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(this is a multi-part series on mobile cross-platform technologies available with Visual Studio)

Microsoft Bing predicts wearables to be the hottest trend in 2015. You can check Bing Predictions technology trends right here: http://www.bing.com/trends/us/predictions/technology. According to these predictions, wearables in 2015 are even more important than personal digital assistants, home automation, 3D printing and virtual reality gaming.  This post continues the series on wonders you can do with cross-platform C# and Visual Studio tools on all kinds of devices: Android, iOS, Windows and now getting to even smaller form factors.

So what are the wearables today: at least devices that are available to developers with existing or upcoming SDKs and APIs? Wearables are definitely in the IoT category: smartwatches, bands, things that we wear on our body to take body-specific measurements. The evolution of watches started a very long time ago, literally centuries ago, with the watch becoming more of a fashion item. Later, fitness bands created a new category of smart wearable devices.

Let’s compare some wearable devices available today. If we attempt to classify them, they differ in sensors, functionality, price and purpose. In 2015 we will get an idea of market share each of them have, but the most interesting point: devices you see below can be accessed or programmed with C# and Visual Studio!

Wearables APIs: What’s in common

From the app prospective, since wearables are so lightweight as a platform, they commonly make use of several API tiers that are more specific to small devices:

Visual Studio and C# story with Wearables

With Visual Studio and C# you can develop cross platform wearable apps that run on Android Wear, Apple WatchKit, and we hope to see Band SDK coming out soon. This makes Visual Studio a unique Wearable development platform for all devices. C# is a fantastic language, perfectly suitable for mobile and wearable development. In many ways it is easier to make apps with C# than with the native languages in each platform.

You can start with these guides:

Android Wear Developer Preview Now Available

Introducing the Xamarin WatchKit Preview

Practical examples of cross-platform apps built with C#

Here’s a few apps I built with Visual Studio that run on wearables or are capable of interacting with wearable devices.

Active Fitness

Active Fitness is a cross-platform (Windows, Android, iOS) fitness, health and sport GPS tracking app and social network of more than a million users. Great for running, walking, cycling, hiking, mountain biking, skiing, snowboarding, urban sports, such as skateboarding, scooter and hundreds of other activities. Active Fitness motivates you by providing ways for sharing your activities with your buddies and friends. Active Fitness has leaderboards for any sports and activities and includes professionally designed training plans. Enjoy and stay fit!

Winter Sports

Winter Sports is a cross-platform (Windows, Android, iOS) app, the official app of Professional Ski Instructors of America and American Association of Snowboard Instructors (PSIA-AASI). Beautiful GPS tracking, ski run analytics, snow reports for thousands of resorts, zoomable resort maps, activity tracking, customizable goals, a social network, leaderboards and ski lessons by snow pros. The app includes many innovations, including voice guidance.

Download free Android, iOS or Windows Phone apps used in this article and GET FIT!

Cross platform apps: dream becomes reality

With recent additions to Visual Studio 2015, it becomes possible to develop native apps for all 3 major platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, and also target desktop Windows and OSX. Clearly, the world is changing and I’d like to share my experience in developing rich cross-platform apps that look great and work on iPhone, Android and Windows. Yes, you heard it right, it is now possible to create rich code that compiles to native bits on each platform, with only one code base (or one developer team, with 80-90% code reuse!), all with Visual Studio, C# and .NET. This is very powerful, and clearly developers benefit from this approach by Microsoft: it greatly increases productivity even for small app development teams and allows developers to create native apps that work across all major platforms.

I’ll share more of my experience developing Active Fitness app (http://activefitness.co) for Android, iOS and Windows. You can download the app and see for yourself by clicking the links above and downloading the app for the device of your choice. I want to share the experience of developing these apps, because I feel that it’s a revolution or rather a natural evolutionary step in app development that changes our perception of 3 operating systems incompatibility, and instead focuses on making developers productive.

What’s especially important, Microsoft provides Azure Mobile Services cross-platform libraries for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows and Xamarin, so that developers of cross-platform apps can use cloud resources efficiently.

