I caught up with Lorraine Starr from Yippee! Entertainment, creators of the hugely popular Windows 8, Windows Phone and iOS game Chimpact, and got her to share some secrets on how they marketed the app.

“We didn’t get support initially from Apple when we launched Chimpact (although they have since featured us), so like most other app developers we had to do our own PR and Marketing. Most apps don’t get picked up by the app platforms and have to do what they can to get their apps in front of customers. There are three key key elements to marketing that we’ve found really successful.

1. Social Media

The key thing we did was build links into the app itself encouraging users to like our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter.

We brought the main character in the game, Chuck the Chimp to life by giving him his own Facebook page and Twitter account.

The key thing is not to bore your audience with endless posts, people will drop out if what you’re saying just fills up their news feed. Only post interesting/news worthy content that resonates with users of your app. We ran a competition to design a Chimp that was promoted on Facebook, offering one person in the UK and one in the US a chance to design a member of Chuck’s Chimpact family and have their design turned into a character in the Windows 8 & Windows Phone 8 versions of the game. The UK winner got the chance to go to our studio in Manchester and see their creation turned into a video game character.

You can also connect your Windows Store app to an online identity provider that uses internet authentication and authorization protocols like OpenID or OAuth– so you can get access to Facebook’s open graph API in Windows 8, allowing users to sign into your app using their Facebook credentials.

Social media also gives people a way of asking you for help if they get stuck or give you feedback. We get fantastic comments and feedback just because we’re approachable and users can come and talk to the team.

The best way to manage social media is to track the conversations around your app constantly, I do a daily search for ‘Chimpact’ and hijack people’s conversations to engage them and join in the conversation. It’s hard work but necessary.

2. PR

PR has been the most valuable thing but not easy to do, usually its about who you know and the connections you can make. For example, we serendipitously got some great publicity from the Celtic supporters who happened to mention Chimpact. I jumped on the conversation as Chuck and Chuck ended up engaging the Celtric team mascot, “Hoopy The Hound Dug” and had a picture tweeted round of the two “furry friends”. We even put a Celtic scarf on Chuck which really resonated with the supporters.

We also saw a direct boost from links we had already with a premiership footballer who tweeted about Chimpact for us just from the fact we had a personal link with him. Whoever you know, make sure you let them know about the app you’ve created and pull in some favours! The value of celebrity involvement or endorsement is amazing. The effects are short-lived, they only last for a day or so – as long as the Tweet is in their stream – but they’re very impactful. If you can afford to hire a PR agency then do it, it’s so important to target the wider market. We were lucky enough to get support from Microsoft and saw excellent results from an article in The Sun and publicity from Jonathan Ross, but usually you have to invest in that PR coverage unless you’re well connected!

In the early days I managed to get us a mention in The Times – the journalist Stuart Dredge used to run an iOS news magazine so I knew him from there. He picked up on Chimpact and he put a piece in The Times. It’s important to get your app some coverage in the general mainstream press as well as your local newspaper/s, both online and offline.

3. Partnerships

Look at who you know and what networks they have that you can hook into. For example, we have the advantage of being based in Media City so they’ve supported us by promoting Chimpact via their social media and The Brand Detective also gave us a feature through links we had with them. It’s important to look at cross partnerships – who do you work near or is in your extended community that might be interested in your app?

People are much more willing to collaborate and help each other than they used to be. If you’re not cash rich then hook up with other devs to do some joint marketing and PR to cut costs. Tell everyone you know – friends, colleagues, family and people you know who work at the platforms you’re working with. Before we started working with Microsoft we saw them as a big, faceless corporation. We’ve been bowled over by everyone at Microsoft we’ve dealt with, they’re very down to earth and willing to help which was a huge revelation. No-one else does that. It’s really important for the developer community.

You’re tired, hungry and can’t be bothered to cook. What if you could pick up your phone and ask it to order you your favourite pizza for delivery without you even having to make a call? Sounds good? Here’s the full story from the team at Future Platforms who built the Domino’s Pizza app for Windows Phone…

“In 2012 Domino’s Pizza added Windows Phone to its range of m-commerce platforms available to their customers, with a Windows Phone 7 app we built for them. The app’s successful development was so popular with Domino’s that it became a prototype for the company’s mobile work going forward.

So in January 2013 we began work on a Windows Phone 8 version for them, looking to make the most of the platform’s advantages. We wanted to not only create a ‘Domino’s store in your pocket’, or even an e-commerce store in your pocket, but to take advantage of the new Windows Phone functionality available on WP8. For example, the menu is rendered within the Windows Phone panoramic interface, live tile notifications notify users of the latest meal deals on offer in their nearest store, NFC tags are activated and voice recognition technologycan activate the app with commands such as ‘Domino’s, feed me’ or ‘Domino’s, I’m hungry’.

