The power of responding to user reviews in the Windows Phone Store 4. November 2014 Shawn Windows Store (0) I have been responding to user reviews since the day it went live for all publishers Sending my first app review response. Hopefully this goes well! #wpdev pic.twitter.com/IeXBHTrEqY— Shawn Kendrot (@skendrot) August 12, 2014 This was my first response to a user, and it worked! WooHoo! Review response worked! User contacted me #wpdev— Shawn Kendrot (@skendrot) August 13, 2014 Responding to user reviews has been positive for me. I wanted to share a few of the positive results with everyone. Matt responded to my email saying the 1 star rating was an oversight and updated his review There was a day when an app stopped getting information from services and some people reviewed the app poorly because it wasn’t working. These reviews were valid because the app stopped working. I was able to fix the issue and responded to users. And like most developers I was effected by the In App Purchase bug the store had in September. Again users started posting poor reviews. Onc... [More]
What is the email sent from responding to user reviews in the Windows Phone store? 3. November 2014 Shawn Windows Store (0) Some time ago Microsoft announced that all app publishers to the Windows Phone Store had the ability the respond to users reviews of their apps. Many publishers have taken advantage of this functionality and many have not. Responding to reviews is simple. All you need to do is log into DevCenter, check out the reviews of your app(s) and respond to any that you wish. You can respond to negative reviews or positive reviews. I like to respond to any user that has rated my app three stars or less. I want to know why a user thinks the app is only a 1-3 star app and ask how they think I can improve the app. If they provided a reason for the 1-3 star rating I’ll try to clarify any confusion there may be.I also like to respond to any user asking for a particular piece of functionality. I will tell the user that what they are asing for is either in progress, will be worked on next, or will be taken into account for future work. One thing I kept on wondering was: “How is my feedback being deliv... [More]
Using the new SettingsFlyout API in a Windows 8.1 AND Windows 8 Store app 23. July 2013 Shawn Windows Store (0) Earlier today Ginny Caughey asked a question about how to maintain an app with support for Windows 8 and 8.1. It’s hard to answer a question that broad so I asked her what she wanted to take advantage of with 8.1. Her main use case is handling of screen [and app] sizes but while she was working, wanted to replace the Callisto SettingsFlyout control with the new native SettingsFlyout control in 8.1. I suggested a few ideas throughout the day from #if separation to MEF. I started tonight working on a sample on how you could inject a SettingsFlyout using MEF but decided that it was just too complex for this example. I took a step back and thought about how to make this as easy as possible. I recently blogged about how to use the new Geolocator API within a Windows Phone 8 and Phone 7 application and thought that wrapping the Callisto API would be best suited for this situation as well. The idea behind this blog is that you have one application that supports both Windows 8 and 8.1. Yo... [More]
We couldn’t get your developer license for Windows 8.1 Preview… SOLVED! 3. July 2013 Shawn Windows Store (0) I’ve been trying to get going with developing Windows 8.1 Store apps on my new Surface Pro but was continually running into the following error. It turns out this error is due to how I configure my PCs. Every time I build a new computer or install a version of Windows I create an “admin” account. This account is only used for admin related stuff. My normal account is not an admin account. I have been doing this configuration since XP due to the lack of security that XP originally offered. I tried running Visual Studio 2013 as admin, I tried running powershell and the command “Show-WindowsDeveloperLicenseRegistration” but all failed. It wasn’t until a helpful Hermit Dave tried to diagnose this issue with me over twitter that I was able to solve it. The solution is to log in as your admin account and either run the powershell command or VS2013 to get the developer account prompt, enter you Microsoft account information and then log back into your regular account. Again, big thank... [More]
Creating a custom async dialog for your Win8 apps Part 2: CustomDialog 12. November 2012 Shawn Windows Store (1) In Part 1 of this series I discussed how to create a custom async LoginDialog to use within your Windows Store apps. In this blog, I’ll explain how to turn that dialog into an async dialog that allows for custom content and works more like the MessageDialog. Most of the hard work was already completed in the LoginDialog. It has a constructor that takes content, a ShowAsync method that has the ability to show a dialog asynchronously, responds to a CancellationToken, it is shown as a Popup and responds to the size of the window changing and many more. To create the CustomDialog, I’ll start with the LoginDialog. For the CustomDialog, I wanted to make it almost identical to the MessageDialog class except replacing the content parameter of the constructor from string, to object. For the new constructors, we’ll be using a ContentPresenter to place the custom content. The ContentPresenter will be created in code when the dialog is shown. public CustomDialog(object content) ... [More]
