Updates rolling out to LCARS Interface for WP7 and WP8.0

We promised this over Facebook a while back that it would be done after we finished the last update to the Windows 8.1 version. Here it is!

This update is mainly a visual update but also includes some good performance enhancements and a few other things. This brings the WP7 and 8.0 versions in line with all that we did visually in the WP8.1 version that we released recently!  The modules exclusive to the 8.1 version such as the ePub viewer, image viewer, and Holo Cam are not currently available. We will be looking into what we are able to do for those based on platform limitations eventually, as we want to keep all versions as close in features as possible.

The modules that you will see as different are:

• Main Menu now has the updated look and also supports Landscape orientation
• Scanner module now has updated look and also the simulator mode for phones without the Compass required hardware.
• Calculator now supports scientific functions in Portrait orientation.
• Improved web browser interface.

We've also done a bunch of restructuring of this legacy code for WP7/8 in order to make maintaining them easier, which will allow for back porting of some newer features to the older versions faster and more likely to be done more often, which is great for those still using capable older versions of the OS.  Not that many developers are still supporting WP7, but we are!

LCARS Interface for Windows 8.1 (Release 41) is now available!

It's finally here!  The record setting time between updates for this app is now over and hopefully we won't be breaking it for a long time. 

The reason for the delay as explained before in previous posts in more detail was due to several things. Windows Phone 8.1 came out and we spent a lot of time re-structuring everything so that we could share as much code as possible between the Windows and Windows Phone versions. This took some time, but it ended up working out great. We had to essentially re-write the Windows Phone app from the ground up to do this, as we moved from the Silverlight framework to WinRT. Lots of code was copied over from the Windows 8 app to star with, but we also had to refactor it quite a bit in order to remove anything that coupled the code to one platform or the other. The result it we now have operation code that is identical on the back end, and we tailor the front end interface for the specific platform. Granted our interfaces for LCARS apps are quite a bit more complex than the typical Windows app UI, so we still have work to do there, but it still saves time and makes everything less prone to bugs.

Once we got the Windows Phone 8.1 app completed, it was finally time to get back to Windows 8.1. It had been a few months since the last update, and although we always have many things in progress, it's hard to show anyone that. This update needed to happen.  But what we ended up doing is another major re-structuring of the code which makes everything more modular, and separates out the "productivity" tools and the "starship systems" parts of the app even further. They now open completely separately from the "login' screen. The roadmap post from last week explains this in a lot more detail as to why we did this.  But the process went very well, and now we have very modular components that will allow more flexibility in the way people obtain these apps in the future, and give more value to the ones who purchased the phone version.

Here's the short list of changes. Not everything is listed here, but most of the things you will notice are:

• New Camera module.
• New E-Book Reader module (views e-pub files).
• New Shield module.
• New animation for external Conn viewer.
• Secondary Tile for Weather is now a Live Tile!
• Structural changes to the menus.
• Bug fixes, animation tweaks, performance improvements all over the place.

Seeing as this update was long it gave us a chance to knock out quite a few things on our ever growing list. The Camera and E-Book modules were completed on the back end in the last major Windows Phone.8 1 update, and as was the plan all along they are now available on Windows 8.1 with the same functionality!

What's really cool though is the Shield module! It goes a step further than our other "ship system" modules because this one is actually running off of a fully operational "starship core" on the back end! This is just the first piece towards integrating everything with it, so all of the other systems are still standalone for now. Lots of new animation on the shields screen too, and we hope to use it as a model for how we want all new modules to be in terms of how animated and how much control you get over things. Right now all systems besides the shields are on "autopilot" and power management, etc is all handled. Eventually that will change and you will be able to modify all of them and they will affect each other! We're very excited about the possibilities for this in the future.

The New Roadmap for our LCARS Applications

It's no surprise that our LCARS apps are the bulk of our publicly available Windows applications. As such we are always doing lots of work on them to improve everyone's experiences across all platforms. This one is a bit long, but there's lots of good stuff towards the end!

Microsoft has been doing a lot of work to consolidate their Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms lately, and we are working diligently to keep up with having our apps using the latest technologies, in addition to supporting the older versions of Windows Phone as much as we can also.