Designing cross-platform user interface

Mobile user interfaces have changed dramatically since the first iPhone. Windows has Modern Design and Google has Material Design, while Apple made significant changes to its user interface in iOS 8. What is common? Designers call it dropping skeuomorphism  (or using material world objects in user interface graphics), and using clean functional design paradigms instead. I like calling a cross-platform combination of Modern Design, Material Design and Apple Design guidelines a “pragmatic” design, but I don’t pretend that I own the name!

Figure 1: Left to right - Android, iOS and Windows Phone interface of cross-platform Active Fitness.

From the very beginning I decided to create a common interface design that would satisfy design guidelines of Apple, Google and Microsoft. With Xamarin Forms, a recent addition to Xamarin cross platform suite, available now directly from Visual Studio, it becomes possible, with code re-use close to 80-90%, including user interface! This is a stunning achievement, given that most shops that make apps these days have very experienced developers that know iOS very well, then they need to hire developers that know Android and Windows. The cross-platform native approach taken by Xamarin Forms and other cross-platform tools changes the way developers make apps!

The three screenshots here are from (left to right) Android, iOS and Windows Phone Active Fitness app. They are developed with the same code base, with 100% C# and XAML and naturally fit Apple, Google and Windows ecosystems. The main approach was: keep it simple: keep it beautiful! Modern lines in this design naturally blend with Google Material Design, Windows Modern Design and Apple design, because this design is clean and functional.

Xamarin Forms introduced a set of controls: Pages, Views, Layouts and Cells that blend naturally with all three platforms: Android, iOS and Windows and provide a natural user experience. What’s even more important: one developer or a very small team of developers can now develop for all 3 major platforms (plus OSX and Windows Desktop), with one code, and one language! You can look at Xamarin Forms Gallery to get a feel of what cross-platform controls are available.

Pages

Pages are very natural part of Web sites, as well as native apps in iOS, Android and Windows. Xamarin Forms offer a wide selection of Pages.

Figure 2: Pages types in Xamarin Forms

Active Fitness app takes advantage of MasterDetailPage which is very popular with Android and iPhone apps. The action bar is also very similar in Android and iPhone apps. In Windows Phone we’re more used to bottom application bar. The “sandwich” icon is becoming very popular to present a “drawer” navigation pattern.  In Xamarin Forms you can use Master Detail page to take advantage of this design. If you look at some of the latest designs for Windows Phone: Facebook app, or OneDrive app implement drawer design pattern, which is also very common in Android and iOS.

Figure 3: Master-Detail navigation pattern with “Sandwich” button common to Android and iPhone apps

Layouts

Layouts are ways to align and position controls on your user interface. Most common layouts are grids, stacks, relative or absolute layouts. It’s interesting that while Xamarin Forms use XAML as a metadata language, most layouts and controls are actually very similar to Android AXML objects. Android developers building cross-platform apps find themselves right at home by using Xamarin Forms!

Figure 4: Xamarin Forms Layouts

Views

Views are often called UserControls in Windows apps. With the cross-platform nature of Xamarin Forms, there’re many views: for labels, entry controls, buttons, date and time pickers, progress controls, and they all look native on the platform you compile the app for:

Figure 5: Xamarin Forms Views

Cells

Xamarin Forms also provide cells. Cells are specialized elements used for items in tables. For example, when you use a databound list, cells would be your choice for data item template.

Summary

The cross-platform apps in this example are developed in XAML and C# with .NET that natively runs in iOS, Android and of course Windows. .NET has a long history of open source development, and it now becomes official with Microsoft integrating cross-platform tools with Visual Studio, open sourcing .NET. Many popular 3D games also run on multiple platforms backed by .NET and C#, with Unity. Game designs are very different from other apps, so we’ll focus on Xamarin Froms as technology suitable for cross-platform apps. Interested in this post?

