Foursquare and YouTube For Windows Phone Gets Major Updates
|Yesterday I wrote in a post about how the app situation on the Windows Phone 8 platform was steadily getting better. Today brings more evidence that the experience is only going to get steadily better. Both Foursquare and YouTube apps have been updated.
Foursquare
Word had leaked out and WPCentral even provided a brief hands-on at Mobile World Congress so we knew what the app looked like and that it was on its way once the kinks were worked out. The app has now gone live in the Windows Phone Store for users of WP8 devices to enjoy. Download it now
Version 3.0 brings a bunch of new features:
- Pin people and venues to your Start Screen
- Get notifications on your lock screen, and check-in and share using NFC.
- In this version, you can also use your voice to search, find, check-in and more.
- As you use the app, Foursquare fine tunes its recommendations for things to do and try in your vicinity.
YouTube
We have known for a while that Microsoft had a high quality WP8 YouTube app ready to be released. Google was speculated to have been denying Microsoft access to certain metadata and APIs that made releasing the app impossible. Today thankfully the app has also arrived in the Windows Phone Store. Download it now
What’s new? Lots.
- Pin videos, playlists, channels, and even search queries to Start as Live Tiles for fast access. The tile flips to show either the latest video from your subscriptions or the most popular one.
- A new and innovative playlist design gives you easy access to videos using a touch-friendly filmstrip.
- Just want to listen to a video? It now plays in the background even when the screen is locked.
- You can also pin YouTube to Kids Corner and activate YouTube Safety mode to protect the kids watching videos.
Source: Windows Phone Blog (YouTube), Windows Phone Blog (Foursquare)
Hey Murani, don’t hotlink images like you did here for a bunch of reasons, the most important one here being that these four images, which took up 1.2MB total, which is huge (especially to our mobile audience presently making up 36% of our visits, up from 31% last month), could not be modified by our server’s new google technology for efficiency.
So I dropped them onto our server for you which did some soul searching and then some math to reduce them to 30% of their original cumulative file size without affecting their appearance (other than how fast they appear to load). I bet I can tune the google thing a bit better to, for example, realize that the dimensions you specified are smaller than the actual images its serving, and because you didn’t link them to the original size, to resize them to the size you specified, saving even more gas.
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/mod
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/filters