When it comes to Windows Phone, the path of least resistance would be to build a WP7 app that will run on WP7.1+, WP8.0, and WP8.1 just the same. We aren't going that route. Why? Well first off, we started out with just Windows 8! Then due to your feedback, we moved to WP8. Due to more feedback, we then added a WP7 app! Our wacky development path aside, we also think that if you buy a new phone, or Microsoft updates the OS on your existing phone, you should be able to get something new for it! While Windows Phone 7.5 is still a pretty good phone OS, it certainly doesn't have the same capabilities as WP8.0 or WP8.1. We want to take advantage of everything available on all platforms, and so we deal with supporting 3 versions of the Windows Phone apps. We have gotten very good at making this process more efficient though in terms of sharing code and being aware of platform differences, so supporting all 3 isn't as much of an effort as it was originally before we overhauled everything earlier this year.

So where do we go from here? Well, in addition to our LCARS Trek (formerly known as LCARS Simulator) game now being a Universal app that can be used on both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone (7, 8, or 8.1!), we are looking to take even more advantage of Universal apps to add some value to those of you that use them!  What does that mean? Let's see...

LCARS Simulator is now known as LCARS Trek, Available as Universal App!

As the title suggests, LCARS Simulator for Windows Phone will now be known as "LCARS Trek" because it is actually a game based on the original "Star Trek" text game from many decades ago, and we have some future plans for things that are more simulation like! We just released an update to ALL Windows Phone platforms with some bug fixes and other visual tweaks along with the new name and icons. That means updates for WP7.1, WP8.0, and we also released a new WP8.1 version that has many performance improvements and is running on the new framework underneath that is the same one being used for the WP8.1 LCARS Interface app, which has a huge number of benefits...

Not the least of which is that "LCARS Trek" is now be a Universal app, which means that we also released a stand alone Windows 8.1 version of it soon! Those of you who purchased the Windows Phone version will be able to get this one for free without paying again, and vice versa! As with the phone version, it comes with an unlimited time free trial with just an ad bar at the bottom, and purchasing it on either platform will remove the ads from both. Universal apps are nice like that!

"LCARS Trek" will continue to be built into the LCARS Interface app for Windows 8, however, and will continue to receive any updates that this one does (since they are literally utilizing the same code base now), so there is no need to buy this one if you already have that one unless you are just itching to give us money!  This is just a way to add some value to those of you who purchased the game on Windows Phone who don't want to buy the whole LCARS Interface app on Windows 8 just for that.

The Windows Phone updates should be available already, or possibly later today depending on where you are. We hope to have the Windows 8.1 version ready to go within the next couple days, as we just need to finish up a couple things on the UI to make it work as a standalone app.

If you have downloaded either version (even just the trial version) please go and rate it for us!

LCARS Interface for Windows Phone 8.1 is Now Available!

It's been a long time coming, and we've given you all a few teasers along the way about what this update includes. The time has finally arrived for our new Windows Phone 8.1 update to LCARS Interface!

In many ways this is an update to the Windows Phone 8.0 app. It's also an entirely new app in a lot of ways as well! A lot of it appears the same on the outside, but underneath is an app that's been completely re-written from the ground up. Windows Phone 7.X and 8.0 apps used a version of the Microsoft Silverlight framework, while Windows 8 Store apps used the new Windows Runtime framework. Starting with Windows Phone 8.1, phone apps now have the option to be either Silverlight or Windows Runtime apps. Rather than simply upgrade to Windows Phone 8.1 Silverlight, we chose to start over and convert it to a Windows Runtime app instead. There are many reasons for this. most of which I've covered in other blog entries.  But there are many performance improvements and new features available now, in addition to this re-write allowing the Windows 8 store (Desktop/Laptop/Tablet) version of this app and the Windows Phone version to share a common code core which will speed up being able to bring new features to both simultaneously!  Much of the same functionality will be available to both, and the layout you see will depend on which device is being used. As a result, many of the new features in this update will be making their way to the Windows 8.1 app very soon!

For the full list of changes that this update brings, see the Version History section of this blog.

A special Thank You to those who participated in Beta testing this version! Without your assistance this update would not have gotten to this point in either quality and would not have been completed yet!

Please let us know how you like the new features! We love to get feedback on what works, what doesn't work, or what you think is missing that we should add.

A few roadblocks, but still moving forward...

Development continues on the Windows Phone 8.1 version of LCARS Interface! We have been working a lot on the new camera module, but unfortunately there is an issue with the developer preview version of WP8.1 firmware on our Lumia 920 that denies access to the camera, and so that's made it a bit of a challenge to test anything. Our 520 does work but the camera is so limited on that device that we can't actually test most of the features.  We will be receiving a new device in the next few days that will hopefully allow us to continue and be able to roll this out as soon as possible!

