As you may have heard, Windows Phone 7 hits the store shelves
this fall. This will change the game in the Windows Mobile world
for the customers but even more for the developers. In both cases
this means huge improvements, but only in the case of the
developers this means also a lot of work.
compactRSS, as you know it by now, won't run on Windows Phone 7
devices and I'm currently working on its successor for Windows
Phone 7 (currently named "Vanilla" or "Feed Vanilla", but that is
just a working title), of course completely written from scratch.
It looks great but there's still a long road ahead … but I hope to
have this little tool up on the Marketplace already when the first
customers get their hands on WP7 devices.
Talking about Marketplace, you might also know that Microsoft
changes the game even here. On Windows Phone 7, you can't buy or
download your applications from anywhere else than the Marketplace.
This also means: no more free downloading and installing compactRSS
from this website.
I'm preparing now for all those changes. This includes that I
will also switch the current compactRSS for Windows Mobile 6.0, 6.1
and 6.5 to the Marketplace and remove the download from this
website within the next couple of days. If you want to get a free
copy, get it now :) …
Windows Marketplace for Mobile isn't free for me or any other
developer. There are annual membership fees as well as fees for
each and every application I want to publish. Thus, I can't offer
you my software for mobile devices for free anymore. Of course, the
price will be fair and I also hope everybody who likes compactRSS
will be fair to purchase it from there to support the ongoing
development of this software. "Fair price" means no more than € 5,-
- but you can expect it to be even lower than that.
Purchasing compactRSS will upgrade your compactRSS 1.0
installation to compactRSS 1.5 - so you will also get some
additional reward with a few additional features and changes that I
have implemented to prepare for a launch on the official Windows
Marketplace for Mobile. This includes:
- Support for localization. Version 1.5 will
include two initial languages: English and German
(currently only English). Other languages may follow depending on
customer needs.
- Removed currently implemented update functionality (wasn't
online for some time now anyhow) because the automatic
update process will be handled by the Marketplace in the
future.
- Removed most of the tracing code from the standard release
binaries for performance and memory footprint improvements. When
launching to a broader audience, it makes no sense to deploy
tracing features to all users.
- Additional performance and stability
improvements.
- Implemented required features to support hosting this
application on Windows Marketplace for Mobile.
FAQs (I will extend this section if additional FAQs pop up):
- I don't want to purchase version 1.5 … will there be
updates and/or fixes for version 1.0?
I will continue to support version 1.0 and fix any
serious bugs that might be encountered in the future. On the other
hand, new features are rather unlikely.
- How much will compactRSS cost on the Windows
Marketplace for Mobile?
I am planning a fair price point of US-$ 3,95 - please
notice that this is subject to change until launch.
- When will it be available?
Within the next weeks.