Dating "Mamba" on Windows Phone

Most recently, we released an application for the Windows Phone platform. We have come an interesting way from design to publication of the application. Today we would like to tell you about it. What pitfalls we met and advice to everyone who is just starting to develop for this platform.

We already have clients for platforms: iOS , Android , Bada . Now it's the turn for Windows Phone. This order turned out to be partly historically, but the statistics of the market force us to satisfy its needs. According to the forecasts of several agencies in 2015, the Windows Phone platform will occupy about 16% of the market. In addition, payment methods will appear in the 8th version of the OS, so you should start to study it now.
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Concept

There were not many options, because setting the problem is simple - it was necessary to implement the current functionality, adapt it to the platform and experiment a little.

After studying the guidelines, we realized that the design may be too boring. Therefore, we intentionally violated many rules (rules that should not be violated below), but we made, as we see it, a more lively and beautiful application. For example, we used pivot with a background, lists in panoramas, etc.

At first it was difficult to understand the difference between the elements of Panorama and Pivot, but if the differences are not noticeable to a beginner, then this is a simple description (eng.).

And if in your own words, panorama is intended for a beautiful invitation a la showcase, and pivot is an element for hosting large content (for example, downloadable lists), divided by tabs (pivot item).

We really liked the concept of the facebook application with its non-standard icons at the top of the screen, as well as the general information architecture.

We used balsamiq mockups for creating mockups , the program solves its problem well. For you to represent the scope of work, the final sketch layout looked like this:



After it became clear that not a single screen was missed, we printed and hung them up as cards on a board in order to play all user scenarios.

Design

Further, the case was behind the design. It was drawn by our staff designers.
It was necessary to convert the layout into a psd layout for the developer.



Also pay attention to all sorts of little things that are described in many places, for example, here .

Here are recommendations for common errors:

• left alignment
• 24px left and right indents
• buttons to use with alignment across the entire width of the screen
• use icons in AppBar only (do not use rectangular buttons or input fields)
• use standard icons in AppBar
• There are no more than 4 icons in the AppBar and only the main functions, side ones should be moved below as menu items
• In the lists and buttons-icons, use the animation of rolling (tilt effect)
• Worth implementing Fast App Switching
• You should not imitate the design of the main page (desktop) in the application screens (a la dashboard or main screen, for this there is a panorama)
• avoid looping between screen transitions
• transition depth should be no more than 5 levels

There are also a lot of inconsistencies and deviations from the rules in standard and pre-installed applications, so you should not strongly rely on them as a reference example.

The finished result:

Implementation and technology

The client was made to us by the good guys from EastBanc . Special thanks to team-leader Chesnokov Vadim for practical advice and great patience.

For push notifications, we used the package for the Zend Framework from Mike Willbanks, it is available on github.com . Very easy to implement and use, solves the problem of notifications for 3 platforms at once. By the way, the implementation of push-notifications for Windows Phone 7 was the easiest. For this, it is enough to run the accompanying example from the Zend package and the example for the client from here .

If you want to inform the user about an event, then we send a Toast notification, but if he didn’t see it, then LiveTile needs to be activated so that when the user returns to the phone, he sees the changes.

In our opinion, it is worth choosing one of the options for using notifications, since they are almost interchangeable. For example, use a Toast notification and change the Tile by the application or only the Tile notification if the application does not imply an instantaneous event. Or a more intelligent first approach: if for some time the Toast notification has not been read, then you should send a Tile notification.

Testing

For tests on the device was selected low-cost phone Nokia Lumia 710 . When testing on the device, the application behaves more smoothly and faster. Therefore, when developing, if you are thinking about buying a device to test your simple application, then we assure you that the emulator will be enough. Exceptions are performance tests, work with gps, sensors, etc.

Be sure to, at least once, run the Windows Phone Performance Analysis performance test application. It is very simple and does not take much time.

Registration in MarketPlace

Almost exhaustive description is here . But add a few words from yourself. If you register as an individual developer, then there will be no difficulty. And if you need a corporate account (Company), then there are a few nuances:

• Publisher Name in English
• Primary Email address must be different from Approver email address
• The Approver email address should be in your company's domain (needed for GeoTrust) Identity Verification instructions will be sent to the Approver email address for this purpose:
  
  • scan company registration certificate
  • translate certificate into English (pdf)
  • print and fill out an Identity Verification Form
  • Scan the Identity Verification Form, attaching an identity document (in English) in the center, for example, a driver's license
  
  

To download the application in the Windows Market Place you need Silverlight (by the way, it didn’t work properly under Ubuntu Moonlight).

If after the publication of your application, it is not on the keywords, then do not despair - wait a few days. If, however, did not appear, then feel free to write in support, the answer is sure to be, but, unfortunately, not immediately.

Total

Development for this platform was very pleasant and quite smooth.

As analytics, we used localytics , this has happened historically, although there are alternatives (flurry, google analytics, etc).

Top 3 devices almost at the same level of approximately 20% were Nokia Lumia 800, HTC 7 Mozart, Nokia Lumia 710.

PS Do you have questions, suggestions, or mistakes, please send to wp@mamba.ru . And if you like what we do, then we invite to our team .

Link to the application in the Windows Market Place.