“I just sat there staring at the tracker until I heard a knock…I STILL LOVE IT” Jetfire

“The easiest and best way I’ve ever ordered pizza.  Thanks Domino’s I’m no longer hungry.” Christopher

“Great app! Couldn’t ask for anything better.  Absolutely the best way for ordering Domino’s” Marco

“Awesome, works flawlessly. I use it all the time now when ordering a home delivery. Great app, a must have for all Dominos Pizza Windows Phone fans.” Phillip

“Excellent, slick UI makes the whole process simple and user friendly.” Aidan

Alex Vitty, Head of UX, explained the process for designing the user journey; “We tried to keep the design as simple as possible in order for the products to take centre stage. We incorporated the Windows Phone 8 modern UI principles and overlaid the new Domino’s branding. We started the process by mapping out the key journeys from the website and simplified them as much as possible. We combined the journey for order a menu pizza with customizing a pizza which made the whole pizza ordering process much more intuitive.

Once Domino’s had decided to use the NFC and voice activation features we had to define how they would provide most benefit to the users. We reviewed the user journey to establish where they would provide shortcuts to the already streamlined process. This took quite a few iterations before we came to a solution which is both beneficial to the user and shows off the features.

Developers Kader Kawsar and Martin Chandler have a wide range of web development skills, but used C# and Java converted to JavaScript using GWT to run on Kirin: “The app incorporates some innovative Windows Phone functionality such as voice activation and NFC, which required a bit more work. We wanted every feature to add to the app’s usability, rather than just be a gimmick, so we worked a lot on making sure the VA commands do exactly what users want.

The main development tools used were Visual Studio 2012 and Eclipse. VS2012 provides the development tools for coding and designing the interface as well as the tools for unit testing your code. Eclipse provided the development environment for the Java components and JavaScript components of the application. GIT was used as the source control platform for the application code along with GIT Extensions on Windows as a UI to the GIT repository. We used JIRA to manage the sprints and story cards for the application and provide the general burn down etc. for the development.

We built the Domino’s WP8 app using Kirin, which is all about ingenious and efficient cross-platform development for us. Kirin gives us the option to migrate and develop the mobile app functionality onto another platform very easily. This means that Domino’s can move quickly and resourcefully onto emerging mobile platforms in the future, keeping their customers happy and their name synonymous with digital innovation. On this app Kirin made our lives easier because its back end business logic is built generically for cross-platform support.

Windows phone emulator was mainly used for testing during development. The emulator was very good in simulating the features being developed and was very responsive and fast. Real phones were used for key features such as NFC and Voice Activation as well as being used by the test team. Developing with Windows Phone is a totally different experience than, for example, trying to build Java ME apps on the Windows Mobile device in the past, which to be honest was not pleasant. The Windows Phone development environment has a much better IDE and method of development. Setting started with developing the Windows phone apps is very easy with freely available tutorials, samples and tools. However, learning of the concept of Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern is required for better understanding of the Windows phone development. The MVVM is not a very difficult pattern to grasp. Visual Studio 2012 worked extremely well with Blend, which helped creation of the user interface with ease. Starting up app from scratch with Windows phone is very quick. However, this was sometime a drawback because Visual Studio generated code where were not required, which was acceptable from a generic tool.

Implementation of the voice commands was easy with the Voice Command Definition File. However, getting the phone to behave as required with the voice commands were particularly challenging because some voice commands behaved differently between the phone device and the emulator.  This was probably due the hardware differences.  Since the app was to be used on the mobile devices therefore the final development was carried out on the device, whereby the commands were arranged in certain order for them to be recognised, in order to overcome the difference in development environments.

Voice activation itself is straight forward to implement and the technology examples and documentation provide reasonable information on the process for supporting voice activation. Testing was quite funny to see as various members of the team shouted various commands at their phones – I’m not sure I could emulate an Irish accent myself though!

As part of the implementation we wanted to provide the capability to dive into the application with deep linking too so commands such as “Dominos give me a deal” could be implemented in the future to take the customer directly to current deals for example. This aspect provides the app with a fun feel for the user and hopefully makes them feel happy when they use this feature to interact with the application and their device.

As a relatively new technology the implications of what can be achieved with NFC are not fully realised at present. There are two primary ways in which the technology can assist the user and in the Dominos application we have both approaches in play; firstly as an embedded tag scan which allows the user to scan a tag at a specific point in time – when they’re on the voucher view. Secondly, as an application launch tag which can be used to launch the application – in this case to save a voucher for use later or to take the user to a meal deal. There is a lot of potential for this capability so the features provided by the application may be expanded in the future. Being able to save multiple types of voucher to save money on orders or perhaps being able to drop products into the basket by simply scanning a menu demonstrate how the technology can assist with the users experience of building and placing an order – making it easier.

The implementation itself relies on the same deep linking capabilities mentioned earlier. As with the voice activation features good information exists to assist with the code required to implement the NFC features. The bigger challenge is thinking about how the feature can aid the user and how to make that relevant and if possible fun for the user.

In order to develop and test this feature we needed two extra components that don’t currently come out of the box with Visual Studio or the emulator. The first is the tags themselves as the emulator doesn’t appear to provide any capabilities for mocking an NFC event so you need some real tags to test with. The second component is being able to write the information we desire to the tags. Some third party tools are available for this but we found the example tag writers provided on the MSDN better for our purposes.

Each time we demonstrated the apps NFC features they were received very well and our tags left with the audience and copies of the app!! It’ll be great to see some posters or menus that use these features.

