WP7 App(s) Launch : 3 x New US Sports Apps

To kick off the upcoming NBA (Basketball), NFL (American Football) and NHL (Ice Hockey) seasons for 2011/2012 – a bunch of new mobilewares sports apps for Windows Phone 7 have been published to Marketplace.

	NBA Season 2011/2012 Price : USD$1.49 (Trial Available) Product Site : http://mobilewares.net/SportsNBA-WP7.aspx Deep Link : view in zune / wp7 marketplace
	NFL Season 2011/2012 Price : USD$1.49 (Trial Available) Product Site : http://mobilewares.net/SportsNFL-WP7.aspx Deep Link : view in zune / wp7 marketplace
	NHL Season 2011/2012 Price : USD$1.49 (Trial Available) Product Site : http://mobilewares.net/SportsNHL-WP7.aspx Deep Link : view in zune / wp7 marketplace

 

These apps are built using an updated version (v1.9) of the mobilewares fixture engine – which provide a bunch of great functionality for keeping up with your favorite sports including :

– Nominate the team you follow (UI is customized around this team).
– View Schedules by Date/Week or by Team.
– View Embedded Scores/Ladder
– View Upcoming Matches.
– Browse Latest RSS News Feeds from Major Sites
– View Comprehensive Venue details with Maps
– View Additional Scores/Player/Team Stats Online
– Auto Converts Match times to Your Local Time.
– Auto Updates Fixtures as changes are made
– View Team Guides with dedicated Team Pages
– Hide Live Scores via Settings (for when you are watching delayed telecasts)

Some screenshots are taken from the NFL Season 2011/2012 product below.

   

   

The other existing apps which also use this fixture engine (AU Footy Fixtures, AU League Fixtures, MLB 2011 – see http://mobilewares.net/wp7apps.aspx) have also been updated to provide the new functionality added to v1.9 (which includes live scores/ladder, UI redesign, online/auto updating fixtures and other new bits) – please don’t forget to update to the latest version if you have one of these products installed already.

Please visit the mobilewares site – http://mobilewares.net for more information – otherwise please use the Zune (deep) links at the top of this post to view these apps in WP7 Marketplace.

WP7 App(s) Launch: ‘AU Newswire’ + ‘UK Newswire’

 

In my ongoing quest to achieve world domination release a truckload of WP7 apps – 2 x new apps were submitted to the WP7 Marketplace for certification over the past couple of days (taking the mobilewares total published apps up to 18).

These new apps are designed to allow you to access the ‘best of’ new sources in the given regions (AU for Australia, UK for United Kingdom) – by offering a fast (and slightly sexy) RSS reading experience, grouped together by topics.

 

	UK Newswire Click here for product page Offers best of news from around the UK (England, Wales, Scotland + Nth Ireland) including BBC World, Sky News, The Telegraph, SUN, Mirror, Evening Standard, The Mail Online, Independant.IE and more..
	AU Newswire Click here for product page Offers best of news from around Australia – including ABC Online, TheAge, SMH, Brisbane Times, Mercury, Daily Telgraph, news.com, Herald-Sun, Bigpond (Unmetered access for Telstra users) and more..

Both apps share a common engine – and each provide around 200 built in/preset feeds for you to chose from (so no need to search for content/rss feeds on a ‘generic’ rss reader).  For each topic (10 different ones to chose from) – they can be enabled/disabled and reordered for the main page/pivot (via settings page) – and you can then assign a ‘default’ feed to each one (so it quickly brings up that source when you pivot across to that topic).   For any additional feeds – there’s also a ‘by topic’ and ‘by publisher’ browser allowing you to access any other feeds you don’t have assigned as a default feed for a topic. 

Once you’re viewing a topic/feed – clicking on any news item takes you directly to an inbuilt viewer (with a web browser hosted inside the page) – so you don’t need to leave the app or lose your context/place.

Here’s some screenshots below (from both AU + UK versions) – check out the product pages (linked above) for the full set of screenshots and details of each app.

        

        

 

As with many of the Apps I have written so far – I’ve made this one to cater for a core user in mind – ‘me’. Personally, I wanted an App to be able to get to news from some of the more serious news sources (like Australia’s ABC, TheAge, The Australian etc) – as all the offerings around at the moment were locked into publications I wouldn’t normally be interested in due to their more lightweight/tabloid reporting or lack of local content (such as NineMSN, Bigpond etc).  

While there’s a number of great WP7 RSS readers already out there too – all of them required quite a bit of setup/configuration to bring in all the feeds I actually wanted – so the idea of an app with everything ‘preloaded’ seemed like the way to go.

Hopefully there’s some other users out there with similar needs that will enjoy using this app.

Both apps have trial versions (so you can see if you like it first) – and are selling for the introductory ‘base’ price of USD$1.29 (which on the Microsoft Wp7 Marketplace currency exchange actually translates to AUD$1.70 and GBP£0.99).

These should be available sometime soon, both are already submitted (first one 2 days ago) – but there appears to be a bit of a backlog on marketplace testing this week (some of the FM radio apps submitted last weekend are still to be approved or tested). 

Keep an eye out for these in the ‘News & Weather’ categories in paid apps on a Windows Phone 7 near you.