In the meantime we are adding a bit more to other things like the new Photos module, in order to pack in the kind of features you would expect in order to make it an acceptable replacement for the default photo gallery. After all, we are trying to make this app useful and not just fun to play with, even if we do want a lot of that too!

It's been a while since we last updated the Windows 8.1 version of LCARS Interface. There is a LOT we want to do with that one still. Many of the things being developed on the Windows Phone side will also become available there once we bring that app into sync with the new phone version. The two apps will eventually share most of their code. So far the "shared" code and most of the Windows Phone code are in place. Then we can tie in the Windows 8.1 app and we will be able to release the same new features on both at the same time going forward. There is still a lot of work to do for this, but it is coming along. There will be quite a bit of re-structuring of the Windows 8.1 app to make this happen, and we are hoping to wrap up this phone update in the next couple weeks so we can get started on that.  There are also quite a few other things going on at the same time, but we don't have many details we can share about those just yet. Stay tuned! We appreciate your patience through this process. Microsoft has been changing their platforms (for the better) pretty rapidly and we are trying to make sure our apps take full advantage of everything they are doing, even if it means working and re-working several times.

We're still here!

This blog has been pretty quiet recently. It's certainly not due to a lack of development activity, though! In fact we've been busier than ever since at any point we have probably half a dozen projects we are working on for public release. I know most of you follow us for our LCARS based projects, and those are my personal favorite to work on, but we also do other things too! Work is still going strong on the Windows Phone 8.1 version of LCARS Interface. Huge sections of the WP8.0 version are being re-written to share a common code base with the Windows 8.1 version. We have had some minor setbacks in this process since we are always working with the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1 that is released to developers. There are some bugs in it that prohibit us from being able to complete work on our app's features. The new Camera module is the latest piece to suffer from this, but hopefully it won't be a problem for long.

Now that Windows Phone 8.1 provides file access, we have released what was our first Windows 8 Store app, Rename It! Pro, for Windows Phone 8.1! This app is taking advantage of the new Universal apps from Microsoft, and so purchasing either the Windows 8 version or Windows Phone version will allow you to download the other without having to buy it again! We plan to take advantage of this with as many apps as we can going forward which should make everything a better value for all of you. We have not done this yet for LCARS Interface, mainly due to the disparity of features between the versions (and so also the cost difference between them). As we move these two versions closer together we hope to make it work eventually. Right now the phone version costs a lot less, so hopefully having to buy it on a second platform won't be too deterring.

Fans of the LCARS Simulator app for Windows Phone (which is built into the Windows 8 version of LCARS Interface) will have some new things coming up soon. Notably we hope to release something related to it that will support more platforms than just Windows 8 and Windows Phone in the next couple of months! 

On another note, MANY of you have asked about us doing something for the pre-LCARS era during the original 6 Star Trek feature films. Well there are no official announcements about this yet, but we are doing some initial R&D on it. It's an ambitious project since we can't simply change the colors for that like we can to go between LCARS themes. We definitely want to do something in that style, but we have a lot of other stuff in the works right now so we would like to get some of those wrapped up first!

We've had a lot of great suggestions lately about new features, and we are certainly working on adding many of them into future app updates. Requests don't have to be added to existing apps, either. We can build entirely new ones if that's what it takes to accommodate what you need! Please also take a few moments if you haven't already and rate our apps in the Windows and Windows Phone stores and tell everyone what you think! If you have technical difficulties, please contact us directly so we can resolve them. We cannot contact you to help with problems from store reviews.

Keep an eye on Facebook and Twitter for new announcements about app updates, new apps, or really anything else what we need to share! We love engaging with our users, so feel free to send e-mails, Facebook messages, or comment here on how we can continue making our products among your favorites!

The Journey to Windows Phone 8.1

Sorry for the blog silence the past few weeks. Hopefully many of you have seen a few sneak peaks of what we've been working on from the Facebook page.

There have been a couple updates to the Windows 8.1 app as well as a minor update to the Windows Phone 8.0 app, but a majority of our efforts have been focused on one thing...getting LCARS Interface ready for Windows Phone 8.1!

Read on after the break to find out how it's going. It's a bit long, as there is a lot that is going into this process which likely won't be visible to the end user when the update comes out.

Long Time No Post....New Stuff Coming!

Sorry for the lack of updates to this blog recently. Hopefully most of you follow us on Facebook where we usually post quick updates and sneak peaks of the things to come. 

