A month later about windows phone app - Photo Editor+

It has been a month now since we uploaded the Windows Phone app to the AppHub worldwide. The application PhotoEditor+ was done by our TCG team just for fun. The ideas was to spend a week getting hands dirty in the code! Without the help of UX team, the developers decided to build an app for photo editing. Dwarak and Basavraj lead them from front and came up with the idea of application - Photo Editor+. The application that basically does following - 


This application allows user to edit images and add different effects to it. This app supports different effects like Ridge, Negative, B/W, Invert etc. User can decorate image by adding different stylish frames around it. It also change zoom level, opacity and rotation angel of image and text objects. That is not all; one can insert custom texts, clip arts, timestamps and images on your existing image. Finally, it can save your decorated image in Gallery so that you can share your creativity with your friends and family. 


Key Features: 

1. Select image from Gallery or take picture directly from camera 
2. Apply stylish frame 
3. Insert (Image from gallery, Text, Time stamp with different formats, Clip Arts 
4. Apply different effects on image such as Negative, Black and white, Invert, Ridge, Custom (Win Effect) 
5. Change opacity of image/text 
6. Inserted image/text can be zoomed, rotated 
7. Apply different fonts, font styles (Italic/Bold) and font color to inserted text 
8. Edit inserted text 
9. Delete inserted objects (image/text/clip arts etc.) 
10. Save edited image in gallery

The application can be downloaded by clicking here. 

Within the month, the application has reached in top 50 apps in photo category for USA and India. Its a great achievement that something created with fun in mind has done well on the user expectations as well! Kudos to the team for doing this. There are around 100 downloads taking place for this application globally. 

Here is the snapshot of current download stats in the month of May 2012.

Photo Editor+ Download Stats for May 2012

This actually now means a lot more responsibility for the team to update the application with more features and better UX. As i am writing this, team is preparing the UX revamp of the application. They will only need another crazy week to sit together and do "hobby code" to finish this app!

I hope, soon team will post the brief writeup on their experience of developing the app :) I have been using the windows phone for around 6 months now. I think it just does what one can ask from a smartphone. I never missed my earlier Android and iPhones except few distant needs. In a nutshell when i look at the OS and device availability, i feel it has got the good/ comparable UX and that X-factor in the phone. I use Samsung Omnia W with Mango. I love the skydrive and office app support and feel that would be the most appealing feature to the enterprises/ enterprise users for driving adoption!

Also, its worth noting that the windows phone is not yet enterprise ready. A lot of features you would need as an enterprise developer including platform support for security/ data exchange/ MEAP extensibility/ MDM support are not fully available as compared to two big-brothers: Android and iOS. I intend to write a quick-stats and platform readiness to take on enterprises. Another promise, that i must keep in the interest of my followers and readers :)


UPDATE 21-Jun-2012:
The application has now crossed more than 5000 downloads in around 36 days. It has gone up on the rank in India and USA app stores. Today is also a day when microsoft total app count on Microsoft App hub has cross 100,000 mark! Not a serious achievement compared to iOS and Android but a milestone in itself. The hobby developers have now increased in the numbers and a new UI with some small feature tweaks is in the revision phase. Meaning, expect the update to te app soon!