Sunday, February 10, 2013

In the Pipeline

Well Release 11 is now in the books and I've gotten some good responses to the new features. I've been reading some of the reviews in the store from around the world and I'm happy that Star Trek fans everywhere are enjoying it! Unfortunately I know a lot of you want things like this to be a Start screen replacement but that's just not possible within the Windows Store limitations. There's a reason you don't see any other apps that can do it.

I do want to say that I am working on international weather! Getting access to this information without paying a lot of fees is difficult, but I think I'm close to having a solution. I don't know that I will be able to get 7 day for everyone, but it should at least get the current conditions for a number of cities in a lot of different countries. Getting this to work is a significant effort over what was required for the U.S. weather since I'm dealing with data in much more raw formats that have to be parsed into something I can use. This functionality most likely will not be ready for the next update, but hopefully the following one. Just know that it's coming in some form!  I certainly see that the desire is there so I will do my best to make it happen.

Even after the latest overhaul, the media player still isn't in a place where I'm 100% happy with how well it works, so I think I'm going to look at it again and see if I can't optimize it further. Mainly this will relate to the full screen code and it most likely won't be anything you will even notice as an end user, except that the media player should run and transition more smoothly, along with a reduction in the resource overhead of the app. I haven't seen any performance issues anyways even with Windows RT, but as the app gets bigger I want to make sure it stays running at peak performance so the visuals stay nice.. It's going to be a decent amount of work though, and aside from the occasional user, most of the feedback I've gotten on it has been good anyways. If there are formats it doesn't play, let me know and I will look into it. It's possible I may just need to add the extensions to what the program looks for.

The next update you will see (barring any emergency bugs that may need to be fixed) is a substantial one, but I'm not going to say what it is yet. I've been working on it for a while now since it involves making many new controls and adding new sound effects, and just a lot of adjustments that take time to test. I also want to possibly put a viewer for this website into the app itself so people are more likely to read it. A lot of answers to things get posted on these blog entries as well as on the pages dedicated to features and FAQ. The more feedback I can get, the better this app will get over time.

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