Our strategy with Domino’s mobile products is for them to integrate seamlessly into a multichannel ordering process, so our Windows Phone 8 app does everything their e-commerce site does, such as ability to log in to the same account online or on the app, personalized information for returning customers, shopping baskets and a ‘Pizza Tracker’ to make sure their customers are getting a consistently great Domino’s experience no matter what platform they’re using.

When you’re building apps across platforms, from the developer’s perspective, separation of concern is vital for developing cross platform apps whereby the business logic could reside within the Kirin JavaScript code and the user interface code could reside with native device code. Intuitive and user friendly interface as well as performance of the apps are important too.

The UI needs to be consistent through-out so the user is always sure and comfortable with the choices available to them and what they can do to interact with the application and achieve their desired objectives. XAML provides great support for UI consistency with templates and styles that allow for re-use. These assets can also be re-used on other Windows platforms too.

Consider how the interesting technologies provided by the platform can assist your user with how they interact with your app; to make tasks quicker and easier or to make tasks more fun and interesting. “Shake me” to add some sides might be a useful short cut in the application but it might also frustrate the user if it happens in error so don’t use a technology feature just because it’s there.

If it can’t be slick then make it easy; in some places you may need to collect a reasonable amount of information from the user so try to make it as painless as possible.

As with any application the internal architecture of the application itself is important so the application remains responsive every time the user performs a task. Consider your deep linking functionality upfront as this will also help to keep your implementation cleaner and more focused. Async, async, async – make sure everything that can be performed in the background is performed in the background.

Tools for me have been a key feature of the Microsoft technology stack. Visual Studio is slick and efficient and provides just about everything you could think of for developing just about any type of application you could imagine. For business applications the ability to develop secure and scalable back-office applications with front-office components built in the one technology and then deploy those features to users through a range of different devices from Phone and Xbox to tablets, laptops and desktops – it represents a very unified corporate world. The tools help make the Windows development process more fun than building Android or iOS although the tools for these have both improved massively in the last couple of years.

If you’re still undecided whether to start building for Windows Phone all I can say is get involved. Currently Windows Phone has a smaller market share than other platforms but that’s also a great opportunity to get your app recognised on the platform early. The devices running Windows Phone 8 have been improving too so they really can compete against the phones that run other platforms. With the added benefits of the Windows desktop market and the Xbox gaming platform your app can reach a very wide and diverse audience not being restricted to just the phone and tablet. That said the tablet themed devices such as Surface Pro that can run a full Windows 8 desktop are starting to appear so we now have a tablet that can do more than play games, surf the internet or read email.

I can imagine it won’t be too long before I can order a pizza directly from my Xbox, flick through the menu by gesturing at the Kinect and then back to my movie!”

It might resemble a spaceship command centre straight out of the latest Star Trek movie, but Soft Array is actually an art installation showcasing the epitome of an interconnected devices experience, with no less than 80 Windows 8 touch devices set up over multiple structures with a programmable environment – so anyone can come and play around with it, build on it and hack it.

Soft Array was created by design studio Arcade for Microsoft. Arcade and Microsoft invited a number of designers and developers to build apps for Soft Array’s debut at SxSW Interactive, one of which was London based design agency, Weapon7. We spoke with Michael Naman, Head of Creative Technologyto find out more…

“Universe is an app that uses distributed processing to control mass particle flow across 80 Windows 8 devices – it was part of an installation featured in Microsoft’s Windows Studio venue at SXSW Interactive. What you see on screen is a single planet with asteroids orbiting it and flying across the galaxy. There was a poll asking SXSW attendees what their preferred topic of interest is at the event, each topic is colour coded. The colour of the last vote made is represented in the planet and the asteroids orbiting it. Users can interact with the planets and influence their behaviour.

The chance to do something technically challenging and innovative with Windows 8 at SXSW was too irresistible to miss. It’s been fantastic to bring our front-end knowledge of web technologies to native Windows 8 applications. We wanted to use Windows 8 to show connectivity in a totally new way, engage with people and see everyone get involved. For example, as well as using the networked devices, the app uses features like live tiles Share to draw users back into the experience.

We needed to show how each device was able to seamlessly communicate with each other, as Windows 8 does from smartphone to tablet to computer. The way we did that was with distributed processing. Each time an asteroid left one screen it appeared on the other. The processing for each asteroid switched from machine to machine rather than coming from a single computer and linked up to multiple screens. You could see this connectivity visually as the asteroids flew across the galaxy.

It also needed to have a reason for being, which is why we asked people to vote which topics they were interested in at SXSW. The more dominant a colour, the more people there that were interested in that topic.

The designs for Universe came from three places:

• Windows 8 itself, especially the colour scheme and live tiles
• Constellations, both as they appear naturally, and as constellation maps
• The structure (called the Soft Array) also had geometric shapes around it

The user journey was exceptionally important. It needed to be something beautiful that people could appreciate from afar, and something that people could engage with directly. So we decided to use a bold, colourful approach to its design to attract people in to engage, and if they didn’t want to do that they could still appreciate its aesthetics. Once they were at a touch device we knew people would want to move things about and make it their own in some way. So we made as many aspects as possible  interactive, so it was something you could touch and play with. We made the planets moveable, users could also change their size and affect their gravitational pull. The direction which the planets launched out asteroids could also be manipulated to create completely different shapes and pathways on the installation.