Please, let me know by sending a cheerful COMMENT or twit (@kashleytwit) and I’ll keep this series to tell you more about making beautiful cross-platform apps for Windows, Android and iOS. In the following posts I’ll show you how to make cross-platform apps work with speech, voice, storage, GPS, sensors and more!

Download free Android, iOS or Windows Phone apps used in this article and get fit!

Do you need to spend extra bucks on a pedometer when you already have a phone? Now with SensorCore technology in select Windows Phones, your phone can work as the best social pedometer and count your steps, whether walking or running 24x7. With apps like Active Fitness which already has millions of active users, adding step counter in addition to GPS Tracking adds a battery efficient way and yet another dimension to measuring your sport performance. In this and following posts I’ll share my experience on developing the app with this amazing ground breaking technology.

IMPORTANT: To benefit from SensorCore you need to have Windows Phone 8.1 with hardware supporting SensorCore, like Lumia 1520, Icon, 930, 630, 635. Active Fitness will work on any other Windows Phone in standard mode.

The App

It all started with an app. Like many developers, I have an app that perfectly fits the profile for SensorCore. Active Fitness is my Swiss Army knife of anything sports. It has millions of active users, is fun and friendly, very social and motivating.

Now with new SensorCore technology, Active Fitness adds battery friendly Pedometer function. Simply take your phone with you and it’ll automatically count steps whole day long! Very little battery consumed. Other features include: multiple activities from a comprehensive library, music, action photos, GPS tracking, goals, training module powered by professional instructors and more!

SensorCore Enhancements

If you used Active Fitness, you’ll notice that if your device has SensorCore enabled, you’ll immediately see a tile for a pedometer. So now in addition to GPS tracking you can also measure your daily steps. Now the magic comes here: without running the app! Yes, that’s the beauty of SensorCore, you don’t need to run the app continuously in the background (you can for detailed GPS tracking, but you don’t have to for step tracking). This is genius!

Detailed charts of your activity

Active Fitness allows you to drill from monthly to weekly to daily view and then more into every split of your run! Windows Phone brings a clean fresh consistent design and everything about this fitness app looks great.

DOWNLOAD

PHOTOS, even more photos…

DOWNLOAD THE APP: Winter Sports

For the second consecutive year, it is becoming a tradition that Microsoft and Nokia participate in the outdoor educational events. One of these events is National Academy, a week-long event in Snowbird, Utah, at an altitude of 10,000ft gathering top ski and snowboard instructors from North America. PSIA-AASI is the nation’s oldest snow-sports educational organization, uniting more than 32 thousand professional ski and snowboard instructors. In 2013 Microsoft and Nokia teams for the first time participated in this event with a launch of Winter Sports, a ski and snowboard sports tracking app for Windows Phone and Windows.

This year highlights:

· Microsoft/Nokia Lounge

· Direct Verizon Sales: sold many high-end Windows Phones on-site

· XBOX ONE + fitness and games

· Nokia Lumia Icon, 1520, 1020, 520

· Nokia Accessories (Wireless Speakers, gadgets, wireless chargers, batteries)

· 3,000,000+ vertical ft tracked by the  app

· 50+ Windows Phones used on the mountain every day

Outdoors Industry and Windows Devices

This year, we expanded our collaboration with the organization, by creating an on-site Microsoft/Nokia Lounge, equipped with Xbox One, fitness apps and games, and bringing 50+ Windows Phone devices: from smallest Nokia Lumia 520, to top of the line Nokia Lumia 1020 phone with 41 megapixel camera, Nokia Lumia Icon and large 6" screen Nokia Lumia 1520 phablet, as well as Microsoft and Nokia tablets, such as Microsoft Surface. Each instructor could use Winter Sports app, tracking activity on the mountain, the app uses Microsoft Azure cloud to store tracking information securely and reliably (also see Microsoft case study).

