FollowMyFeed: generate WP7 apps without any coding

Some time ago MIcrosoft launched a website called FollowMyFeed. The site is a service that allows anyone with an RSS feed to generate an application for Windows Phone 7 in mere minutes, without any coding. Sounds like fun, so I decided to test the service with the RSS from this blog.

These are the features, copied from the site:

• Multiple RSS feeds
• Logo, Tile, Background, Pivotbackground custom
• Offline content
• Comments (online)
• Share to social networks (online)

Before you get started you do need to prepare some graphics like a splash screen, background and icons. For this purpose Microsoft put some templates on FollowMyFeed in both Photoshop and Paint.Net format. The templates are in a zip file and contain all the graphics needed to build an app. All graphics accept all the different icon sizes that are needed, luckily there’s an app for that. Someone build an app that takes an image, you select a square that you want used as icons, click save and the app will save the icon in all the necessary sizes. WP IconMaker can be found here (codeplex).

Generating a new application is as easy as following a small wizard, selecting the correct graphics and colors, setting the RSS feed and you’re done. I did encounter 1 issue, when I uploaded the splash screen it didn’t work. A splash screen can be maximum 480x800 pixels, the resolution of all WP7 devices, my splash screen was exactly that size but didn’t work. I’ve resized it to 479x799 and it worked flawlessly. Besides this small bug I didn’t encounter any problems, I’ve downloaded the .XAP file, installed it onto the emulator to take some screenshots and submitted it to the marketplace, once I got the result of my submission, I’ll let you know.

I made some screenshots of the entire process, those can be found here