Windows Phone 8.1 Development Platform

Editor's Notes

• #4: There are many, many more features that users will love, including: Action Center to enable you to see notifications from ANY app – pinned or not—and to give you a customizable way to quickly access the settings you care about most, like Wi-Fi, Flight Mode, Bluetooth and Rotation Lock. Skype: The new Skype app for Windows Phone 8.1 brings the best of Skype on a smartphone. It’s integrated with the Phone dialer, so if you’re on a call you can quickly and easily “upgrade” your ordinary phone call to a Skype video call at the tap of a button. Word Flow Keyboard: The keyboard in Windows Phone is smart enough to learn your writing style and even knows the names of people in your contacts for faster typing. Best of all, our new Word Flow Keyboard lets you glide your fingers over the keys to type INCREDIBLY quickly. Calendar:The new Calendar has been redesigned to add a new week view which lots of people have been asking for. Many others are listed here that will delight Windows Phone 8.1 users.
• #5: In 2013, we added a third column on devices for 5-inch screen or larger devices, like the Lumia 1520, to enable more stuff to show up on the screen. People really liked this so we are enabling this on all screen sizes in Windows Phone 8.1. Pin away! We’ve also added the ability to customize your Start background with a favorite picture or one of the options we’ve provided, which will make many of the tiles on your Start screen become clear so you can see the background you selected as you scroll up and down.
• #6: In Windows Phone 8.1, you get to Cortana by either a Live Tile on your Start screen or by pressing the search button on your device. This will take you to Cortana Home. To interact with Cortana, you can either speak or type—if you’re in a meeting, just type and Cortana won’t talk out loud. But if you ask her a spoken question, she’ll answer verbally and even carry on a natural conversation. When you interact with Cortana for the VERY first time, she will start learning things about you... like your name, how to pronounce it, and ask for some personal interests. Once she’s learned a bit about you, Cortana’s home populates with information that is curated just for you. You’ll see things like flight information she’s found from your email confirmations, weather, the latest news, and even traffic information once she learns your commute routine, such as from work and home. Cortana will be released first in the U.S. in 2013, U.K. and China in late 2013 with other regions following on after that.
• #7: We’ve also looked at the hardware costs of a Windows Phone device and driven those down. New devices will be coming out supporting the latest SOC (System On Chip) designs and working with Qualcomm to provide reference designs that hardware manufacturers can take and get to market quickly with a minimum of adaptation necessary. We’re also supporting much requested features in some markets such as dual SIM support. Windows Phone 8.1 also comes with loads of new apps that are there to help you manage your bill costs, such as an improved Data Sense and Battery saver and new apps such as Wi-Fi sense that help you connect to free Wi-Fi services.
• #8: For developers, the key feature of Windows Phone 8.1 is that it delivers on the promise of one Windows for developers. There are many exciting new features, such as new Live Tiles formats, Action Center programmability, Bluetooth LE support and the latest Internet Explorer browser. But the best thing is that it delivers a converged developer platform where you use the same APIs and techniques on both Windows and Windows Phone – and soon Xbox too. You can easily build an app to run on both platforms, and you can offer shared entitlement which means that a user can purchase your app on one opatform and automatically get usage apps for your app on the other.
• #9: This ‘convergence’ is nothing new; we’ve been working on it for a while. In Windows Phone 7.5, we implemented a shared browser – both Window and Windows Phone used the same codebase for Internet Explorer. In Windows Phone 8.0, we continued that work by making the core modules of the Windows and Windows Phone Oss common – laying the groundwork for all the later convergence, and delivering a converged programming experience for games development in C++ and DirectX. And although the XAML app platforms where still different, we started introducing some common Windows Runtime APIs around areas such as Storage and Sensors and In-App Purchase. With Windows Phone 8.1, we now deliver on a highly converged app development platform across the board.
• #10: So this is the Windows 8.1 Developer Platform. As you can see, it’s the same pretty much all across the board, with common WinRT APIs on both Windows and Windows Phone. The major standout difference is that we are continuing to support and invest in the Windows Phone Silverlight app framework which is the XAML-based framework Windows Phone app developers have used up to now. This means that if you have Silverlight app development skills, you can continue to use them – we’re not forcing you to move the the new Windows XAML app framework which is the converged framework for Windows and Windows Phone.
• #23: Windows Phone 8.1 comes with a new improved Maps control. As before, there is good support for geolocation, but 8.1 brings support for geofencing. You can set up to 1000 circular geofences (a radius around a geolocation) and when the user passes through a geofence, a background task can be triggered allowing you to run some code to alert the user or perform other relevant processing.
• #24: The Windows Phone Wallet: A single location for reward cards, tickets, deals, and payment cards A platform that lets you easily reach your users through engaging content Example scenario: Anna is on her way to catch a movie with friends. She bought her ticket via a mobile app on her phone and it saved her ticket to her Wallet. When she arrives at the theater, her ticket is ready to be scanned on her phone. She’s glad she doesn’t have to keep track of a physical ticket. New in 8.1: Introducing a “front of card” view for all types of cards Merchants and issuers can create full screen fully customizable cards Additional information can be included on the back of cards Cards can be linked to apps to provide merchant specific scenarios Making and distributing cards is easy: Cards can be distributed via email or from the web Issuers and Merchants can create cards without writing an app for Windows Phone If you have already launched a campaign with Apple passes, it’s easy to support Windows Phone as well. The Wallet can save Apple passes without modification.
• #25: For developers of mobile Websites or those building HTML/ JavaScript UI running in a WebBrowser control, we have Internet Explorer 11 on Windows Phone 8.1. This has industry-leading HTML5 support, and adds the ability to incorporate inline video display with adaptive streaming. It brings WebGL support and a host of other enhancements.
• #26: The tools on the SDK have had a major overhaul. The emulator now supports new tools such as a Push notification simulator which allows you to test your app by sending dummy notifications from the emulator additional tools rather then from the cloud. You can also emulate an SD card by mapping it to a local folder on your PC – useful for getting content onto the emulator.