Windows Phone apps

This event helps Microsoft and Nokia to collaborate with top sports and outdoor organizations, having devices used in real-life mountain high-altitude conditions, taking professional grade pictures and sports activity tracking and gathering feedback from top North American ski and snowboard instructors, including National Team champions. Also check out these apps for Windows Phone and Windows:

Winter Sports

Active Fitness

ELAN Skis

Rollerblade® Inline Skates

Microsoft/Nokia Lounge at 10,000ft

Microsoft/Nokia Lounge at 10,000ft in Cliff Lodge was set up for the whole week to present latest gadgets from Microsoft and Nokia, and became an Xbox One playground. For one week we entertained instructors with latest fitness and sports apps and Xbox games, demoed latest Windows Phones and Windows tablets, as well as Nokia accessories, such as wireless speakers, wireless chargers, headphones, phone batteries and more.

During the trade show we also had Verizon on site, selling Windows Phone devices. After ski and snowboard instructors were introduced to Winter Sports app, some were interested in purchasing top of the line Lumia Icon devices with unbeaten screen resolution and 20 megapixel camera. We certainly recommend these devices for ski instructors, because of their quality, reliability, great camera resolution, built-in action shot features and great outdoors apps.

Educational On-Snow Events

Some of Microsoft's own team are certified ski instructors and participated in the on-snow educational groups. We skied Snowbird and Alta, tracking skiing with Winter Sports app: in one week the app tracked 3,000,000+ vertical feet, tracking supported by Microsoft Azure cloud technology. Anyone had an opportunity to try one of several Windows Phone models. Great thing about Windows Phones is that they support a variety of form factors and features: from best camera phone in the world: 41 megapixel Lumia 1020, to a small footprint very inexpensive Lumia 520, to 20 megapixel Lumia Icon device.

In-class events and trade shows

During the National Academy we had a number of in-class training events and a trade show. During the trade show we had a joint Microsoft/Nokia/Verizon booth set up, with devices available for sale from Verizon. A number of high end Windows Phones were sold and activated at Verizon booth.

Next Year

We are planning to continue working with National Academy and bring the excitement of technology and new devices to the world of outdoors.

On the photo above: a special WINTER ski named after the app is signed by National Team coaches at National Academy. The right ski was signed at 2013 National Academy. The left ski was signed this year. I guess next year we need to make new skis J

PHOTOS

even more photos…

DOWNLOAD THE APP: Winter Sports

http://bit.ly/rollerbladeapp

The app is immediately available from Nokia Collection on all Nokia Windows Phone 8.0 devices. From Rollerblade® the leader of inline skating industry and our partner:

West Lebanon, NH –Rollerblade®, the international leader in the inline skating industry, recently announced the launch of the Rollerblade® Inline Skating App, a brand new application that’s taking the sport to a whole new level. Through a partnership with Nokia, Microsoft, and the Active Network, the Rollerblade® Inline Skating App is the official application for the sport and will enhance the skating experience for users worldwide. The new Windows 8 Phone app allows users to enjoy features such as tracking workouts and fitness goals, sharing progress and photos with friends and family via social media, finding the newest gear, and photographing their skating experience.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

10 Cool things you can do with Rollerblade app

1. Track your skating progress

2. Take action photos with your skating stats and share them on social networks

3. Share your routes with your friends

4. Compete on world-wide leaderboards with fellow skaters from all over the world!

5. Find the best skates for YOU

6. Find nearby Rollerblade® locations

7. Set goals to keep you motivated to skate

8. Our training plans have a set of lessons, videos and auto-tracking plans for everyone: from the beginner to the marathon expert

9. Meet new friends who love to skate

10. Enjoy, have fun, stay fit and be motivated

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Download Active Fitness for PC, tablets and Surface: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/active-fitness/5a64d9f1-aea7-493c-a353-da41c08c0e77

Download Active Fitness app for Windows Phone: Active Fitness for Windows Phone

Active Fitness for PCs and Tablets

Active Fitness is a personal trainer and fitness organizer for your Surface tablets or any Windows PC, with a companion Windows Phone app and a social network of quarter of a million users. Active Fitness is great for running, cycling, walking and hundreds of other activities, the app that earned raving reviews by Microsoft Phone blog and WPCentral for its companion Windows Phone app. Now with a Windows version of the app, you can enjoy your free sports analytics from the comfort of your tablet or PC and import data from other apps or devices.

