It's been a very busy few days for us as we completely stripped down and re-designed our code base for all of our LCARS style apps. The results from our perspective are fantastic, as the new changes will significantly reduce the time it takes to release updates for WP7 and WP8, as well as being able to more tightly integrate features between Windows Phone and Windows 8/RT! Microsoft is merging the two closer together and we are now taking advantage of that and are in a good spot to go even farther as they introduce more common APIs for us to use.
We are very happy with the state of our Windows Phone projects at this point, as they seem to be up and running perfectly now after the overhaul. Our LCARS Interface app is undergoing some additional updates to bring some new features before we release an update for it. Read past the break for a lot more info on what we've been working on recently!
We just finished wrapping up changes to the LCARS Simulator app for Windows Phone (7 and 8!) and submitted it to the Windows Phone Store a few minutes ago. Now that the two projects are sharing a majority of their operational code, any fixes and updates should come to both at the same time from now on, rather than updates for 7 being released days or a week later. That said, we are not just re-compiling apps for WP8 from a WP7 project. We are taking full advantage of the improvements made in WP8, and making use of the newer APIs where available so that we benefit from the performance gains and additional functions that WP8 offers. We will be giving WP7 everything it can handle though! A lot of you still use that OS and we will support it as long as we can.
So what's new in this coming LCARS Simulator update? Well, the game still plays the same. You will notice a new tile icon, and a new splash screen image (WP7 only, since WP8 doesn't have splash screen mages). You will also see a couple new sections in the Settings, one of which will allow you to access our social media apps which are available in our other apps. More importantly, you will be able to preview what we intend to bring to all of our LCARS apps very soon, and that's making the Extra Animations option do much more! Enabling this option will bring the UI to life similar to the kinds of flashing you see on the show consoles. There is a standard animation set for normal conditions, and a special one for Red Alert which is similar to the Windows 8 app with this option enabled! We intend to bring similar things to both the LCARS Interface apps as well as our new LCARS Personnel app for Windows Phone as quickly as we can get them updated. We felt LCARS Simulator was a good place to start since the functionality for the WP7 and WP8 versions is almost completely identical, and the other apps are getting more features added before the new updates get released.
We are happy that so many of you are enjoying the new FREE LCARS Personnel app! It has racked up hundreds of downloads in just a few days and the feedback we are getting about it is great! We will be making some minor modifications to the functionality, as well as adding a similar Extra Animations setting to it as well! Windows Phone does limit us quite a bit on how functional we can make the Personnel app, but every available API we are able to access for it is in there! We do have a couple cool things that are available to the WP8 platform that we would like to get working on at some point though.
Apologies for the very long post today. There is a lot going on and we want to make sure you all know what to expect from us soon!
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