Creating a Custom Async Dialog for your Win8 Apps Part 1 - LoginDialog 28. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (0) For a recent Windows Store App, I needed to create a way for people to log into it. I could have easily created a simple control or page that allowed the user to enter their login information, but I wanted to work with the new async/await architecture. I thought that creating a login dialog that fit this pattern would be a fun adventure. I wanted to follow the same pattern found in the MessageDialog class so it would be easy to use and understand how it works. This is part one of a two part blog. Part one will cover creating a LoginDialog class that only handles the ability to login. Part two will cover changing that class to be a more generic CustomDialog class that allows for custom content. By the end of the blog we’ll create a LoginDialog that will display a login to the user that looks a lot like the login you get from the People app. This first stab at the dialog will focus on the ability to login, so we need a class that will hold the information the user enters. pu... [More]
Easily create light themed styles for your Win8 Settings Flyout 25. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (1) One of the things I love about Windows Store apps is their ability to integrate with the system. One of these integration points is the Settings Charm. I’m not going to show you how to create a settings flyout. There are already lots of examples out there that do this. There are even some helpers like the SettingsFlyout available in Callisto and the helper created by Jerry Nixon. Recently Tim Heuer made a change to the SettingsFlyout to set the background to white. This change allows your app to follow the guidelines. He also added a property that allows you to change what you want the background to be if you are not a fan of white. This change to the background works great if your app has a light requested theme. If you are using the default dark theme then the new background on the flyout becomes a nightmare. It’s a nightmare because now you have to style all of the controls you use for your settings to work properly with a light theme. You could easily start changing the brushes of... [More]
Easily create light themed styles for your Win8 Settings pane 24. October 2012 Shawn Windows Store (0) One of the things I love about Windows Store apps is their ability to integrate with the system. One of these integration points is the Settings Charm. I’m not going to show you how to create a settings flyout. There are already lots of examples out there that do this. There are even some helpers like the SettingsFlyout available in Callisto and the helper created by Jerry Nixon. Recently Tim Heuer made a change to the SettingsFlyout to set the background to white. This change allows your app to follow the guidelines. He also added a property that allows you to change what you want the background to be if you are not a fan of white. This change to the background works great if your app has a light requested theme. If you are using the default dark theme then the new background on the flyout becomes a nightmare. It’s a nightmare because now you have to style all of the controls you use for your settings to work properly with a light theme. You could easily start changing the brushes of... [More]
Creating an inline AppBar Button Style for your Win8 apps 17. September 2012 Shawn Windows Store (1) As you have probably read, the Metro Windows Store projects in Visual Studio now comes preloaded with a ton of styles for your AppBar. I love this style of button. You get the nice icon and text to indicate what the icon is supposed to mean (sometimes the icon can be confusing). Having both the icon and the text removes the need for users to hover over an icon to see what it’s suppose to be. As awesome as the style is for buttons on the AppBar, they do have some limitations. They are big, and the text is on the bottom. This design makes it hard to put this style of icon in other parts of your app. Take a look at the Games app. Go all the way to the left and you’ll see your avatar along with ways to do more with your Xbox account. You accomplish these actions with buttons that look a lot like the AppBar buttons. Creating a style for these button is really easy. In the past you’ve needed Expression Blend to be really effective at editing or creating styles of controls. Now this can ... [More]
Fixing the VisualState of your Win8 AppBar ToggleButton 4. September 2012 Shawn Windows Store (5) This post would also be called Fixing the AppBarButtonStyle for ToggleButton support in you Win8 app: Part 2 In my last post I explained how to fix the AppBarButtonStyle to support ToggleButtons. This minor fix does give you the correct style, however there are more problems. I’m not sure if it is a problem with the style, or with the ToggleButton, but after checking and unchecking the button, the state becomes completely messed up. When the ToggleButton does not have an AppBarButtonStyle set, it works great. We only get this problem when we apply one of those styles. With that said, it would seem there is a problem with the style, but the style looks just fine. I’ve seen some solutions that change the Unchecked and/or Normal VisualState back to the original style. I have not seen this working and this should happen by default. It appeared to me that the VisualState was actually getting messed up. I tried subscribing to the Click event and changing the VisualState manually. ... [More]