App of the Week - TouchDevelop

If you ever had an interesting app idea but not a lot of mobile app programming experience or if you wanted to use your mobile phone sensors in an easy manner or just experiment with the capabilities of your Windows Phone, I have a real gem for you to make the magic happen.

TouchDevelop comes with powerful functionalities to enable you to do all the above and even more! You can easily automate reoccurring tasks, query you phone’s sensors, create graphical interfaces and even program complete games!

Update v2.10 functionality include:

- Tutorial videos: Learn how to create cool apps step-by-step

- Synthesis: When you search for available commands, just say what you want to do, and TouchDevelop will try to write the script code for you

- Trace + replay (experimental): Watch a script run again

- Crash debugging: When a script fails, inspect the stack trace Other features:

- Access to accelerometer, location, maps, translation services, web search, tile customization, charting, live camera, geo augmented reality, share on Facebook or Twitter, and more

- Events: write actions that get invoked on certain external stimuli

- Design simple UIs by creating nested pages with buttons

- Earn money by submitting the apps you create to the Windows Phone Marketplace

- “Take the tour!” tutorial: learn how to write a script that plays random songs by shaking your phone

– Take screenshots, write comments, reply to comments, and compete on leaderboards

- Fast game and physics engine

- Use colors, pictures + sounds from the web as art 

- Get push notifications when someone does something related to your scripts

- "Pin to start" any script action to the phone start screen - Define custom structured data types, objects, tables

- Create and reuse code with libraries

This app is amazingly powerful and enables you to easily program your functionality. There are some informative examples and video tutorials included in case you need some help or if you want to explore the capabilities of this app and your phone.

And all that you can hold right in your palm for free! Unleash your creativity here: https://www.windowsphone.com/de-ch/store/app/touchdevelop/fe08ccec-a360-e011-81d2-78e7d1fa76f8

When you’re done with your amazing new application or script, you can share your work with your friends. If you have perfected your skill and want to try something bigger, take the chance to take part in our You Make IT Smart campaign by programming two Windows 8 Apps and win a brand-new Samsung ATIV Tablet with Windows 8! Check our website for more details: www.microsoft.ch/ymits

Have fun with it!

Pascal

Lead Student Partner St. Gallen

The App of the Week blog category is an initiative of your local Microsoft Student Partners in Switzerland. Feel free to contact us, send us your proposals for an App of the Week or drop some lines below if you want to share ideas, feedback or just want to comment.