News on Hungarian Dictionary
Hungarian Dictionary (also known as Magyar szótár), my first app for the Windows Phone platform has been released 5 months ago, it's time to take a look at the numbers. Today the download counter is at 2200, that may be considered low, but the target audience is extremely limited. Windows Phone has a marginal market share in Hungary – still, 70% of downloads were originated from Hungary, the rest were from various countries. I've got 94 really positive reviews so far, mostly 5 stars, which puts it to the top 5% (and top 50) of the Hungarian Marketplace, making it one of the most popular free apps. There are new downloads every day, people seem to like it and use it frequently; this makes all the hard work worthwhile. After two updates the current version is 1.2 and now it includes the Bing translator that can handle 36 languages.
Usage is shared between the following device types, follow the legend clockwise...
I consider the application done, which is a great feeling because in my career it's really rare that I can say such thing to software I wrote, most of them always need constant updating, new feature requests come, redesign, refactoring, you know the drill. I must note that I'm still satisfied with Windows Phone, I thought that once Leslie gets her iPhone 4S, I'm going to feel jealous and get one as well. The truth is, in everyday use the two platforms are equally good, so for now I stand by my choice. And for the first time, I have mobile internet connection so I can use it for really useful things, like Foursquare check-ins... :-)
Breaking The Silence
I haven't posted anything for a while, mainly because I still feel a bit uncomfortable writing about personal, non-technical stuff. Silly me! Anyway, for those handful of people who might care, during the past few months I moved to the USA after quite some legal and logistical trouble. Once I was here with all my possessions I could take on the plane, we finally tied the knot with Leslie; the US government was pushing us with strict deadlines so we went for a rather minimal wedding in short 3 weeks. It was still too big for us (due to family intervention it has gotten out of hands quickly); I know people always claim that it was their most amazing day ever, but for us the word traumatic describes the event more accurately. It was on a Friday (11/11/11, just to make it easy to remember), then we made it a long weekend and went to our usual vacation spot – Washington DC. It was nice, but I must say you better avoid the International Spy Museum, it was awful, expensive, boring (during the initial elevator ride and profile room you'd think it will be great fun) and I guess it tells all that the most entertaining moment was when in a really busy room I accidentally kicked up a toddler. Right then I felt awful but now it's a fond memory of ours. On the other hand, go and check out Mount Vernon, George Washington's remote mansion and farm, chances are you'll find it a really pretty place, even if you're not a history buff.
We must have caught the flu in DC because we got sick by the time we arrived home and it took a while to get through that. We bought lots of IKEA furniture and reorganized the house, I built a new workstation from components I brought from Hungary and ordered the rest from Amazon even before I arrived here. Got a new telly (47" LCD, yay), lots of video games, enjoyed Christmas with our first actual tree (we just took it down last weekend) and I've been quite busy with work. All this didn't leave too much space for hobby projects, but before moving I wrote an FTP server that's been running ever since without major hiccups, so I might release it sometime.
Enjoy the winter!
I Do
Goodbye Steve
WP7 Marketplace Submission Procedure
If you're an active Windows Phone developer, or you're thinking about joining, you may have thought about what's happening to your application once you submit it to the Marketplace. This is the scenario of my latest app update, your mileage may vary but this is what you can expect in general.
1. You upload your application to the App Hub. Their system processes your XAP file and looks for obvious problems. If there is an issue, you will be notified about it and you have to upload a new XAP file that has been fixed to continue the submission.
2. Once the XAP is verified, they repackage it and you can enter various metadata on each of the supported languages of your app, such as short and long descriptions, keywords, images in various sizes and up to 8 screenshots. It's best to have these all prepared before you start submitting your app. If you actually use special features like network connectivity, device information or phone user identity request, access GPS data etc, these will be detected in your application's code and displayed on the profile page of your application on the Marketplace. For some of these there will be an extra confirmation page displayed to the customer.
3. When you filled the metadata and selected the price and the countries where your app will be available, you're done, the app is "signed and encrypted". Now you just have to wait, a lot, to have it certified.
4. Unless you submitted it really early, the app will be tested the next day by manual labor in Microsoft's User Interface Lab in Norristown, Pennsylvania. They test it with a variety of devices (like the
5. About two days later, if everything was okay during their tests, they run another test by installing the app over wifi directly from the marketplace storage, then the application will get certified and you will receive an email with a title like this: Congratulations! AppName has successfully passed certification for Windows Phone Marketplace. Now you can publish the app, unless you selected automatic publishing on getting certified.
6. The marketplace content gets refreshed once a day, at 2am in US Eastern Time. If you got your congratulations email (and published the app) before that, it will appear in the marketplace soon. Otherwise you will have to wait yet another day to get it published.
You won't see download and crash statistics showing up on the App Hub for quite some days, but don't worry, it doesn't mean that nobody cares about your app. This information gets processed with a delay of 6 days, refreshed at 8pm in US Eastern Time. User ratings appear quicker, in about an hour or so. On the App Hub you can view these only by selecting single countries to see if there is anything to see there, it's awful. You may use AppTracker instead to follow your applications and see all the user ratings and reactions.