Take your active lifestyle with you

With Active Fitness you can use the same account you used for companion Windows Phone app, or your Winter Sports app account from another popular app for tracking activities. You are presented with a simple and rich interface that allows you to check your stats, add your activity from Windows Phone or any other app or device, check your training schedule, find your friends and see where they run or exercise and more!

Hub for all your sports activities

Active Fitness automatically synchronizes your data with Windows Phone Ski & Ride app, and easily imports your data from other apps, Web sites and devices. Essentially, Active Fitness is a personal trainer, organizer and a fitness hub for all your sports activities on any Windows devices.

Personal Training

Active Fitness provides dozens of training plans: both videos and automatically tracked with Active Fitness app for Windows Phone. Training plans keep you organized and motivated, and you can see your progress real-time as you run or cycle with Windows Phone.

Companion app for Windows Phone

Active Fitness app comes with a free companion app for Windows Phone: the app that earned raving reviews from Microsoft Phone blog, WPCentral and is included in Nokia Collection.

Feels like Olympics

Active Fitness has a rich global leaderboard that immediately makes you feel like you are in the middle of Olympic Games. Compete with thousands other users of Active Fitness social network and Active Fitness will track your position on the leaderboard.

Where’s your friend?

Active Fitness has 200,000+ active users, the number that grows by thousands every day. To see where your friends are, use Active Fitness Friend Finder feature to find your friends.

For Windows PC, tablets and Surface

For Windows Phone

POWERED BY ACTIVE FITNESS SOCIAL NETWORK

Download: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/app/winter-sports/e142d77f-4266-44e6-ac4a-4a8bcd28fd52

For all snow-sports enthusiasts, Winter Sports is this season’s must have app for your Surface tablets and any Windows PC and Windows Phone. If you like skiing, snowboarding or any winter activity, Winter Sports is an official app of Professional Ski and Snowboard Instructors of America. Winter Ski & Ride for Windows Phone is the companion app for Winter Sports, has been translated to 10 languages and is crazy popular with skiers and snowboarders around the world, overall quarter of a million users. Now, there’s a large screen version of the app with tons of new capabilities, in case you want to show off your skiing or snowboarding to your friends, import data from other apps and devices.

Take your skiing and riding with you

With Winter Sports you can use the same account you used for companion Windows Phone app, or your Winter Sports app account, and also load data from another popular app for tracking activities. You are presented with a simple and rich interface that allows you to check weather reports and conditions at thousands of resorts worldwide, check your stats, add your activity from Windows Phone or any other app or device, check your training schedule, find your friends and see where they ski or ride and more!

Hub for all your snow-sports activities

Winter Sports app automatically synchronizes your data with Windows Phone Ski & Ride app, for all other apps and devices, such as Strava, RunKeeper, Garmin etc, Winter Sports allows you to import that data, and also add and edit your sports activities. Essentially, Winter Sports is a hub for all your sports activities on any Windows devices.

Personal Training by Professional Ski and Snowbnoard Instructors of America

Winter Sports provides dozens of training plans: both videos and automatically tracked with Winter app for Windows Phone. Training plans keep you organized and motivated, and you can see your progress real-time as you ski or ride with Windows Phone.

Companion app for Windows Phone

Winter Sports app comes with a free companion app for Windows Phone: the app that earned raving reviews from Microsoft Phone blog, WPCentral and is included in Nokia Collection.

Feels like Winter Olympics

Winter Sports has a rich global leaderboard that immediately makes you feel like you are in the middle of Olympic Games. Compete with thousands other users of Active Fitness social network and the app will track your position on the leaderboard.

Where’s your friend?

Winter Ski & Ride is part of Active Fitness network which has 200,000+ active users, the number that grows by thousands every day. To see where your friends are, use Friend Finder feature to find your friends.

