Version 3 of Bedside Clock App Shipped
So we're still on target for shipping an app a month, but January was always going to be an easy month as I've just shipped v3.0 of my Bedside Clock Windows Phone 7 app.
The cliche says that the 3rd version of Microsoft software is always the good one, and I'm hoping that my background will mean this is true here too.
To be honest the first two versions have been more about me learning the capabilities of the platform than shipping something with a massive amount of value to anyone but myself - and in particular v2.0 had an application bar control in it mainly because I wanted to see how it worked.
What I did learn was that user feedback is invaluable, and I received some great (if slightly negative) feedback from users that the new design didn't work very well, especially when the user has chosen the light theme. The problem was the application bar control can't be minimised in a satisfactory way, and it always takes the theme color - which somewhat clashes with the rest of the app if not using the dark theme.
Anyway I'm really happy with v3.0. The UX issues mentioned above have been addressed by moving all the settings to a separate page, and the big addition to the functionality is adding in weather information from Yahoo! Weather. This has already been useful a couple of times last week as I knew the forecast was for rain before I left for work early in the morning.
I'd also like to give credit and thanks to Gavin Elliott for the nice weather icons he generously made available for free.
I'm not intending on doing any more development on this app right now - unless some horrible bugs emerge after it's made it's way out via the Marketplace - but I'm always looking for feedback so please let me know what you think.