It is available in the marketplace now.





Below are some screenshots:

We think we could do a much better job on this.  We would be bringing new features for this app in near future.

Windows Phone 7 Development

I have already dived into the ocean of Windows Phone 7 development. Not alone, but with one of my friends Rajeev Venkitaraman. He is also a .NET enthusiast and technologist. We already developed two apps, for kids, Shapes4Kids and Alphabets4Kids.

To track our progress, and also to share our experiences, we have created a blog - http://hubapps.blogspot.com/. Please visit this site and plant your feedback.

Shapes4Kids - Helping kids learn various shapes

Alphabets4Kids was not our first app. There was another app we developed (Shapes4Kids), but failed the certification. We had sound added in that app, for each shape. My 7 year old daughter, Parvathy, helped us in recording the sounds. We have promised her a Happy Meal from McDonalds!:)

Our app failed the certification for two reasons:

1. Our app would stop any existing background audio.
2. We did not have any control over our on media, for example the volume.


While I started working on developing a Settings page, Rajeev Venkitaraman had completed the Alphabets app. So we got that app uploaded, without any audio. It passed the certification.

We have completed the work on the Shapes app and have submitted the same.

Here's how we solved the two issues.

1. Controlling the background audio.
There is no inherent methods in Silverlight to check whether a background audio is being played. So, we take help from XNA framework. For that we need to refer the following assembly:

Microsoft.Xna.Framework

The following property would help us identify whether a background audio is being played:

Media.MediaPlayer.GameHasControl

If it returns false, then it means the background music is being played. Do not forget to call FrameworkDispatcher.Update() before accessing the Xna property.

2.Controlling our own audio
We created a separate Settings page for controlling our audio. The IsolatedStorage ApplicationSettings came very handy in this case. We created a separate AppSettings class and accessed this as a resource in both the MainPage.xaml (in which we rendered the Shapes) and Settings xaml page.



The testing is in progress.
(Cross fingers!) :)

UPDATE

The Shapes4Kids app has passed the certification and is available for download.

Alphabets4Kids - Our first app

Our very first app Alphabets4Kids is ready for download in the marketplace, for Windows Phone 7 users. This is a very basic app, targeted towards kids aged 3-5, who are learning alphabets. We would be adding audio, to make it more interesting in further releases.

Please feel free to drop a line regarding this app.

Our stint with Windows Phone 7

I have been pondering around developing mobile apps for long. When I attended John Baird's session on Windows Phone 7 at the Central Penn .NET User Group, I knew this was the time. I pinged my geek friend Rajeev Venkitaraman and we talked about this a little bit. He also got excited, but we needed more brain washing :)

I had already been dwelling into Silverlight and XAML at my free time, and I was quite confident in doing the WP7 development. We attended the MVVM session by Miguel Castro at Microsoft's Malvern (PA) office and John  Baird's WP7 session (again) at Philly Code Camp. Their enthusiasm were contagious. We couldn't wait further.

After 2 days, we met and talked about various ideas. We came into creating apps for kids - kids who are beginning to learn. Shapes, alphabets, numbers and what not... We made 2 apps, one for Shapes and another for Alphabets. Both are being tested...


We are quite excited on this new adventure...

I will keep everyone posted on our trips, tricks, successes and failures...

What I have been upto

I haven't been blogging much lately... just posting activity updates of our .NET User Group. What I have been upto?  I have been:

• Learning Silverlight
• I have made several attempts to learn SL in the past, but for some obvious and not-so obvious reasons, I had to drop it. The obvious reason was for the fact that SL was not "enterprise" ready. But this time, I have had it all sorted out. With the SL4.0 being out, and Windows Phone 7 supporting SL4.0 development, it made quite sense (yes, I am not out of it yet :)) to get into the SL bandwagon (is there one?). I am reading mainly from the Wrox book and from the blogs around.
• Learning C#
• Ha.... I have been a VB(.NET) guy for long. I still am. But the world does not seem friendly enough to VB.NET developers. Almost all the articles that I read are of C#. I read C# pretty fluently, but my coding skills are still immature when it comes to this language. There is one truth that we VB.NET developers do not like to admit - C# is (going to be) the de-facto language of .NET. In my travel around the blogosphere and the web, I see more and more applications being written in C#. I have decided to break the barrier and learn it and make it my primary language of choice.
• Learning MVVM
• If you know Silverlight, it is understood that you know MVVM (Model View ViewModel) also. They go along so well. This became more and more clear when I attended the Get DevReady with MVVM session by Miguel Castro at Malvern PA. I am reading Josh Smith's article as my primary resource.

So, all the three at the same time. Hmmm... its fun! :)

On the side, I am developing an app in SL4.0, to apply what I have learned. Every week I try to do something with what I learn. This is a slow process for now, but I am getting there...  The world of XAML is pretty wonderful... As I said before, it makes easy things hard and hard things easier.

Expect more Silverlight related posts.... yeah... coming soon!

Windows Phone presentation

It was an amazing evening this tuesday. John started of with this statement: Silverlight (and WPF for that matter) makes easy things harder and hard things easier.
It couldn't have been explained better.