Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels

Stéphane Vidouse is main developer at Cassio (www.cassio.be) a Point Of Sale Software company. His interests are C#, XAML, Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Windows Azure. He develop on is own time apps for the Windows (phone) store such as « Blague du matin » or « Fast Food Locator » and attend on major Hackathon in Belgium & France (BeMyApp, DevKings, …). He is a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) since 1995. Stéphane is an active member of the Windows Phone & Windows 8 community on Facebook.

What makes your application a real good one?

1. Invest in a great (live) tile!

The first contact of users with your application is your store icon and your tile. Do not underestimate the first impression of users. You have to design a good looking tile to ensure that customers will download your app from the store. Making a “Live” tile ensure that your app will be ranked up in the store instead of non-live tile apps.

2. Localized content

The right content for the right people. Users like to have apps that reflect proximity with them. Creating a restaurant diary? E.g. Show it in the user language with restaurants in their country!

3. Great Name

Your app name has to be simple to remind and to pronounce. E.g.: An app calculating calories from meals: KalCulator instead of “How many calories in my meal”

4. Lock Screen (WP8)

Windows Phone 8 introduces lock screen notifications. You have now the availability to bring your application in front of your customers as they awake their phone. Use it to promote your app content and use also the lock screen counters to inform them of new contents.

5. SkyDrive upload

If you save user data, consider saving it to SkyDrive to allow the user to retrieve it from anywhere and to recover it if he buy a new phone.

6. Incremental save

When your app is de-activated, it has a couple of seconds to save data. Why not saving datas incrementaly by doing this “as-the-user-go”? The user fill in a textbox? Save the content to the application state. The user finished completing a form? Save it to the isolated storage. Don’t wait the OnSuspending event to be fired to do the job. This technique will result in a faster closing app and a better user experience.

7. Async/Await

Let ALWAYS the UI thread free. Work with threads and the couple async/await. The application must stay fast & fluid, all CPU consuming operations must be placed in a separate thread to keep your app smooth.

8. Incremental loading

If you must load big amount of data, consider doing it incrementally. What’s the advantage of loading 10.000 items in a listbox if the user only look at the first 30?

9. Cache of resources

Using pictures dynamically loaded from the web is very easy. But is it efficient? Why not trying to keep them in cache? e.g.: You build an app with movies pictures. Once you have downloaded them, why not considering saving them to avoid downloading them again the next time? These pictures will not change from one time to another… And if your user is over a metered 3G connection, he will thank you for this!

10. Optimize pages form XAML rendering (CPU vs GPU)

When you design storyboards for animating your content, check the CPU & GPU counters to ensure that you are doing the right job. Font sizing uses CPU, but TextBlock sizing uses GPU, which is better for the smoothness of your app.

11. Sharing content

People like to share content with each others. Implement sharing in your app to allow them to post on Twitter, facebook, share by mail or by text. E.g.: Waouw, that’s cool, could you send it to me? Doh… No, I don’t, my app doesn’t allow this…

Think about this!

12. Review app

If you want your app to be in the top of his category on the store, you’ll need customers reviews. Encourage your users to review your app by adding a “Review this app” feature (button, menu item or pop up after 10 launches, …)

13. Market your app
Once your app is published, send links to major websites and ask them to review your app in their blogs, you will increase dramatically your visibility! Use also marketing tools such as Nokia “Marketing in a box”(http://www.developer.nokia.com/Distribute/Promoting_your_app/Home).