Building a Windows 8.1 app – Step 3: Features & Monetization
Back to these steps from App Builder:
Decide what user activities to support
Decide what features to include
Decide if and how to monetize the app
Design the UI of the app
Design tiles, the splash screen, the first launch, and the home page
Prototype and validate the app
In this blog post I’ll cover:
Decide what features to include
Decide if and how to monetize the app
This will be a pretty brief post, because we’ve done most of the work already.
Deciding which features to include
Our app is going to be a place where you can keep a record of all the cool things you’ve done.
We’re going to want to be able to search for an item we added a while ago, or maybe search for an item that fits a certain criteria. We’re going to want to be able to share our accomplishments with others. Maybe via email, maybe via a SkyDrive link. Semantic Zoom is pretty neat, let’s implement that. As is snapping, users will want to be able to snap our app to the side of the screen while they gather their information. Settings are always required because we need to show our privacy statement. We might also want to think about reminding the user to update the app with notifications.
And for future reference, we can look at samples on MSDN for how to implement these:
Searching in a Windows 8.1 app using C#
Sharing content from a Windows 8.1 app using C#
Semantic zoom in a Windows 8.1 app using XAML/C#
Snapped view for Windows 8.1 using XAML/C#
Settings in a Windows 8.1 app using XAML/C#
Notifications in a Windows 8.1 app using XAML/C#
Deciding if and how to monetize the app
This is our first app, and we all know that the first version of anything isn’t going to be spectacular because they are more of a learning experience. This app, I’m not going to monetize at this time,because I'm not sure it'll be the best representation of my work. If I do decide in the future, I may add some advertisements using the Microsoft Ad SDK.
P.S. Look for a post soon about what I've been doing lately (because we've all noticed I haven't been blogging)
P.P.S Have you seen foxes on a trampoline?