WebTone for Windows Phone

WebTone 1.5 Released

scottisafool — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 11:31:28 +0000

After a bit of a wait since the last release, I’m pleased to say that WebTone 1.5 is now out and people should have started getting the prompts from the MarketPlace to update. If you don’t already have it installed, why not?! You can go to the MarketPlace and install it now. So what’s new? Well, read on…

What’s New?

New Icon

Well, for a start, we have a new application icon! Thanks, Mike.

A Browser!

One of the questions I’ve got asked a lot is about how to get the links of mp3/wma files into WebTone. I did a quick tutorial on one such way, but it’s a messy way of doing it. So based on this, I’ve added a web browser to the app which makes it super easy to browse the net for ringtones and download them straight away. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, here’s a video:

WebTone 1.5 Demo – YouTube

And this doesn’t just work with sites like Zedge, you can also do this right from your own SkyDrive (although at the moment, the file does have to be in a publicly available folder, this will be looked into for a future release). Sadly, due to some strangeness with DropBox cookies, you can’t download files from DropBox (unless you are given a direct link to the file).

Bing Searching

One of the other regular occurrences that I see based on some of the telemetry I’m getting back is a lot of people are putting search terms into the main link box, which of course causing problems. I have now made it so that if you don’t type a valid link into that box, it will do a bing search for you to help you on your way.

More languages

As I’ve said lots of times, WebTone is available in a number of languages, that previously consisted of Dutch, Chinese, Italian and Spanish. With 1.5 I’ve been able to add French and German to this list. I’m always up for having support for even more languages than that, so if you feel you can help, I urge you to look at this request.

Get Involved: Translations

scottisafool — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 11:10:41 +0000

As has been mentioned before, WebTone is currently available in a few languages (Italian, Dutch, Chinese and Spanish). To manage the translations and to make it easy for my amazing translation volunteers to manage the translations they’re doing, I use Amanuens which was recommended to me by @dereklakin (thanks by the way!). Amanuens allows you to do all the translations through their website and it will then get put into the WebTones project for when I build it.

Previously with Amanuens, I would have to create a new account for a translator, but now they’ve allowed developers to make it even simpler by letting us create a project widget that potential translators can click on to let them choose the language they want to create.

So if you would like to help out with WebTone and add further language support to it, click the widget below (it’s also in the sidebar on the right).

WebTone 1.2 Released

scottisafool — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:02:40 +0000

In WebTone 1.1 I added some error logging to try and help make sure that the app was improved upon and any problems that were arising could be dealt with. Thanks to the emails people have been sending with their error reports I’ve been able to try and make some improvements as well as increase the information about an error that’s included in the error reports.

There are no new features in this release as this is all about changes under the hood, but new features are in the works and I’ll give hints about them in a future blog post.

In the meantime the update has been pushed to the MarketPlace and you should be seeing that update now.

Some Download Stats and a Request

scottisafool — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:46:38 +0000

Now that WebTone 1.1 is out there, I thought I’d take a look at some of the download stats leading up to this release. It’s proven to be quite interesting:

It’s been downloaded over 4300 times.
It’s been downloaded in 35 countries (so far)
8 of those countries have had 50 downloads or more
The top three downloaders of the app have been the US, Germany and Russia, in that order.
The total downloads for the US is greater than all other countries put together.

I’m really pleased with these numbers, and I thank everyone who has downloaded it. I will be very interested to see how these figures change after the update figures start rolling in.

As mentioned in the release post, the new version supports some new languages (Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Chinese) and as this app is being used in 35 countries, I would love to be able to add support for more languages. If you feel you can help on this front, then please do get in touch with me, either on twitter, email or a comment on here, it would be very much appreciated.

Where To Get Ringtones From

scottisafool — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 14:45:36 +0000

There will be a lot of places you can get ringtones from, and they might have something similar to what I’m about to show here. For this blog post I’m going to use the ringtones you can find at zedge.net.

On your phone, head over to http://m.zedge.net/. If it asks you for the make of phone, click anything (apple, for example) then just click “default phone”.

Tap on ringtones to take you to the ringtones section.

Choose, or search for, the ringtone you would like and go to its page

Tap and hold where it says “Play / Save Ringtone” then tap Copy Link

Next go into WebTone and tap in the link box, when that is focussed, tap the clipboard button

Then tap the download button and you’re good to go.

You can then set your ringtone accordingly.

Hope this little guide is helpful.

WebTone 1.1 Released in the Marketplace

scottisafool — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 12:01:00 +0000

The original release of WebTone made it into the Windows Phone Marketplace at the beginning of September, and after one or two issues that needed sorting during certification, version 1.1 is now released.

What’s New?

One of the frequently mentioned things in feedback emails was the lack of ability to download from a forum, or similar such hosting. The problem for this was the app was checking for .mp3 or .wma in the link. Now when it encounters a this kind of link, the app will ask you what file type it is

You just have to make sure you know what type it is.
One of the things I have been noticing is the number of error reports, so to try and get to the bottom of the most common faults I’ve added in some better error logging.
WebTone now comes in more languages. Specifically: English, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional)

WebTone is available in the MarketPlace now. Search on your phone or click the button below

I’ll leave you with some screenshots of the app in the new languages

Spanish

Italian

Dutch

Chinese