On Wednesday the Bing Maps SDKs for Windows Store apps were released. You can take a look at the announcement here, https://binged.it/Vv6kxi, but essentially what this means for us at Earthware is that we can now upgrade our first Windows 8 Bing Map app from the Beta control version, to the release one!
A Windows 8 Bing Map app you say…
Well, yes! A few weeks ago we decided to set ourselves a challenge – to see if we could build a Windows 8 app in a day. It turns out… that we couldn’t. Alas, we made a great start, and have today been putting the final touches to it.
So… What is it!
Our app is called Meet½Way and is designed to make finding convenient, interesting places to meet friends and family, at a location half way between you both, much easier.
Users enter their location as well as the one their friends will be leaving from, and select from a variety of activities and locations they would be interested in meeting at. The app then populates a map with possible meeting places that are half way between the two start locations – genius!
What Next?
As mentioned, until Wednesday our app still contained the Beta control version of the map. Now however the SDKs that have been released will allow our app to pass the Windows app Certification Kit (WACK) process. This means that once we have our new Basic Windows Store App Key, with a quick recompile our C# app will be good to go into the Windows Store!
We’re hoping to run the Windows app Certification Kit, which is included in the Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) for Windows 8 early next week, and have Meet½Way in the Market Place as soon as possible, ready for the Windows 8 official launch on October 26th 2012!
As soon as you get the chance, download Meet½Way and let us know what you think! And in the meantime we’ll sit tight until the arrival of more Windows 8 Bing Map apps in the Marketplace…
