The popular digital magazine app Zinio arrived in the Windows Phone Store this week as an exclusive for Nokia’s Windows Phone 8 models. (Miss it? You can grab it here.) It’s a beautifully-designed app that should please any magazine junkie. But it gets better: To celebrate their debut, Zinio is also offering a $50 magazine credit to jump start your library. Click here to claim the credit. The deal ends June 30. Zinio has an impressive stable of publications to pick from—everything from mainstream titles like The Economist, Esquire, and Rolling Stone to niche offerings such as Poker Player and Simply Crochet. Reader-friendly features of the official Windows Phone app include the ability to pull articles from multiple sources into your own customized reading list and read magazines offline. Zinio also serves up free articles each day from a selection of top-drawer titles. Check it out and let me know what you think.

This blog post was authored by Joao Lucas Guberman Raza, a program manager on the Windows Phone team. - Adam In this post we cover important information for Windows Phone 8 developers who use the XAudio2 APIs, including best practices for battery performance. XAudio2 is a high-performance audio API available in Windows 8, Xbox 360, and Windows Phone 8. An app developer can use XAudio2 to create audio graphs in which they can treat each audio source in the graph as a distinct “voice.” The developer can apply different effects to each of the “voices.” In Windows Phone 8, the XAudio2 engine must be aligned with the life cycle of the app. This means that if an app is suspended, the app that’s using XAudio2 must force the XAudio2 engine to stop. When the app resumes/rehydrates, if it is designed to resume sounds using XAudio2, it must restart the XAudio2 engine. Significant battery drain can occur if an app doesn’t stop the XAudio2 engine when the app is suspended, and the engine continues to run. To avoid this scenario, an app must call IXAudio2::StopEngine when the app is suspended as described in the Native audio APIs for Windows Phone 8. When the app is resumes, it should call IXAudio2::StartEngine. For Silverlight and Direct3D with XAML apps, the suspend/resume APIs are the Suspended and Activated events. For Direct3D native-only apps, the suspend/resume APIs are the Suspending and CoreView Resuming events. The following code examples show you how you can do this in a pure native Direct3D app. First create the XAudio2 object, which handles the XAudio2 sound APIs. C++ IXAudio2* pXAudio = NULL ; if( FAILED(XAudio2Create(&pXAudio, 0, XAUDIO2_DEFAULT_PROCESSOR) ) )         return false ; if ( FAILED(pXAudio->CreateMasteringVoice( &pMasterVoice ) ) )         return false; Then, on the suspending/resume events, set up the XAudio2 object to call StopEngine and then StartEngine. In the following example, we use the default events in the Windows Phone 8 SDK template for Direct3D native-only apps. C++ void WindowsApp::Initialize(CoreApplicationView^ applicationView)     {     applicationView->Activated +=         ref new TypedEventHandler(this, &WindowsApp::OnActivated);     CoreApplication::Suspending +=         ref new EventHandler(this, &WindowsApp::OnSuspending);     CoreApplication::Resuming +=         ref new EventHandler(this, &WindowsApp::OnResuming);     } void WindowsApp::OnSuspending(Platform::Object^ sender, SuspendingEventArgs^ args) {     pXAudio->StopEngine() ; }    void WindowsApp::OnResuming(Platform::Object^ sender, Platform::Object^ args)    {     pXAudio->StartEngine() ; } With these steps, you can design your app to follow best practices for battery consumption when you use the XAudio2 APIs. It’s important to note that this is one of many best practices you can use in your app. To learn more, see also local folder best practices for Windows Phone, localization best practices for Windows Phone, and background agent best practices for Windows Phone.

Jing Chan talks about his personal history as a developer and his experience creating CamWow.

Your Windows Phone 8 app presents three potential sources of revenue: app sales, in-app advertisement, and in-app purchases. In a previous blog post I wrote about what you can sell in your Windows Phone 8 app by adding in-app purchase. You can: Sell digital items. Offer consumables (items that are used a set number of times per purchase) and durables (items purchased and then owned by the buyer). Extend app features: add game levels, app features, and game currency, for example. Today, I want to share recommendations and guidance to optimize the experience and effectiveness of in-app purchase in your Windows Phone app. In-app purchase trends in the Windows Phone store In-app purchase was added with the launch of Windows Phone 8 as a way to expand the value of apps and offer the possibility of additional revenue. It represents a growing revenue source in the Windows Phone Store: already 40% of the top 15 highest-grossing developers have apps that use in-app purchase. Consumer adoption of in-app purchase