Why Windows? We ran the numbers, and the potential is incredible. We hadn’t developed on the Windows 8 platform before, so our Head of Creative Technology, Michael Namen, and his team had to learn the coding language in a matter of days. We thought it would be complicated and clunky, but it turned out to be very straightforward. Visual Studio was actually very good to work in, having never used it before. Windows 8 is really quite intuitive, and when they say it’s built for touch that basically means it does what you think it will do when you swipe etc. We were able to show high res imagery, and users were able to seamlessly come out of our app, explore Windows 8 and the other apps being showcased. We knew people might do this so our app automatically saw any device no longer on our app as ‘space’, which the asteroids could still pass through.

We were given a number of Samsung Windows 8 development tablets from Arcade to create and test the app on. We only had two weeks to create and design the app from scratch, so testing was done as we went. We were surprised at how quickly you can build stuff, and how little there is to learn with regards to Windows 8 native development with web technologies.

The app was really well received at SwSW. People engaged with it as we had expected, either choosing to stand back and view it as a whole, or coming closer to play around. Because the asteroids could travel quite far we saw people moving from tablet to tablet trying to make them all follow a specific pathway, like a figure of 8 for example.

We’re always looking to push ourselves and explore new technology; mobile app development is a part of what we do. Building a Windows 8 app let us explore the platform for ourselves, develop new skills, and bring an idea to life. Plus the interconnectivity was interesting to concept around. We’re now actively pursuing it as an option for our clients.

Come and see Soft Array for yourself at Modern Jago – Microsoft’s limited time creative and collaborative space in Shoreditch – before it ships to the Cannes Lions Festival. Or, if you’d like more of an insight into what a user of Windows 8 expects from an application and examples of those expectations creatively executed, join Microsoft UX Evangelist Andrew Spooner in a free workshop at Modern Jago on the 6th or 19th June. Visit www.modernjago.co.uk for more details.

The British & Irish Lions Official app was launched across the three main app platforms with no less than seven different apps (Windows Phone 7, Windows Phone 8, Windows 8, iOS for mobile and tablet, Android for mobile and tablet). Phew! Liam Flaherty, Creative Designer at Sequence gives his take on the challenges and positives of creating an amazing experience across different platforms.

“The British & Irish Lions tour is a highly anticipated and prestigious sporting event. The free British & Irish Lions Official app is available across the 3 leading operating systems, Windows, iOS and Android – both phone and tablet. The app provides in-depth tour knowledge and the perfect platform to share with the rest of the online sporting community using the #seaofred hashtag on the featured twitter feed. There will also be the ability to add your Man of the Match as the tour proceeds. We are really excited about the behind the scenes videos that will be taken by the Lions using the Microsoft Surface and the Nokia Lumia. These videos will be uploaded in real time to the app, giving fans unprecedented insight into the tour. The app also provides the opportunity to enter exclusive competitions and win once in a lifetime prizes. These features provide a great deal of opportunity for exposure for the Lions in the build-up to the tour.

As well as massive potential for usage during the tour the app will also serve as a great repository of content for the months following where fans can go to read more about their favourite event and sport. The ‘behind the scenes’ video function of the app is a modern and digital take on the iconic ‘living with the lions’ documentary, this will be a snapshot of history captured in a unique and utterly modern way. We‘ll all be part of a great sporting legacy. This app will provide more authentic content about the tour than any other app or website on the market. The tone is playful and fun with the content created by the squad and the fans themselves.

Windows 8 Squad Playerpage Designs

To come up with the initial idea for the project we brainstormed as a team of rugby fans to work out the features that we would want to see from a British & Irish Lions App. The inspiration for the design of the app came from the established heritage of the British & Irish Lions as a brand. It’s a very distinctive logo and the lions wanted to maximise its effect by using the colour red throughout. The lions wanted there to be an epic feel to the design to recreate the drama of the sport. Even the content pages make reference to the original branding using hints of the Lions red, making it instantly recognisable to fans.

Lions Visual Style

Our process for designing the user journey started by considering the features before anything else. We filtered out anything that wasn’t specifically aimed at our audience (rugby fans and sports fans).

Cross-Platform Squad Sketch

Going forward, our aim is to highlight certain areas of the site as they become featured and relevant. For example, with the pre-squad announcement the focus was primarily on the “On the Plane” competition. Then, after the squad announcement, and before the tour, the focus will be on the squad. As the tour approaches focus will turn to the first game, after that it will shift to the next test game. We want to keep those journeys high up in the navigation as well as highlighting new behind the scenes content as it becomes available.

On the plane competition

We didn’t use the default languages of Windows, Apple and Google, however we did use conventions found on these platforms. We decided to use the modern user interface that complements the Create Once, Publish Everywhere ethos. The core underlying framework is the same for all platforms and the main challenges were adhering to distinct user interactions of each. Initially we built the foundation framework which we went on to use to feed content to all apps regardless of platform, once that was created and tested the team proceeded to develop the specific user experiences.

iPhone and Android Structure

The apps aren’t native to each platform but they do look typical of each. For example, the iOS app doesn’t use standard controls, but it does use conventions familiar to users of other similar apps on the platform. Plus, the flexibility we gave to the client in the CMS meant that the structure could be changed easily. Windows 8 is fantastic at showcasing content so we maximized on that by using the Live tiles, lock screen, share charm (for on the plane), lovely big feature image, pushing relevant content to the surface.

