Hi All,
I’ve been working like mad to try and get this one done and up to scratch. I set myself a deadline of Sunday for having a beta out to start getting feedback, while its not as complete as I’d like it would be great to get your opinions on it!
*Updated* link contains 4.0.1.1:
Fixes:
- Settings page failed to save – Fixed – Thanks @mrlacey
- Live tile update issue – Fixed – Meee
- Also thanks to Mark Osborn and Ed Harrison for their feedback.
What’s Changed:
- Everything! I’ve rebuild the app from scratch
- The old app was based off 2 year old code, written when I was back at University. It made me want to vomit so I’ve started again
- New Shared core between WP8 and Windows 8
- Much improved performance (hopefully)
- Wide and Medium live tile support
- Lock Screen support
- In Pictures support
- Improved layout (hopefully)
Its not finished yet, full post has details on known issues, link to XAP and screenshots.
Edit: Limited to those with dev accounts who can load XAPs.
What’s Missing:
I plan to get most of these features back in the app, I’d really appreciate your help in prioritising.
- Offline reading mode
- “Next story” button when reading story (first on my hit list)
- Share story
- Secondary live tiles for sections
Known issues:
- Icons, when static, are defaults
- No Welcome experience. User must use app bar to access settings & sections to setup live tiles, lockscreen and select feeds.
- Wide livetile contains full string date, this is just to help debug
- Suspend behaviour is untested.
- Lots I’ve forgotten
So if you’ve got some time have a play and let me know what you think! PS. keep in mind I started from scratch on the 21st, week and a bit ago, so things are going to have rough edges. The more you can spot and share with me the better!
GripDev 
Will this be an update to the existing app or will we need to uninstall and reinstall? When will it go live in the WP8 Store?
It’ll be an update to the existing app for anyone on WP8. Not sure when it will hit the store yet, soon I hope!
Can’t test this unless your phone is dev unlocked as you cant sideload xaps?
Yeh, afraid so. You can still give me feedback once it goes live on the store.
😦 Is there still a beta/private place in the Store like there was in the Marketplace?
I don’t know whether you can get any logging or diagnostics from the app, but FWIW in my first few minutes playing I managed to get it into a nasty state to the extent that it seemed to completely lock up my Lumia 920 for a minute or so.
This was my first run having deployed the XAP and I was swiping through the screens from right to left – I’d swiped all the way through the default screens and was starting on a second go through when the entire phone became unresponsive.
Having restarted the phone and looked again, though, it looks like a nice update!
Thanks, at the moment I don’t have any diagnostics feeding back – still working on it! I’ve got logging on the builds locally and I’ve noticed a couple of things that I’ve fixed in the XAP I’m about to upload, so let me know if you see this again as I can potentially make you a build with some debug output baked in.
The Background Updates toggle button is always off even though it set it to on.
That’s the only problem I’ve noticed so far, nice work 🙂
Thanks, fix should be in next one.
Anyone know why I recently get the mobile BBC news site on my home computer? I’m typing http://www.news.bbc.co.uk which always used to work but am getting re-directed to m.bbc.co.uk/news??
Afraid not, probably a change by the beeb.
Great app, but the update seems to have removed the breaking news feature and stories in the live tile. Is this something you are planning to sort out?