Any efforts for Windows 8 applications?

[Huhenyo]

As an additional note, I tried using Bluestacks to run the Android app on my desktop PC running Vista and it seemed to work well, yet a little clunky. Since I was on a desktop, I couldn't switch the display from landscape mode to portrait mode. My biggest question regarding the Bluestacks and running the Android version of LDS Gospel Library is whether or not it will go into portrait mode auto-magically like most apps do. If one of you who tries this out could report on that, I would appreciate it.

Thanks again

[jkentner]

I suspect it will be some time while Church IT reviews acceptance of the Windows 8 Surface platforms. According to this article, Microsoft is already starting to worry about its adoption in the face of iOS.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/03/ ... rs-tactics

Consider the source there...I have had two demo devices from Dell, one an RT the other a Pro. The OS is great. For me, functionality wise, it is ten times more functional than an iPad or Android device. I am an IT guy and I heavily rely on accessing file shares at home and work, remote desktop, heavily use Office (mostly OnteNote), connect up to Media Center for TV/Videos. File share connectivity on the iPad/Android is non existent as well as a good DLNA reader application. Windows tablets are much farther along in that ecosystem. That ecosystem will cause it to grow much larger in the near future. I think it will just take some time. Plus you have to look at the desktop side, any new machine will have Windows 8, and touch screens are becoming more and more the standard. I think for that reason the Church IT will make a good sound choice to develop the apps on Windows 8.

[dstaheli]

Hello all,

I apologize for such delay in announcing how the Church will address its applications for Windows 8. Unfortunately, I do not yet have anything new to announce. The Church would love to address this platform but is still determining its strategy and budget for doing so, as well as how community development could augment the efforts. If anything certain develops, I will share it. Availability of these applications would also be posted at lds.org/mobile.

Thank you,
David

[Eric84]

David,

Thank you for the update. I'm sure we all appreciate knowing that the Church IT department is aware of the interest. Keep us informed!

Thanks,

Eric

[jkentner]

Thanks David for the update!

[gilby2279]

The windows 8 phone apps are great. Isn't it just a matter of recompiling them for x86 to run on the pro? Shouldn't require much budget or development.

[dstaheli]

It is actually a completely different platform/SDK. Only a very small portion of the Windows Phone code is portable to Windows 8.

[kurtjohnson]

Please. I do not wish to use an Internet connection during church and I surely don't want to be IT tech for my wife during her Relief Society lessons.
Thanks

[twsouthwick]

The underlying code should be fairly portable from Windows Phone to Windows 8. The only main difference is the UI stack. Have you looked at using Portable Class Libraries for the business logic? That is a very good way of creating portable code for .NET libraries.

[twsouthwick]

I'm not a developer, but one has to look at this from their perspective too, and in that light, Windows phones have a pretty poor track record. When WP7 came out, porting WM6 apps was a significant rewrite, and now just a few years later, WP7 is toast in favor of Win8/RT, which will take yet another significant rewrite. That's a tremendous amount of effort for <3% of the phone/tablet market. If I were in charge of limited development resources, I would probably want to take a long hard look at the Win8/RT market trends to see if it will really mature before committing a team of developers to it.

With that said, I have no idea if the church has started on Win8/RT development, or are taking a wait-and-see approach. I'm only commenting on what *I* would do given the situation.

First off, WP7 is NOT toast in favor of Win8/RT. WP7 cannot be upgraded to WP8 because of the internal changes that occurred (WinCE based kernel to WinNT required different hardware). That means that WP8 has the same kernel as full Windows. As far as coding is concerned, the difference from WP7 to WP8 is minimal - there is binary compatibility between something compiled from WP7 to run on WP8. And as I mentioned above, there are easy paths to use to create code that would not require a rewrite of the one "version" of windows codebase to work for another.