After a couple of important releases for Windows Phone, including the brand new and FREE LCARS Personnel app, and a nice update to LCARS Interface for Windows Phone 7/8, we feel now is a good time to do a major overhaul to the back end code being used by all LCARS applications.
If the software development process interests you, read on past the break for more details of what we are doing..
What does this mean for you? Well, aside from the slight delay in updates while we do this, not too much will be visible on the outside at first. When we made the first LCARS Interface app for Windows 8, we never anticipated all of the additional apps we would end up making for Windows Phone. When we made the Windows Phone 8 app, we didn't anticipate supporting Windows Phone 7. Those additional platforms were all supported because all of you asked for it! The result of our initial efforts was a lot of duplicated code and that means duplicate maintenance and update times...
Now that those apps have matured quite a bit, it's time to really streamline the development process for them all. We are rebuilding our LCARS control libraries from the ground up and this time, code re-use between apps will be fully maximized! What does this mean? It means faster development of new features, and it means we will be able to add new features once and it will be available for Windows 8 (RT/Modern UI), Windows Phone 7.1+, and Windows Phone 8 with only minor modifications needed for the individual platform's capabilities. This should mean the end of delays in getting Windows Phone 7 releases out a week or so after the Windows Phone 8 release (assuming WP7 supports the new feature, that is!), and will allow us to spend that week on new features instead of doing the same thing again (and again)!
Microsoft has been making a lot of changes to allow this type of cross-device development within the Windows ecosystem. Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone will be continually growing closer together in terms of development potential, and these new changes will allow us to take full advantage of this.
Ideally this entire process will take under a week, as we have been working on the redesign for quite some time now in anticipation. We apologize for the temporary delays in updates while this takes place, but it should allow much faster updates for all Windows based platforms that we make apps for in the future! This is especially useful as the Windows ecosystem grows, with possibly a lot of this code able to be used on the new Xbox, web, desktop applications, etc.
Cant Wait
ReplyDeleteI love you guys. I'm not a trekkie but I like TNG and enjoy novelty apps like this. Its cool to see you guys so dedicated to improving your applications- I have much respect.
ReplyDeleteBTW I'm writing this in the browser of the WP8 LCARS app. ��
Thank you! We are definitely dedicated to improving everything we do in order to provide the best experience possible for everyone. The overhaul of the code is going very well so far. We have both the WP7 and WP8 version of the LCARS Interface app running on the new modular platform and the improvements are very promising. WP7 and WP8 versions are now directly sharing over 90% of their code! We now have the flexibility to implement the functional part of new features once for all platforms and only have to separate sections that are specific to one platform or another.
DeleteAnother thing this will help is with fixing any bugs that come up. Now any fixes to the common code will be shared for any platform using it. Small things that we might fix while writing the WP8 version may be missed sometimes when we go to back port it to WP7. We do our best to document these things but it's never completely foolproof while they were running completely independent code.
So far the LCARS Interface for Windows Phone 7/8 apps look pretty much like they did before, but we streamlined all of the animation and sound effects to be completely consistent across each page. The next step is to implement some REAL animations to bring more life to the UI. One reviewer mentioned that we were lacking this, and it is somewhat true for Windows Phone. We were conservative with animations at first because we didn't want to overload the capabilities of the hardware, but now that we've purchased more testing devices we can more accurately determine how well it will work.
Sorry for the lengthy reply, but we are very excited about how well this process is going so far, and are also very excited for the new things we will be able to bring to all of our applications soon!
Next up is to get our other 2 Windows Phone LCARS apps running on the same new framework, and then it will be on to the Windows 8 app to have that one share as much as 50% of the same code as well! Another week and it should all be complete, and then we can get back to finalizing some of the updates we have been making as we go, because we do want you to see something new in addition to just the back end being different when you get the next updates!