A new update was just submitted for the LCARS Interface app for Windows 8.1, which will hopefully be approved later today. The quick change log is as follows:

• Simulator module can now be pinned to Start screen.
• Fixed some issues with Trig functions in Calculator module.
• Fixed seek bar in the Media Player when in full screen mode.
• Many visual adjustments and fixes.

Not anything major this time, but we are making a push to improve upon the interface design. Our initial designs and colors were based on the LCARS Standards Development board website, but that effort was never entirely completed, and is still somewhat incomplete. We are now going through and adding some additional colors to the mix, in addition to making some mathematical adjustments to the controls in order to make them more screen accurate. We are also considering some additional themes. New animations are also in the works.

We have a TON of new projects and updates in the works, and we are rolling them out as quickly as we get them finished. We are also experimenting with the new Universal apps for Windows devices, and investigating what it would take to rebuild the LCARS Interface apps into one of these packages, which would speed up development time and bring the feature sets closer together. The downside is that it would be incompatible with Windows Phone 8.0 at that point. This should not be a huge problem since ALL Windows 8 devices will be able to upgrade to 8.1, similar to the decision we made to no longer support Windows 8.0. We are still working out the details, and consolidating, optimizing, and adding to our code base for these apps in addition to designing the new things we have in the works. It's a little overwhelming at the moment while all of these changes to the development process are taking place, but we should come out more streamlined and better able to support Windows and Windows Phone, in addition to other Windows platforms, than ever before. We are proud to be early adopters of Windows Store development, and some of these growing pains are part of having provided these apps before the platforms were totally mature. But that isn't discouraging us from moving forward. LCARS Interface remains in the top 3 Entertainment apps in the Windows Store, and we intend to keep it that way, in addition to making new and exciting apps to complement it.

LCARS Interface [Windows 8] Release 37 is now available!

Another update to the Windows 8.1 LCARS Interface app should start rolling out to everyone soon! This update brings one of the most requested features...an Image Viewer! It currently supports selection of multiple files, as well as entire folders.  Functionality is very similar to the Document viewer, with a few changes that make sense for the different content.

Also in this update is the ability to add LCARS Interface as the default PDF viewer, so you can launch files straight to the Document Viewer! The same is true for the new Image Viewer as well, which support .jpg, .jpeg, .png, and .bmp for now with possibly more formats coming soon.

We also patched up some code that should help the app use less memory and experience significantly less slowdown after prolonged usage and lots of switching between modules. It seemed to improve performance pretty substantially on our 1st generation Surface RT! We've also made several other adjustments and minor fixes to many places in the app. Getting everything to look good and work correctly across such a wide range of device sizes and resolutions is quite a time consuming task, but we're up for the challenge!

We've also been very busy lately adding to our LCARS framework with the Silverlight and WPF ports of our controls. The process is going well and should expand what we are able to do in the future to give you all the capabilities that Windows Store apps are not able to do. The WPF port will allow us to accommodate the many of you who have asked for very specialized applications that don't make sense in the context of the Windows Store application. This could make for some awesome home automation systems!

LCARS Simulator for Windows Phone is now free to play!

We've got a special treat for Windows Phone users...you can now download a free trial for LCARS Simulator from the Windows Phone store! As with most free to play games this one is ad supported, but it has no in-app purchases so you won't be spending all your money if you get addicted to it. The trial has no time limit or functionality limitations, so you are free to play as long as you like without buying anything! If you like it and wish to purchase the full version to remove the ads, you can click on "Remove Ads" from the "About" section of the Settings screen, or from the Windows Phone Store directly!

We look forward to getting new feedback on possible improvements to this app. It has been a while since we made significant changes to it, but while we are working on planning the expansion of it, we decided to try and expand the user base so that more people will benefit from the work going into it. Since the Windows Phone and Windows 8 Store apps use the same game core, any changes we make to the game will be for both platforms.

Lots more in the works....

It's been a little quiet on this blog lately! But it's been as busy as ever here working on lots of new content. Our latest update to the LCARS Interface app for Windows 8 seems to have been going over very well with all of you. We've gotten a ton of feedback on the new additions, and quite a few new great reviews as well!  We followed that up with an update to the Windows Phone version that brought a few of the same new features.

