Tag: wp7

the art of lil todo, part 1

This is the first in a series of posts of how I came up with the art and color scheme that I did for lil todo. I’m no expert at graphic design or product design, but I figured my little experiment with writing an app and trying to make it beautiful might help other developers out there. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please post them in the comments below. Thanks for reading.

When I first decided to write a Windows Phone app, I really wasn’t too concerned with how it would look. I just knew it should work well, should be simple, and overall it should just get out of my way. After researching other to-do apps, though, I started noticing a lot of, shall we say, aesthetically challenged apps. That’s when I decided I should put a little bit extra effort into how the app looks just to stand out. Continue reading the art of lil todo, part 1

Suit Up—Let’s go

This site is up and lil todo has been submitted to the Windows Phone Marketplace. We’ll let you know when it’s available for download. For now, you can visit the lil todo page for more information.

That said, I wanted to mention the submission process for the App Hub. I have to admit it was surprisingly easy to submit the app and the instructions were fairly clear on what to do. However, it did help that Microsoft provided a walkthrough page to detail each step along the way since the submission form isn’t that crystal clear on what you need to do.

One thing that was a surprise was the size of the app image that you need to submit for the ApplicationIcon.png file. If you’ve used Visual Studio to create a WP7 app, you’ll know that this is a 62×62 PNG. Strangely, when you submit your app, you must supply a 99×99 PNG instead. You must also supply a 200×200 PNG for your application tile (i.e. Background.png). When creating your app, this is normally a 173×173 image (who comes up with these images sizes anyway?).

Apart from the image size weirdness, there weren’t any real issues when using the submission tool. The next step now is to see how long it takes for them to certify my app and get it into the store. I submitted around midnight Sunday 4/4/2011, so let’s see when I get the approval email.