Happiness Is Just Around the Corner

Not long ago, Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview became available to anyone who wants to install it. Just about everyone has written about it already. I'd like to talk about what users of Fiction Book Reader can look forward to.

Attentive users have probably noticed that features added to the phone version don't always show up in the PC version right away, and vice versa. The reason is that the reader used to be developed as 2 separate projects. Any change to one project required a matching change to the other. Sometimes that meant I forgot something.

Now all of that is going to change.

Both projects have been merged into one. Yes, for now these are still two separate apps (for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0), but they now share the same core, parser and synchronization code.

A small digression: "With the release of Windows Phone 8.1 comes a new type of app: Windows Phone 8.1 apps built on the Windows Runtime. The approach to developing them is very, very close to Windows 8.1. Apps of the old type are now called Windows Phone Silverlight 8 and 8.1".

A version for Windows Phone 8.1 built on the RT will be coming soon.

You'll be able to open files stored in the phone's memory. This is especially useful for phones without an SD card. The Windows 8.1 version will get a small redesign so that the versions for all platforms look the same, or at least as similar as possible.

The page rendering library will also be shared between Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1.

To sum up: there will be hardly any new features, but the existing ones will reach a whole new level of quality.