Back at it...

Update: LCARS Trek is now completely free as a Universal app for Windows 8.1! There are no ads at all on any version. We hope you continue to enjoy it :)

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Thousands of people took advantage of LCARS Trek being features on MyAppFree!  We hope you enjoy the game ad-free for a long time to come.  For those of you who missed the deal, you can still download the game for free on both Windows and Windows Phone.  It will have ads in it but there is no time limit on the trial version.

I know things have been quiet around here lately as it relates to updates for our Windows/Windows Phone Store apps.  That should be changing soon, as some other projects have calmed down lately and we are back to hitting our To-Do list for LCARS!  We should have a new update ready very soon that will bring some new features!

The short list of ones that are completed are:

• Ability to "Save As" for PDF documents.  This will help those of you who use LCARS are your default PDF reader and want to save the document that was opened from your browser.

• Background audio for the Media Player!  This one was requested several times.  Currently background audio can be played if LCARS is minimized but the Media Player module must still be open.  In the next update, playing audio while working in other parts of the app will finally be possible!

In addition, new animations and visual changes have been made to the Warp Core module.  Starship engineers have figured out how to keep the Warp Core operational when leaving the screen, so it does not start up again every time.  This is because this module now is linked to our still in-progress ship simulator core which links all of the systems together.  Things like Navigation, Shields and Weapons will not work the same if the Core is offline!  Piece by piece we are getting this operational and when its done you will be able to manage all of the primary systems of the ship, and won't have the disconnect that they currently have where going warp speed with no warp core is possible.  Many of you have asked for this, and it's been a huge undertaking to try and map out everything that a starship does and have other systems react appropriately to different conditions, etc.  We are happy with how well it is coming along though.  Many exciting things are coming.

Windows 10 and LCARS

Windows 10 is looking like quite a product.  We installed the preview on an OLD Netbook (like pre-Clover Trail series Atom processor) and it actually runs reasonably well for basic tasks. I imagine the new browser they are coming out with will make it even better.

Our apps also run on it quite nicely too. The hardware requirements for LCARS Interface seem to be pretty low! Our typical test device is a first generation Surface RT, so everything that good or better shouldn't have any problems. We've also been taking it up a notch in the new animations we're working on and everything still seems to be silky smooth right now on Windows 8 and Windows Phone. That's one of the reasons we like having native apps that aren't running some kind of virtualization layer. You're getting the full capabilities of your hardware with less overhead. This rules out having it work cross-platform to things other than Windows based platforms, but the Windows platform continues to grow across many types of devices, and you may even see some form of LCARS come to XBox eventually. With Windows 10, Windows 7 users will be able to upgrade for free and have access to Windows Store apps too.  Other platforms of mobile devices have or are soon going to have LCARS apps.

We've got a lot of new progress to share but it will need its own blog post! We will get to that pretty soon.