Speaking of Windows Phone, that's one of the reason it has been so quiet...Windows Phone 8.1 is coming out soon and from the information that's been leaked so far, it seems like it is going to bring some sweeping changes to the platform and bring it even more in line with Windows 8/RT! We've been very busy prepping all of our libraries, LCARS and otherwise, in order to be ready to take full advantage of these changes. The more shared code we are able to use between the Windows 8 and Windows Phone versions of our apps, the faster and more feature-rich updates will happen. It also appears Windows Phone 8.1 will allow setting of a new default SMS app, so that may open up some new potential for the LCARS Personnel app that we currently have which is limited by Microsoft in terms of how useful it can be.

Also now in development....we've also begun porting our Windows8/RT and Windows Phone LCARS controls to the WPF and Silverlight platforms, which means more powerful versions of our LCARS style for the desktop may be possible in the future. This would enable us to accomplish many of the things a lot of you have asked for with regards to deeper system integration that just isn't possible on Windows RT. Of course maintaining desktop software is more complicated with regards to distribution and informing you of when updates are available, but it also doesn't have to go through any approval process so getting fixes out for bugs will be more immediate. We don't have any immediate plans to make a desktop application yet, but we want to make sure that if we do, we aren't starting completely from ground zero. The same goes for Silverlight. It may be possible in the future to build some web-based content that wouldn't require installing anything besides the Silverlight browser plugin, which most of you probably already have. This brings in complication of obtaining web hosting with the required capabilities and setting it up online. We also don't have any immediate plans to do anything with Silverlight, but we're building it the capability to do so in order to spread our popular LCARS application style as far as possible eventually!

There is a lot more in the works as well, but it would take a very long time to talk about all of it! We have a couple new utility apps in progress that may be of some use to you retro gamers out there. Also being re-built from the ground up is the Simulation core that exists in the LCARS Interface app for Windows 8, as well as having its own app for Windows Phone. We are building it more universally so it can work across any platform and with any interface in front of it. That brings about many new possibilities and it will also have more possibilities to increase difficulty eventually. This is still in the early stages though, as it's taking a while to set up the new architecture. Stay tuned though...there are lots of exciting things coming down the pipeline!

LCARS Interface for Windows 8 and Windows Phone Featured on Nokia Conversations Blog!

Nokia Conversations, the official Nokia blog, has done a feature on our LCARS apps for both Windows 8/RT and Windows Phone! Check out the article at the link below!

GET STAR TREK LCARS ON YOUR LUMIA

LCARS Interface for Windows 8.1 (Version 3.0, Release 36) has been Released!

It's finally here! After a month and a half of development, version 3 is now complete and should start rolling out to all of you today.

On the surface it may not look like that much has changed when you first load up the new version. You will notice there is now a PDF reader, which many of you have requested over the past several months! That alone is worth submitting an update for, but there was a whole lot more done than that. Read on for more details on what's new!

Working Hard on the Next Update!

Well if Microsoft featuring LCARS Interface for Windows 8 in the Red Stripe deals a couple weeks ago was good for anything, it certainly opened up LCARS to a whole new set of users. It has been a bit of a whirlwind working to sort through all of the feedback and minor issues that we have heard about from you all recently! But I'm loving every minute of it, and of getting the next update ready!

If you follow us on Facebook (which I suggest you all do, since we tend to post a lot of updates and sneak peaks on there that we don't post anywhere else usually) you have seen a few screenshots of the next update and some of the new features it will bring. At this point we are looking at Version 3.0 which will come as Release 36 when it is ready. You may notice that you are currently on Release 33. Releases 34 and 35 were used for the price changes during the Red Stripe deal. We are going to keep the release numbers in sync with what Microsoft has to avoid confusion. Release 36 will have enough changes to count for 3 updates though! Read on to see what we've been up to...

Changing gears for a little bit...

Recently we've spent most of our time working on the brand new "ship" that will exist as a backbone for our next major update to LCARS Interface for Windows 8. Our preliminary work on that has been very promising! We are looking forward to continuing that work soon.

Now that we've had a bit of time to examine the changes for developers with Windows 8.1, we are finally starting to go ahead and make the changes in order to take full advantage of all the new features. The first step was mentioned previously and that was to divide out the Windows Phone 7 code from our portable class libraries that make it possible to share code between the different platforms. Some of the modules taking advantage of this are the Clock, Weather, and Calculator. The Simulator also follows this structure. We have made all of the necessary changes and upgraded our projects to isolate WP7 so that we can continue to support it as best we can, while moving the other platforms forward with all of the API improvements Microsoft has made available.

