Several months back, Microsoft launched Windows Phone App Studio Beta, a tool that allows you to create an app for Windows Phone without having any development experience. Microsoft has now relaunched the tool as Windows App Studio Beta, allowing you to create Windows apps as well! How cool is that?
According to Microsoft, over 400,000 users have utilized the service to create their own app for Windows Phone. However, the biggest feature request was “what about Windows?” “Today, we relaunched the tool as Windows App Studio Beta. With this release, you can build a universal Windows app project that results in an app for Windows Phone and Windows, all in a single session,” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
The device preview on the Windows App Studio Beta site allows you to switch between Windows Phone and Windows with ease, allowing you to create your universal app and have it published on both platforms. If you already utilized the service to create a Windows Phone app, you can easily create the same app for Windows.
“New in this release, we’ve added the ability to build a template that allows you to wrap a mobile website into an app, and add native controls, called a WebApp. By simply entering the URL of the mobile website, you can create a Web App Template (WAT) for Windows Phone. This option is currently not available for Windows apps,” Microsoft added.
Head over to the Windows App Studio Beta website to create your app and don’t forget to register for a Dev Center account ($19 USD annual registration fee) so you can publish your app to the Windows Store and Windows Phone Store.
During Build 2014, Microsoft unveiled the concept of “universal apps” which allows developers to create apps that will work on all forms of Windows device without the need for changes to be made to code. However, there is still scope for making some changes when desired (for example: a tablet version of an app could be tweaked slightly to take advantage of a larger screen) but the idea is to make it quicker and easier to create app that work on multiple devices.
