Posts
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Windows 8: Pinning Documents to the Start Page #2
In a post last week, I gave a kind of convoluted solution to pinning a document to the Windows 8 Start Page. Jesse Freeman just pointed me to a Windows 8 app that does the same thing in a bit more of an elegant way: Tile A File. You simply start the app, browse to a file you want to pin, and tell it to create a Start Page tile. You can opt to use the default icon it picks, or choose a custom tile image. Nice solution.
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Windows 8: Pinning Documents to the Start Page
Before diving into all the stuff below (which still might be useful in some cases) you might want to look at this post: https://www.bit-101.com/2003/3657
If you’ve read past the post title and into this text, I’m going to assume you have some experience or at least some interest in Windows 8. Therefore you know that there’s a Start page with tiles of various applications installed on your system. You can rearrange these, remove and re-add them, and in some cases resize them. A lesser known fact is the ability to pin folders to the Start page – just right click the folder in Explorer and you’ll see a “Pin to Start” menu item.
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Game in Progress: Infiltration
I just wanted to share a little bit about the game I’m currently in the process of creating. It will be a Windows 8 game, called “Infiltration”. The game play, as well as the visual style, is very much a homage to the arcade classic Gravitar, but it is far from an exact copy. The concept is that you have to infiltrate this alien world, fly through various barriers and tunnels and capture one or more targets. I guess I’ll make up a story of what these targets represent – information, energy crystals, or whatever. Anyway, once you grab all the targets, while avoiding being shot, taking out the guns that are shooting you, and keeping track of your fuel, the exit will appear and you fly into it to complete the level. Here are a few screenshots of some of the levels:
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2012 in Review
Following a tradition several years in the running, I bring you my personal retrospective into 2012 and a glimpse into the new year.
In fact, 2012 followed much the same pattern as 2011 – some interesting stuff in the start of the year, a long period of just kind of being bored with everything, and then finding something to be excited about as the year drew to a close.
As 2011 ended, I was starting to get more seriously into JavaScript and web development. In early 2012 I posted a few opinionated opinions on object creation in JavaScript, which sparked some good conversation. I followed these up with a couple of articles on the same subject on the Adobe Developer Center.
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Falling Balls Update
At the end of October this year, Falling Balls was released into the Windows 8 Store. After just over a month, I thought it would be interesting to discuss how it is doing, and to answer the question, “should I build games or apps for Windows 8?”
Hard statistics.
Here you can see the download stats. It’s averaging roughly 900 downloads a day, with a best day of just over 1500, and generally trending up. The weekends usually see more downloads than the weekdays. You can also see the demographics of who is downloading the app.
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Falling Balls for Windows 8 release 2 is out
I pushed Falling Balls out the door with bare minimum functionality. In the week or so it’s been out though, it’s gotten a couple of thousand downloads and a solid 4 star rating. Early this week I decided to enhance it a bit with two new difficulty levels – “hard” and “ninja”.
In hard mode, the balls start coming out faster right away and you’ll see a lot more of them. If you had a decent score in the original mode, you’ll be hard pressed to get anywhere near that in hard mode.
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Falling Balls for Windows 8 now available
Just got the email last night, Falling Balls is now available in the Windows 8 Store!
I’m really interested to see how this does. I’ve implemented Bing ads in the game, exactly the same way they are implemented in the iOS version, i.e. when you die, there is a banner ad in the top center of the screen. It goes away when you start playing, so it’s not there to distract you from game play. You don’t want to see an ad – don’t die! However, I’m not seeing any ads in the live app. It took a while to see any at all while I was testing, though it worked fine using a test ad account. From looking at various forum posts, I think they just don’t have that much inventory, so there is very low fulfillment rate. I may need to switch to another ad provider if Bing doesn’t pull through soon.
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Windows 8 App Store Submission Process
As of this writing, I’ve submitted two apps to the Windows 8 Store. The first one is Particle Art. This one took four tries to get approved. The second is a port of Falling Balls, which I just submitted for the third time and I’m pretty sure it will pass this time.
There are a few things I’ve learned in the process that I’m sure will make things go much smoother for my future submissions. And hopefully they will help anyone else going through the process.
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Custom Windows 8 HTML Controls
Building native Windows 8 apps in HTML and JavaScript is – dare I say it? – fun. I’ve been enjoying learning and building things with JavaScript over the last couple of years, but the cross-platform/cross-browser/cross-version issues can become a pain. And the 10 million competing libraries and micro-frameworks can be overwhelming. Everyone has their favorite and is happy to shove it down your throat with the slightest provocation.
But developing apps for Windows 8 has a kind of purity. There’s a single system and a single “browser”. The framework/library code is built in. Yeah, I’m sure you could probably pull jQuery or Backbone or whatever else in to help create your app, but there’s far less need.
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My Windows 8 HTML/JS App/Game Dev Setup
As of this writing, I have three Windows 8 apps/games in the pipeline. Particle Art has been submitted. Falling Balls is 99% done and will be submitted by the weekend, and another game I’ve started is a bit past the prototype stage and starting real development. I wanted to share some of the basic setup principles I’ve been using and some of the things I’ve learned.
First of all, in Visual Studio 2012 (Pro or Express) I create a JavaScript Windows Store blank app. This gives you all of the needed frameworks and references along with a default.html, default.js and default.css file. Running this will give you a blank app with some text that says “Content goes here”.
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