The apps provide a different experience and content to the website. The ‘behind the scenes’ content is exclusive to the app, as is the second screen benefits of using your handheld device. However the on-the- plane competition is featured on MSN and the British & Irish Lions website is instantly recognisable design-wise as being related to the app.

I’m currently working on the design layouts for phase 3 of the project. This includes designing the new fixtures and results pages on Windows 8, tablet and phone. The design for phase 3 is entirely centred around the second screen experience. We are making sure to continue the design elements from the first two phases, including the colours of dark grey highlighted by the ‘sea of red’ and the rich background image of the stadium, so that users easily recognise it as the British & Lions app. We are using windows 8 navigation and design conventions along with my designs to present all the statistics and live match information in a clean and succinct way that enables users to use their second screen to enhance their experience of watching the game. Bring on the tour!”

With the launch of the British & Irish Lions Official app across no less than seven platforms at once across Windows, iOS and Android, we thought the team at Sequence who built them might have some useful knowledge to share on how you create an amazing experience regardless of what platform you’re working with. Here’s what lead designer Liam Flaherty and UX designer Matt O’Keefe had to say…

1. Have a clear value proposition

A user needs to very quickly learn ‘what can this app do for me?’ Anyone working on creating and building an app needs to keep coming back to this question.

2. Know your audience

Consider how they like to be spoken to and how technical the language should be. Building the British & Irish Lions Official app was a rare scenario where the team that worked on the app were also end users as we’re all rugby fans. The British & Irish Lions had a lot of research to hand about committed rugby fans but we suggested they widen their scope with the app to include people that may not normally follow rugby but may want to get involved in the tour. We wanted it to be so that no matter your level of rugby knowledge, you could use and enjoy this app.

3. Do one thing well

Complexity is often a symptom of not differentiating people’s actual needs from what you are building.

4. Test often with real people

Don’t design in a bubble, keep on testing and playing with your app as you build and ask as many other people as possible to the same. Your app will evolve and that’s a good thing.

5. Optimise for the platform

Make your app feel at home – if it’s for Windows, make it feel at home on Windows. We created an information architecture that made the most sense for the content and then designed the navigation using each platforms navigation style. We chose big background images for Windows 8 with parallax and made sure that we used the default font on each platform which helps make the app feel more native than it actually is.

6. Don’t try and be too clever

Users don’t want to have to work at using your app, keep it simple and easy to use.

7. Use existing design patterns where you can

Familiar interactions feel intuitive so try not to change designs beyond recognition. The British & Irish Lions branding wasn’t originally designed with digital in mind so we worked hard on bringing the prestigious identity of the Lions to life with this app.

8. Avoid unnecessary features

Start simple and, if there’s a genuine need, add more. We worked out all features at each stage of the tour to ensure that the structure of the app would ‘work’ no matter how many features were added.

9. Build in some delight

Little things can make people smile and a little character goes a long way. The whole idea behind this app is that the exclusive content will be created by the team themselves, sharing the personal real time experiences that make up the tour. This is what makes this app unique and exciting, an original and thoroughly modern experience of a sporting event using digital to provide a direct line to the team, as opposed to having to rely on reports created by people looking in from the outside.

10. Stuff will always go wrong but when it does help make it better

Make errors and messages that you build into your app helpful and try to make as much information as recoverable as possible. The star ratings and reviews on the Apple/Android and Windows stores gave us an invaluable insight into the user’s experience of the app and enabled us to iterate on and refine our design.

Liam Flaherty: Creative Designer at Sequence. An enthusiastic and friendly freelance graphic designer. Always like to push my skill set to improve with every piece of design I work on.

Matt O’Keefe: UX Designer at Sequence. UX designer for websites, Windows 8 applications and mobile applications.

If you’re into UX and design then May’s the month that just keeps on giving, from POINT to Port80 to Global Accessibility Awareness Day to the Future of Web Design.

2 –3 May – POINT Conference 2013, London

With luminaries like Erik Speakerman, Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, amongst many others, POINT is not to be missed. This self-funded conference provides  forum for designers to “ …discuss the issues that design, in its many forms, creates on a day-to-day basis.”

9 May – UXPA UK May Event: Global Accessibility Awareness Day, London

If you want to learn more about how anyone regardless of their abilities can access information about your products and services then this evening event is for you. 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) and to mark the occasion UXPA UK offers a one day event featuring two talks and a panel session including a case study from the BBC.

10 May, Port80 2013, Newport

Joel Hughes set up this web design fest right in the middle of Newport, hosting some great speakers including Andy Davies, Jack Franklin, Robin Christopherson, Paul Lloyd, our very own nUbellyer Rachel Shillcock, Sophie Dennis, Benjy Stanton & Matt Andrews.

13 – 15 May – Future Of Web Design London 2013
Now in it’s seventh year, the Future of Web Design provides in-depth workshops followed by a two day, two track conference with speakers like Seb Lee-Delisle and Peter Gasston gracing the main stage. Not to be missed.

14 – 22 May – UK Device Developers’ Conference, Bristol, Cambridge and Manchester

If you’re involved in Embedded Systems development or electronics design this even promises to give you info on the latest development tech from around the world. Oh and it’s free. Result!

