Design an App

The next step is to decide what kind of app you want to build.

General ideas for apps are not hard to come by.  Scratching an itch works very well for generating ideas, as does supporting an interest or passion.  Scratching an itch just means making an app like one you already know that works right for a change or doing something that no one has done before (that needs doing). Supporting an interest or passion is also good and provides motivation as well.

The good news here is that XPlatformCloudKit is already designed to be a certain kind of app, and already implements good basic design principles.

The essence of an XPlatformCloudKit app is to display content in a list of groups.

This means that you either create some content yourself or find some content somewhere else.  Content in this case means text, pictures, music and videos.  The content is organized in groups and shown in lists, showing a picture and a title for each item of content.

You can use a local items file to embed HTML content in the application.  You can serve up content from Azure Mobile Services if you wish (we won't get into that in this series).  Or you can show content from RSS feeds.

RSS feeds give you considerable flexibility and power and allow you to take advantage of content that already exists if you can find it and obtain permission to use it.  You can show YouTube playlists, blogs, Flickr images, Amazon items and many other kinds of content.  Web pages, videos, pictures may all be shown in an XPlatformCloudKit app using RSS.

Later, should you go beyond XPlatformCloudKit and use a different starter kit or design your own apps from the ground up, remember to plan to support touch and phone...I'll leave the finer points of app design to sites such as those listed below.  

• Index of UX guidelines for Windows Store apps
• The Windows Phone 8 Design Style
• Windows Phone Dev Center - Design Process
• Design library for Windows Phone

XPlatformCloudKit is already designed with many of these ideas in mind, but a couple of general comments will help here.

Touch

Remember to support the different gestures and to leave extra room for larger controls that you tap with your finger instead of click with your mouse.

Phone and Tablet

The screen is smaller than on a PC, some controls look and behave differently and you ought to consider both portrait and landscape orientations for your apps.  Phones and tablets may also have other capabilities: accelerometer (tilt and shake and so on), cell phone communications including location services, cameras, the ability to send SMS texts, and others.  These are all things you can use in your apps as you learn the techniques for doing so.