So I’ve been running this series: 50 Apps by Christmas.

Currently I’ve got 29 new apps to create before Christmas 2013 (next week).

As I’m not going to hit this (my book has been a higher priority) I’ve decided to roll it up into a new self-challenge: 100 Apps By Christmas 2014, I’m going to call it “A Year Of Apps”.

This means I’ve effectively got to develop 71 new apps in about 53 weeks!!

One way I’m going to do this is to (by default) dual target apps for both Windows Phone and Windows Store – I count them as separate apps. By leveraging Portable Class Libraries for view models and shared code and by creating my “starter template” in Visual Studio 2013 I hope to decrease app dev times. I also intend to do some work around automating app icon design, about pages, etc. to further reduce “boilerplate” work. Hopefully I’ll be able to evolve these and release them as open source tools :)

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series.

As part of the (Australian) Appreneur challenge, I created 6 apps – the same 3 apps, but for both the Windows Phone Store and the Windows 8.1 Store.

The 3 apps are:

• Lorem Ipsum Pro
• Say Stuff
• Sleepyhead Power Nap

These are each available in the Windows Phone store and Windows Store.

Say Stuff and Sleepyhead Power Nap both use text-to-speech capabilities which I’ve already written about. Both these apps were low in complexity so a simple code-behind model was used rather than any MVVM style.

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series.

I was listening to episode episode 135 of the Windows Developer Show and an idea was discussed to help people generate an email template to send to companies who don’t yet have Windows Phone apps. So I made Where’s My Phone App?

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series

Start Screen Splitter is a simple idea to help organise the tiles on the Windows Phone Start screen. The idea is to allow the user to create and pin wide tiles to vertically group tiles into different categories.

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series

Color Eye is a Windows Phone 8 app that creates colour schemes by sampling live data from the camera.

Working with Live Camera Data

As I’d not worked with the camera in a Windows Phone app before I needed to learn the basics. One of the best sources to get up to speed on a particular specific topic are the samples. I started with the Camera Grayscale Sample to learn how to “pump” the values from the camera and how to get an array of colour values.

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series.

When I’m using Windows 8, sometimes I wanted to copy something from one app and use it somewhere else. If the app allows selection and copy all is well, but a lot of apps don’t.

When an app does implement sharing I could share to another app such as Twitter, select all the text, right-click then copy to clipboard, which is tedious.

So I wrote Share to Clipboard.

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This article is part of the 50 Apps by Christmas series.

I developed a Silverlight app a few years ago and I wanted to see how easy it would be to port to a Windows Store app. You can download free trial of SilverKeys for Windows 8.

The Original Silverlight App

Here’s a screenshot of the original Silverlight app:

The app helps amateur composers try out different scales and also helps them understand what common chord progressions are often used.

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So I thought I’d issue myself a challenge.

By Christmas (2013) I will have 50 apps in store. This will most likely be Windows Store apps, but also smattering of Windows Phone 8 apps for good measure.

Why?

• To see if I can do it
• To learn
• To make some cool stuff

How?

• Build a common library of useful code
• Use portable class libraries wherever possible
• Fully embrace releasing minimal functionality in V1 products

That’s it, sounds simple. I might not succeed but it will an interesting journey!

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