31 May – Converge 2013, Edinburgh

Billed as a ‘pick your own style adventure’, Converge aims to encourage collaboration, conversation and enthusiasm across all the various disciplines in the technology area. This unique event has two tracks – one is a more traditional speaker/discussion track and the other is a hacking/making track. Sign me up!

31 May – .net Awards, London

On Friday 31st May the .net Awards will showcase the best in the industry as judged by a panel of 50 industry judges. The winners of these prestigious awards will be announced at an exclusive ceremony in London on Friday, 31 May. If you’re on the list to attend, lucky you – otherwise you can keep an eye out on the website for the winners as they’re announced, and a full list will be in the August issue of the mag.

We like to highlight events from around the country, not just London, so please drop us a line @ubelly if you want to see your event listed below.

My name is Martin Grant and I’m a second year Computer Games Technology at the University of the West of Scotland. In April a Windows 8 game jam was held at my campus, organised by a Window Game Ambassador, the goal of which was simply to build some kind of game that would be released on the the Windows Store. Microsoft also kindly offered a prize as an extra incentive.

We could use any means possible to build our games be it straight from Visual Studio or any other development software. I chose Construct 2 – an absolutely fantastic HTML5 games engine. If you have ever used GameMaker before, it is quite similar to that but more powerful in some ways. We had a theme to design a game based around mythical creatures, and thus Unicorn Space Command was born. The mere mention of the term mythical and I jumped straight to unicorn, and why not add some space in there too just for the hell of it.

Unicorn Space Command lets you control the turrets of a starship caught in a treacherous asteroid field, firing rainbow lasers at incoming space rocks, blasting them into history so you can make it back home in one piece. The design took a matter of minutes to conjure up, so I got fired right into the development while my artist Callum Lyons got started on producing some lovely space themed imagery. I’d never used Construct 2 before so I spent an hour working through a tutorial which let me know right away that I had made the right choice for my development tool, it was just so easy to use it’s unbelievable. To start off I created a very basic prototype where a turret could shoot out some coloured particles wherever the player indicated. Programmer art, of course, then I created a nice starfield background and had some test asteroids fall down the screen. Once I added in collisions the game was more or less complete, once I imported the final artwork I just spend a lot of time polishing it up so the game loop flowed correctly, the spawn times of the asteroids seemed challenging and implemented a basic scoring system. My favourite part of the game might just be the music, it’s incredibly cheesy.

It was surprisingly easy to build my game for Windows 8. Construct 2 has a built in export for Windows feature, from there I just had to edit some of the game files from Visual Studio and that was me ready to upload! It was very cool to be able to create a game that utilised touch controls since a lot of Windows 8 computers are touch screen, something I had never done before. Since I had a very short space of time to create the game I never got to use some of the new Windows features like the charm bar and live tiles but they will be absolutely making an appearance in the next update of Unicorn Space Command. It was so exciting submitting my game to the Windows Store as this has been my first published game. Submission was a very easy and smooth process, you are guided through and shown exactly what you need to create a successful submission. Approval of your game is a fairly transparent process too as you are shown what they are doing with your game at various stages whether it is testing the game or just checking all your data about the game matches up correctly. I chose for Unicorn Space Command to be a free game, it being my first submission. Thankfully as a student with access to Microsoft Dreamspark I get access to a Windows developer account for free, as well as getting access to all sorts of development software. As soon as I got an email telling me it was approved for the store I was refreshing the page constantly just to see my game appear on an international store. What a fantastic feeling that was seeing my game there, starting to feel like my career as a games developer would start taking shape from here on out. My friends were immediately ordered to download the game and give it a shot giving me some great feedback right away.

Since Unicorn Space Command has appeared on the Windows Store it has been going absolutely fantastic. There has been a few articles published about the game so far including one of the largest sites representing games in Scotland (http://scottishgames.net/2013/04/22/unicorn-space-command-game-jam-title-hits-windows-app-store/). I’ve even been gaining a rise in my Twitter followers. Speaking about the game specifically, at the time of writing I am closing in on 200 downloads from various countries around the world. The game has also received a generous number of 5 star ratings. As a Windows Store developer I have access to an analytics dashboard which offers me a plethora of statistics about downloads, playtime and other data that I can use to update my game to create the best experience I can offer to my players. On the Windows Store you can filter games by the highest rating, and I’ve been absolutely shocked that again at the time of writing Unicorn Space Command is currently #48 out of over 6000 games. Every time I check I say to myself “are you kidding me?!”, I don’t think I believe it quite yet.

My plans for the near future are to make a small update to the game and definitely ship it over to Windows Phone, iOS and Android to hopefully see some larger download figures! As I used Construct 2 to create the game, throughout the summer months I will be rewriting it in C++ as I plan on shipping a sequel to the game, involving a number of quite large changes turning it into a much bigger game. I am still going to be continuing to use Construct 2 as I have also purchased a full license for it to make a couple small games to hopefully generate a small stream of ad revenue for some extra summer spending money. April was also a great time for me to create a Windows 8 app as I won a Windows Phone from the game jam which I plan on using for more games developing, testing future mobile apps.

