With Telerik WindowsPhone Q1.2012 Beta release we are shipping the first parts of the new line of Telerik components – Application Building Blocks for Metro mobile applications. These components are created to target mobile Metro applications for Windows Phone 7 and for Windows 8/Rt at a later stage.
The tricky part in mobile development is that you have to think about development and promotion simultaneously.
The Marketplace is the primary distribution channel for your app and it has its logic and app’s success metrics. What’s cool is that there are a number of in-app tricks that you can do yourself that will influence the app’s overall success. What’s even cooler is that we have thought about these composite parts of your app instead of you.
With our experience in building professional Mobile applications we identified that there are a lot of mobile specific features that can be reusable and are essential parts of every professional application that will be distributed throughout mobile marketplaces. For every application we’ve been working on we needed to implement a set of common features like trial experience, rate the application reminders (for better marketplace rankings), error diagnostics, dynamic live tiles etc.. This is how we came to the decision to develop the following application building blocks which you can get out of the box and reuse in your applications:
- Error diagnostics – with this component you can receive crash reports, add specific debug information and get run-time information from your users when an issue in your application is encountered.
Read more about Rad Diagnostics
- Trial functionality– with this component you can adjust the trial functionality of your application. You can add application wide trial notifications, or feature specific trial functionality with a lot of configurable options for Trial Period or Trial Usages of the application or the paid feature.
Read more about RadTrialReminder
- Rate Application Reminder – with this component you can add a very important feature for reminding your users to rate your application thus increasing your marketplace presence.
Read more about RadRateApplicationReminder
- Live Tiles – live tiles in WP7 and WinRt are a great way expose application functionality onto user’s desktop. With this component you can easily create context specific dynamic tiles.
Read more about RadLiveTileHelper
Please give these components a try, while they are still in Beta, and let us know if you have any other feedback or ideas for other building blocks that will be useful for you.
You can also find me on twitter @valiostoychev – I’ll be happy to discuss any feedback you have!
We have also left some new cool stuff as a surprise for the release. If you’d like to see all the new bits, make sure to sign-up for the Release Webinar Week, February 20-22. This 3-day event is packed with hour-long webinar sessions on the coolest new features shipping with the Q1 2012 release. One lucky winner from each webinar will leave with a Telerik Ultimate Collection license worth $1999. To enter the drawing and participate in the Q&A session, you must attend the live webinar.
Register at: http://www.telerik.com/support/webinars.aspx