Today we are turning our focus to re-targeting LCARS Interface for Windows 8 (and its associated framework components) to Windows 8.1, which if we did nothing else than re-compile it and release, it would benefit from many performance enhancements. We have been pretty successful in making this app run lean and mean as it is, so any additional optimizations we get for free are most welcome as well!  In our opinion, Microsoft has been doing a fantastic job of listening to developers and they have been making tons of changes to make our lives easier. Some things we had to work around before are now fixed. We may even be able to finally provide a basic web browser for the next version that so many of you have asked for! We will continue looking into this as we have always promised and evaluate what we can do within the new limitations.

We could blog for days upon days describing all of the changes that Windows 8.1 will bring, but safe to say it is going to take a bit of time to optimize everything for a new set of APIs and to add new functionality to existing modules. We know you all have been missing our previous rapid updates, but we are rebuilding the entire foundation of the entertainment side of things, as well as making bug fixes, optimizations, and feature additions to pretty much every module in the app! That is in addition to adding several brand new modules, and topping everything off with a huge helping of animations. As you can imagine, this is no small task, and we need to make sure that every feature still works as intended after the updates.

We have no ETA on when the next update will be yet, but at this point it is possible we will do it in two stages now instead of one. We may make the updates to the productivity side of things first, and then update the entertainment side later on, as that will take the most time. This will allow us to roll in all of the new API calls and take advantage of the new performance improvements for the existing modules more quickly. We will continue to make updates as we narrow down the release cycle.

LCARS Interface featured as Red Stripe deal in the Windows 8 Store!

As part of their ongoing Red Stripe deal promotion, Microsoft has chosen LCARS Interface for Windows 8 to participate this week! For approximately one week you will be able to purchase the app for 50% off the normal price!

We're only a couple days in and the response has been wonderful so far! It is great to hear that so many from all over the world like what we have done with the app, and we are sure that you will continue to enjoy the major updates we have planned for the coming months! We also appreciate all of the new 5 star reviews we have gotten in the past couple days! As always, we read each and every one of them and take any suggestions made very seriously about how we can improve the experience for you. No request is too big or too small...we will do it if we can.

So far it seems that with Windows 8.1, Microsoft has made quite a few things available through their APIs that were previously not available, and many of those things have been requested before, so we are looking forward to now being able to address that in the coming updates. Given the extensive changes happening, it is not likely that we will release another update for Windows 8.0. Given that the update to 8.1 is completely free, and anything running Windows 8.0 can upgrade to it, we see no reason to hold back the capabilities and support 2 platforms.  It is a very different scenario than Windows Phone has, where we will be continuing to support WP7 because those users have no option to upgrade to a newer version.  We have completed our modifications to support legacy WP7 devices that were mentioned in the last post. We see no major issues with continuing WP7 feature additions if they are possible on the platform, other than potentially a short delay after we release for WP8.

Hope all of you have recovered from the holidays!

A sad situation for LCARS apps on Windows Phone 7....

Ever since we decided to support Windows Phone 7 for our LCARS style apps, we have been able to keep the features and functionality very close to our Windows Phone 8 app, short of a few features that are just not supported by the platform. We hope to continue this trend as much as possible, but it's going to be a little more difficult going forward.

It seems with Windows 8.1, Microsoft decided to give the hard axe to Windows Phone 7 support for its portable class libraries, and that means if we want to be able to support the newest functions in Windows 8.1, and Windows Phone 8.1 going forward, we will have to remove support for Windows Phone 7 when it comes to a lot of our code. This is a bit of a tough pill for us to swallow, since we just spent several weeks a couple months ago setting everything up to work across all Windows platforms including WP7!

So, what does this actually mean for our WP7 users? Well, it means things will go back to the way they were previously where WP7 may get updates a little slower than the rest. We don't intend to completely drop support for it in the short term. We are going to have to make some changes to our back end code once again to have one code base for Windows 8(.1), Windows Phone 8(.1), Windows Desktop (when we get there...) and possibly XBox One (If we ever get there...) and a separate code base again for WP7. Rest assured, if it's possible to add the new features to the WP7 app that we add to the WP8 app, we will just as we always have. It's just going to take a bit longer in come cases. It's a shame that we only had the luxury of our current setup for a couple of updates...it really did make things nicer!

But Microsoft, for what it's worth, is doing a lot of great things to improve the Windows Phone platform overall, and so we intend to take full advantage of that as they bring the Windows 8 and Windows Phone platforms closer together, our LCARS apps will grow closer together and more tightly integrated as well.

We will also have a bit of good news coming up later this week. We can't say what it is just yet, but those of you who lurk on this blog but haven't yet gotten our Windows 8 app will want to stay tuned for our next post...