This has been an amazing experience for me, giving me a taste of the life of a professional games developer. Getting my ideas out there in the public is very cool and the fact that people across the world are actually downloading and rating my game?! I’m still not over it, I check the download stats on a daily basis! I thoroughly recommend some of the resources I’ve mentioned like Construct 2 and Dreamspark and I would like to make a big thank you to Microsoft for making this experience possible for me, and thank you to anyone has enjoyed playing my game!

Check out my website and Twitter for updates on Unicorn Space Command, its sequel and some other brand new games coming soon!

Following on from recent sold out workshops, Microsoft UX Evangelist Andrew Spooner is running day long workshops that will introduce you to the new Windows 8 operating system and the design and UX patterns that exist in Windows Store apps. The day is split into 2 parts. The morning will give you an overview of the Modern UI, explaining the new Windows experience and explaining the design principles that manifest themselves in this new style of application, brought to life using live examples. You will also get a brief introduction to the development environment so you can understand how to download and run sample applications. The afternoon will build upon the essential idea for an app and guide you through the process of turning it into a Windows Store application that will truly shine in the Windows Store.

Who is the workshop for?

This is a non-technical workshop aimed at visual designers and UX designers. Developers who are looking to build a better application experience will also learn a great deal from this workshop.

What should I bring?

Bring paper and pencils for taking notes. Sketch pads will be supplied for the afternoon wire framing exercise and you will be given digital copies of the content at the end of the day. If you can bring a Windows 8 machine (either a PC or a Mac) you can drive yourself through some of the theory in the morning but that is not essential, Andrew will bring Windows 8 touch devices available to share round the room.

What will you learn?

You will learn how to approach application design for Windows 8, what the unique experiences that a user of Windows 8 expects from an application and how you should approach some of the unique features of Windows 8 and bring them to life within your app. You will get an overview of the technical structure of a Windows Store HTML application and the tools that are used to create these applications.

The new round of workshops are free to attend and will be held at The Modern Jago studio in Shoreditch, London and you can register now for the following dates:

· Weds 1st May

· Weds 22nd May

· Thurs 6th June

· Weds 19th June

If you have any questions about these workshops, feel free to contact Andrew on Twitter @andspo

Vikas Arora and Ricky Brundritt from the Bing Mapsteam give us the details on integrating mapping into your website and applications to make fantastic experiences for your end users.

Over the last few years the need and use of digital mapping has increased substantially, so much so that mapping has now become integral to a digital strategy. Mapping provides context and relevance to search, it provides the ability for companies to improve the user experience of their services. Traditionally mapping platforms were used as locator’s platforms for either the Retail, Property or Travel industry. More recently with the demand to view business intelligence data on maps growing the need for flexible mapping platforms has paved the way for the providers to become more creative and inventive with the features, services and also the tools available to the dev community.

No doubt you’ve already come across or used some kind of mapping service or functionality in your websites and applications. We’ve been lucky enough to work with some big brands like Marriot, British Airways and Easyjet which has taught us a lot about the specific features of Bing Maps that work well for them and their customers. With some of these insights and experiences with our customers from all industries the following seven points are worth considering when developing your website or app with Bing Maps:

1. A robust, scalable platform– with over 2000 customers using Bing Maps from Locator Services to Business Critical Applications, the Bing Maps platform provides the stability needed by many blue chip companies to support their infrastructure. Bing Maps also provides Technical Support through its Specialist Support team; knowledgeable in not only supporting the ongoing use of Bing Maps within your application but also in supporting and aiding the initial development of your application.

2. Flexibility in the API’s to support multi-device and multi-browser environments with API’s for REST Services, Silverlight Control, iOS, and Ajax (compatible with all browsers) details of which can be found at MSDN Bing Maps

3. Global Footprintthat aligns to their business – Bing Maps provides Global Imagery updated frequently to provide the most up to date and high resolution images. More recently Bing introduced an exclusive update with High Resolution imagery only available through Bing Maps.

4. Bird’s Eyeis technology exclusive to Bing Maps. Provide users a better overview of the property and the surrounding area to provide insight into “what it’s like there.” Zoom and pan smoothly within bird’s eye and across imagery types for a truly immersive viewing experience.

5. With the latest Bing Maps Ajax v.7.0 API and it’s modular framework developers have the opportunity to be flexible, inspirational, creative and dynamic. A great example of this is the EasyJet InspireMeservice.

6. Bing Maps provides Point Of Interestdata through its Navteq Partnership consisting of local facets such as hotels, restaurants, museums and much more, categorized into groups allowing ease of integration and selection depending on the requirement. Integration of POI data provides greater relevance and context to the users search.

7. Integration – Microsoft offers a wide range of products that can be used in conjunction with one another to enhance each of the products and the solutions built on the stack.

Venue Maps – explore another dimension…

When you want to find your way somewhere, say for example the airport or theme park, the standard is to add your location and destination. However, wouldn’t it be great to actually see where the duty free store is at the airport once you check in or the actual location of Magic Kingdom when jetting off to Disney World?

This feature really adds value to the end user and helps provide richer content to your service or product. There are over 4000 venues worldwide at the moment, and this number is constantly growing. Details of how you can integrate Venue Maps can be found here.

