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.
