Your App Here – Round 6

This is the very last entry round of Your App Here! That’s right. Your last chance to win your share of $13,000 worth of cool prizes like HP Envy X2 convertible ultrabooks, Xboxen or a trip to TechEd Australia on the Gold Coast later this year. All you have to do is enter an app that’s never been published in the store before and you’re in the running. This is a great opportunity to port from other stores such as iOS, Android or Windows Phone.

Technical design guru Shane Morris is the Creative Director at Automatic Studio, one of the final judges in this comp and all round good guy. He’s built Windows mobile apps for Qantas, NAB and Dimmi plus Windows 8 touch-enabled apps for Westpac, Webjet and NineMSN’s Jump-In.

Less is more, explains Shane: “Avoid the temptation to cram more features into your app assuming that will make it more popular. In our experience, an app that has a limited set of options, and does so with confidence, tends to be more appealing.”

“And if you’re not a confident designer, don’t get too ambitious too early. Stick to the Windows design language templates. If users open your app and see consistent styling and navigation, they’ll immediately be much more willing to explore.

“Navigation style is key to crafting an authentic app experience. Games can be different, but for regular apps – don’t be fooled that designing for Windows is just typography, white space and blocks of colour. There are helpful Windows 8 and Windows Phone guides on MSDN.

Success begins with your first submission! Learn more about promoting and managing a successful Windows 8 Store app.

So, what are you waiting for? Register at Lifehacker for your last chance to enter!

Your App Here – Round 5

Our second last round has started! You can still win your share of $13,000 worth of cool prizes like HP Envy X2 convertible ultrabooks, Xboxen or a trip to TechEd Australia on the Gold Coast later this year. Just enter an app that’s never been published in the store before and you’re in the running. This is a great opportunity to port from other stores such as iOS, Android or Windows Phone.

If you’ve read any gaming or tech news sites this week, or just been pottering about on Twitter, you’ll have seen links to a great article from Greenheart Games on their approach to piracy. The game, Game Dev Tycoon, that Patrick Klug talks about in that post was first written for the Windows Store. It has has been at the top of paid lists on the Windows Store in several countries, including Australia and the US. Lifehacker spoke to Patrick recently:

“It’s great to see a paid game can have success as well, not just free ones. Microsoft really makes it clear and easy to publish to every country.”

“Don’t focus on so many features that you can’t get them all right. Remember the importance of quality – and that the polish (that last 10% of effort) – is often the part that really makes the game fun to play.”

To that end: “The biggest advantage to Windows Store development for us was the tooling – Visual Studio debugging is absolutely fantastic for HTML games, and for C# it’s even better.”

Success begins with your first submission! Learn more about promoting and managing a successful Windows 8 Store app.

So, what are you waiting for? Register at Lifehacker to enter!

Your App Here – Round 4 Results

Adrian Akison’s Shared Whiteboard is a Windows 8 app that lets you share your graphs, notes, equations and doodles as a literally shared digital whiteboard. Anyone the whiteboard is shared with can edit it simultaneously, making it very useful for brainstorming and a lot of fun as well. More details on Adrian’s win can be found in the Lifehacker announcement.