You can embed your own venue within your Bing Maps application through the use of a very handy tool created by Microsoft Research Labs, called MapCruncher. MapCruncher makes it easy to publish maps overlaid in an application using the Bing Map Control. Once you’re familiar with the tool, it takes about ten minutes to generate a new tile layer. Just find 5 to 10 corresponding landmarks on your map and on the Bing map view, and MapCruncher will register your map to the global coordinate system, warp it to fit a Mercator projection, and generate a set of image tiles that can be seamlessly layered on top of Bing map control’s standard road, hybrid, or aerial imagery. It even makes a sample HTML page for reference.

All of these features – High Resolution Imagery, Points of Interest, Geocoding, Global Coverage and Venue Maps etc. – enrich the user experience when they come to your website and/or app and are core features and components of the Bing Maps API details of which can be found here.

Bing Maps for Window Store

Bing Maps is integrated with Windows 8 out of the box. There are two development API’s available, the first one is commonly referred to as the Native control that allows you to use C#, Visual Basic, or C++. The second API uses JavaScript and is based on the Bing Maps V7 AJAX web control. This makes it easy to take existing web applications using Bing Maps and re-use a lot of the code to create a Windows Store application. If you’re interesting in using Bing Maps to create a Windows Store app take a look at our training kit.

British Airways has created an excellent Windows Store application called The British Airways Inspiration App. This application is a great example of how a Windows Store app can be used to create an enhanced user experience and drive customers to your site. Rather than redeveloping their booking engine into a Windows Store app they took some of their great destination guide information that is often over looked on their website and turned it into an app where users can get ideas of places to travel to. They include information about destinations such as average temperatures, cost of a round trip ticket and a map of the location. If the user selects a month to travel to the destination they will be taken to the British Airways website.

Bing Maps for Mobile

The Bing Maps V7 AJAX control was designed with mobile in mind. The base control weighs in at only 38kb in size and makes use of HTML5 when available. It’s supported on all the major mobile platforms such as iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone 8. Pairing this map control with tools such as jQuery mobile or PhoneGapwill allow you to create excellent mobile map applications that have a mobile friendly user interface.

There are a number of great mobile applications already out there using Bing Maps. Two applications that make use of venue maps to show users the maps of airports are the United Airlines application for Windows Phone 8 and the FlySmart app for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. These are definitely worth checking out.

Add Bing Maps to your App

The Bing Maps platform has a number of API’s available to suit your needs. Read through the documentation or jump right in and try the interactive SDK. For more information or development assistance see the Bing Maps blog or forums. If you have any licensing questions contact us here.

New to Windows app development? Download the free tools and register for a developer account.

This month we’ve got Bacon and Whisky to keep us going on the events circuit – what more does anyone need? There’s some great web and mobile dev and design focused events this month, whether or not they involve bacon and/or whisky. Hope to see you at some of them! If you want to see your event listed get in touch @ubelly.

10 – 12 April – UX London

“I came. I listened. I stayed. Great event, great crowd, great venue. Learn, network, enjoy.” That’s what Dan Norman, one of last year’s speakers said about UX London. With such luminaries as Tom Hulme, Richard Seymour, Marty Neumeier and Jeremy Keith it’s not to be missed.

12 –13 April – Whisky Web II

The inaugural event last year went so well the organisers are promising an even bigger and better conference held in Airth Castle, Stirlingshire and then onto Edinburgh for a day of hacking. Billed as ‘a web conference created for the web community, by the web community’, Whisky Web has a great set of speakers lined up as well as the odd Shark to two. Say no more…

12-13 April – BACON 2013

BACON has no less than thirty-one tasty sessions on topics including rocketry, Go, infinity, data visualisation, and continuous deployment. Our very own Charlotte from the nUbelly team will be there to keep you up to date with what’s happening on Twitter and on the blog. Yum!

12 – 14 April – Úll

This 3 day event for mobile devs and designers kicks off with an afternoon of workshops, followed by a day long conference and then a restful Sunday BBQ (let’s hope the rain holds off).

17 April – HCID2013

You just need to take the afternoon off for this 1 – 9pm open day event run by the Human Computer Interaction Design department at City University London. There’s bunch of free talks and workshops around the ideas of creativity, usability, user experience, web accessibility, mobile design, multi-touch technologies and service design for UX professionals and designers.

18 – 19 April – jQuery UK 2013

Join Remy Sharp, Adam J Sontag and Brendan Eich for jQuery UK, which promises a day of workshops followed by a full blown conference that’s even bigger and better than last year.

20 April – State of the Browser 2013

State of the Browser is brought to you by those lovely chaps and chapesses at London Web Standards, this year held at Ravensbourne College, London. It’s a grass-roots event that our very own Martin Beeby is speaking at and we’ll be covering the sessions and live tweeting, so catch us online if you can’t make it in person.

23 – 24 April – Industry Web Conference

Yes, we’re heading up to Newcastle to wallow in the wisdom of web luminaries like Noah Stokes, John Allsopp and Rachel Andrew. Run by Gavin Elliott of DIBI fame, Industry Web Conf promises to teach you skills you can put into practice at work the next day. We’ve got the Soapbox (let us know if you want to speak for 5 mins on the world’s smallest stage*), some freebies and some good banter. We’ll also be covering the event on Twitter and on the blog. See you there!

*Not necessarily factually correct, but it sounds good