Testers wanted for a new app that turns Win10 kit into a mobile

Kari said:

Thanks, I can see Sweden is now available.

A Finnish number would have been perfect for me, but I understand that Nexmo has none available. Finland has one of the most liberal systems regarding pre-paid mobile numbers, you can buy a pre-paid SIM from any supermarket, kiosk or gasoline / petrol station without any ID or need to register. In addition, it is one of the cheapest countries in western world to make calls, mobile calling cost being a cent or two a minute, with a subscription you usually get free calls and text messages with 20 EUR or less a month.

So, for me it would be the best possible choice, making calls cheap even in Germany, this adopted home country of mine.

Anyway, Swedish number is a good compromise. I will get a number and start testing after the holidays.

Kari

Thank you Kari, I'm much obliged.


I'm off to bed for this evening and will check back in here for any other questions from people tomorrow arvo when I get back from out of town.

Thank you again awesome tenforums people

Rock on.

- Simon

Superfly said:

Nice app.. but from a conceptualization point of view it requires a monetizatation design.. basically, a sponsor is required for testing - then other forms, eg. ads etc to offset the cost - suspect MS feels the same way.

Once that has been accomplished the costs can be ascertained and Store certification will follow. I went through a whole drawn out process just for a free app.

Thanks Superfly, I don't actually intend to put it in Microsoft's store. I submitted it and the issue was it wasn't using their payment system -- effectively they want a 30% cut of top-up payments, which defeats the whole point of having a no-markup wholesale phone alternative. The 1 EUR /mo support stipend from each active user is enough to make it sustainable for me for running a multi-server SQL cluster with live streaming replication and failover (I'll probably move it to a citusdata/postgres setup if people show interest in it) and then a few load balancing web servers so everything can scale out horizontally if it gains traction.


Small update on the app: I'm going to refine the top main menu for PC/desktop users per Edwin's feedback. I agree it's not quite optimal for mouse/desktop.

I have a menu idea I've not seen anybody try before, and the stock UWP components won't allow me to do it.. this is my first UWP app so it's slow going. I'm finding UWP is a bit better in some ways than WPF, but in others not so much, I'm more accustomed to using a Direct3D UI framework and I hate that they're using Direct2D and caching to bitmap instead of vertex shaders and tessellated vectors for 100% of 2D rendering, which could give us exciting lively animations and vertex deformations and zoom/scaling "for free" without blurring. Anyway I'm seeing if I can achieve what I want with their "composition" API without reinventing the wheel. Also I wish I had a time machine so I could use their unreleased improved ScrollViewer. The very first thing I hit yesterday was there's no actual standard "Scrollbar" that can be used standalone outside of the default ScrollViewer... if you drop one into the visual tree and set min/max/value/viewport properties it renders nothing since it's apparently only designed to work with one specific other component internally - d'oh..

Cheers!

@Edwin - A new menu is in build 1.0.15 which should auto-update probably tomorrow (the app installer thing auto checks every 24 hours.) Hopefully the new menu is a bit better for desktop.. just click on the top menu and it expands into a list, or you can just grab it anywhere with a mouse and spin around it using inertia.

Looks good @Sichbo
I'll check it out tomorrow!