BBC has finally launched it’s iPlayer on windows phone platform. The iPlayer links BBC mobile site to BBC Media Player App. The app allows user to minimize the player to listen to audio only, while multitasking on other stuff, or to save content for later. BBC Media Player App works well in 3G or WiFi connection. Sadly enough the app does not work on Windows Phone 7.5, or older software. BBC Media Player App launches the same day as the newest and the best windows phone out there, the Nokia Lumia 925. Lumia 925 features some new software like Smart Camera, which allows you to take 10 consecutive shots at once, so that you can choose the best one of the pack. Be mindful of the storage, each photo has 5 megapixels. This feature is particularly useful in action shots. As for hardware, new Lumia 925 features 8.7 megapixels PureView camera with Carl Zeiss lens and Xenon flash which improves photo-taking in the bad light conditions. The polycarbonate body has been replaced with metal that works as an antena.

Here’s another classic Angry Birds title for your growing Windows Phone collection. As we previously hinted, Rovio’s Angry Birds Rio arrived this morning. The game works on both Windows Phone 7 and 8 devices. Price: $0.99. In the game, the original Angry Birds have been caged up and shipped off to exotic Rio de Janeiro, where they eventually elude their captors and set out to rescue friends Blu and Jewel—two rare macaws you’ll recognize from the 2011 movie Rio. The scenery in the game is fresh and exciting, and the physics-based gameplay is as fun as ever—with 210 challenging levels and more than 40 bonus ones. Speaking of bonus: The Windows Phone 8 version of the game also includes Xbox LIVE achievements and leaderboards. Buy it for Windows Phone 8 Buy it for Windows Phone 7.5

Bing just added a new language to its highly rated Translator app that makes it a must-have for Star Trek fans headed to see Star Trek: Into Darkness this Thursday: Klingon. Download it to your Windows Phone communicator. In what could be the biggest advance for the popular fictional language since the publication of 1984’s “The Klingon Dictionary,” the app lets you translate back and forth between Klingon and the 41 planetary tongues it supports. If you really want to test your skills, check out this post from Microsoft’s Translation team. Klingons, as most fans of the Trek franchise know, are a fictional warrior race with famously boney foreheads (an anatomical quirk that presumably inspired the cringe-inducing Klingon curse: “Your mother has a smooth forehead!”). Early in the series, they were everybody's favorite villain. According to Guinness World Records, their throat-wrecking tongue is today the world’s most popular fictional spoken language (though its unclear how much competition it has). Curiou

Nokia’s design team is on fire lately. Just days after unveiling a sleek new addition to its Windows Phone 8 flagship line—the Verizon-bound Lumia 928—the company today took the wraps off another innovative new model at a highly-anticipated London press event today. (Watch the replay.) There’s a lot to say about the new Lumia 925, but let’s start here: The first Windows Phone to incorporate aluminum into the design is something to hold and behold. The second thing to know is that the phone will come with the latest Windows Phone 8 update that adds FM radio support and a handful of other goodies—extras that existing Windows Phone 8 owners will ultimately be offered, too. (More on that in a moment.) The Lumia 925, which also includes an advanced new camera, will debut in June on Europe’s Vodafone network, then head to China Mobile and China Unicom. It’s scheduled to launch on T-Mobile in the U.S. later this year, Nokia said. In Europe, the phone will cost around 469 euros before taxes and subsidies. Why m

This blog post was authored by Matthias Shapiro, a technical evangelist at Microsoft. - Larry One of the exciting things and lesser known features in Windows Phone development is how it’s the perfect place to develop apps using HTML5. Jeff Burtoft, an HTML5 technical evangelist with Microsoft, joins us this week to talk about the flexibility and cross-platform power of HTML5 in Windows Phone. The in-depth example that we cover in the video is a project called YetiBowl, a standards-compliant HTML5 game that runs flawlessly on the web, as a Windows 8 app, and as a Windows Phone 8 app.

One of the really exciting things about Windows Phone development is how enormously flexible it is. With Windows Phone 8, in addition to supporting native (C++) and managed (C#) development, the platform is the perfect place to develop apps using HTML5.Jeff Burtoft, an HTML5 technical evangelist with Microsoft, joins us this week to talk about the flexibility and cross-platform power of HTML5 in the context of Windows Phone. The in-depth example that we cover in the video is a project called YetiBowl, and standards compliant HTML5 game that runs flawlessly on the web, as a Windows 8 app and as a Windows Phone 8 app.Make sure you check out Jeff's 4 part series on creating the HTML5 Yeti game you see in this episode.Yeti Bowl Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4What makes all this possible is Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8. IE10 for the phone and the PC are built on the same engine and use the same renderer which means that what you see on your desktop (or tablet) is what you'll see on your phone. A