Status Report

Well it has recently come to our attention that not everyone follows us on Facebook, and so I will make an effort to update this blog more often with new information!

Windows 10 is something we've been looking at recently, and we have started updating our apps to start supporting it.  Rename It! Pro is now a Windows 10-based Universal App which is available for both the desktop and mobile versions. This was already available as a Windows 8.1 Universal app, so it was a natural progression to update it and get our feet wet with Windows 10 UWP apps.  All in all, the process to move it to Windows 10 was fairly straightforward, and we were happily able to condense the code base even more than it was before.  Most of the work was done on the UI end, as with Windows 10 you can now resize app windows to nearly any size, and the UI in your app needs to adjust to this or it won't look very good.  Our LCARS apps have this problem since Windows 10 came out, and we will be updating those apps as well in the future. But the UI in those apps is significantly more complex, so it will take some time.  Read on for more info on our focus going forward.



The current plan is to update all of our apps for Windows 10. This will allow us to maximize code sharing and maintain better feature parity on all platforms. We have currently been doing this as best we can, and even back-porting new features to older versions when possible because we do share as much code as possible between all versions.  Unfortunately this is something we can not continue doing due to a lack of time and resources.  So far we have continued updating even Windows Phone 7 apps as much as possible, but due to recent changes from Microsoft, it's nearly impossible to even develop for WP7 anymore. Support for it has been deprecated from all portable APIs, so last year we had to maintain a completely separate code base for that (in addition to keeping an older version of Visual Studio 2012 just to be able to compile for it, as support for building WP7 apps was dropped in 2013). It's also no longer possible to even developer unlock those devices anymore, and our current developer licenses on our test phones are starting to expire, so we can't even test apps for it anymore on real devices. Moving forward, updates for our Windows Phone 7 apps will be dropped completely. We apologize if any of you are still using WP7 and would like new updates, but it's becoming nearly impossible to continue fighting the fact that Microsoft has cut it off. We are happy that we continued to support it long after many other dropped support for it, though!

Windows 8.0 and Windows Phone 8.0 will also no longer be supported with new features. There are versions of these apps still available in the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store, but they will not be receiving updates anymore. Microsoft has also dropped support for developing for these versions now, and Windows/Windows Phone 8.1 updates are available for ALL devices that ran 8.0, so we highly recommend updating to at least 8.1.  Our eventual goal is to support only Windows 10 UWP, but due to many phones not being able to receive that update (and unfortunately devices running Windows RT can also not get Windows 10 at this point), we will do our best to update for Windows Phone 8.1 when we can. This may mean that our Windows 8.1 apps will also get some updates, but if we are working on 8.1 it will be focused on the phones (since there are more of those out there than Windows RT devices), but the desktop may also be updated just because they do share a lot of code so we will try and give new things to as many people as possible. 

So, after all of that, what's really coming soon? Well, the first milestone is getting the current code base for the LCARS apps updated for Windows 10. This will mostly be work on the UI portion so that when resized, the apps work better than the current versions that were made for 8.1 where you could not resize them so freely. Once we have that completed, then we can get back to the huge list of new features that we want to implement! We apologize for how long it's been since the last update, but we haven't given up on them! We just have to re-focus our efforts a bit in order to make things more smooth in the future.

The next thing you will see in terms of LCARS is that our LCARS Trek game will be updated for Windows 10 UWP. We are currently working on this as a stepping stone to get LCARS Interface updated.  The LCARS UI does not play by the same rules as regular Windows UI does, so we have to do some additional work to make it a good experience.

That's all we've got for now. I apologize for the long read. I will try and update more often so that posts can be shorter!