Download Winter Sports app for Windows tablets, PCs

Download Winter Ski & Ride app for Windows Phone

POWERED BY ACTIVE FITNESS SOCIAL NETWORK

Read this review on WPCentral

Active Fitness is a new beautifully designed free Windows Phone app from Nokia Collection app for tracking various fitness activities: running, cycling, mountain biking, urban sports, such as: rollerblading, skateboarding, scooter, watersports and snow-sports.

Great design and focus on ease of use and best features of Windows Phone makes it an outstanding app for sports, as WP Central mentioned in its review “can easily become our favorite fitness app on Windows Phone”.

Why I use this app every day

My Active Fitness day tracker shows I’ve been using it for 100 days of activity tracking.  I use Active Fitness for all my running, cycling, mountain biking, kick scooter (I have 2 awesome kick scooters) and of course skiing. I use it because I like keeping track of my activity, and also keep myself motivated: I have many friends on Active Fitness and when you’re friend with someone you can share your favorite runs and keep yourself motivated.

The app is built by the same team of developers who brought us the beautiful Winter Ski & Ride app, a small startup in Silicon Valley and a guy from Microsoft. The app has the same beautiful user interface, that we love and enjoy in the Winter app, but with some major differences: Winter app is specialized for snow-sports, while Active Fitness is a multi-sport multi-activity tracker.

Activity Tracking

Active Fitness tracks your activity and automatically calculates beautiful statistics, charts and shows it on the map. The great thing about Active Fitness, it can show you multiple activities on the map, an amazing feature because I can often walk, run and have a bike ride on the same day!

Personal Trainer

Active Fitness has dozens of training plans for running, cycling, walking, but also professional training plans and videos for skiing, snowboarding and even telemarking.  

Gorgeous Fitness Charts

Active Fitness presents your activity in multiple beautiful historical charts: drill into any activity to see details on calories, distance covered, altitude, speed etc. Really good job on the charts!

Friends and Finder

One of the features where Active Fitness truly excels is its extensive friends network: Active Fitness Network (AFN). This network also integrates with another popular app by the same company: Winter Ski & Ride, so if you are a snowboard or skiing aficionado, you can see your ski buddies in the same view. One cool feature that Active Fitness has is Tap-to-Friend, so if you have a friend you want to instantly watch in Active Fitness, you can simply tap your phones, and then you can share your fitness activities.

Beautiful Worldwide Leaderboards

If Olympics were done by Active Fitness developers, they would fun to watch: tap Leaders tile, and you’ll be instantly transferred into Active Fitness worldwide sports arena, where you can see people competing for the first place in any activity. This is by far the best sports activity leaderboard of all the apps.

Training Goals

Training goals is another great feature that Active Fitness has, and it’s extremely easy to use: just tap the dials to increase your goals, and the app will automatically congratulate you on your achievements, post your results to leaderboards etc.

Conserves Battery: Longest Battery Time!

Active Fitness was originally designed by the team that made Winter Ski & Ride app, which is amazing at battery, skiing in cold conditions is very demanding, yet the app drains very little. According to the authors if you only use their app, it runs for 48 hours! The app really has very smart algorithms to minimize battery consumption.

Voice and Speech Support

This is one of the best features, I use it all the time. As you run, cycle or ski, you have very little time to look at your screen, so the app can talk to you, counting your progress. This is also a great safety feature, because it does not distract your eyes from the activity, but rather gently reminds you of the progress. You can also tell the app “Active Fitness, start running” to switch activities.

Lockscreen and super-rich live tiles

Active Fitness takes full advantage of the lock screen and posts tons of useful information there, as well as beautiful pictures for your activities. This greatly minimizes battery consumption, because you don’t need to open the app to see you progress, one glance over the lock screen is enough. Also, the app has rich live tiles: Windows Phone live tiles display very useful information about your progress on both medium and large tiles.

Summary

Active Fitness is easily the best fitness and activity tracking app for Windows Phone today. It has a beautiful and very intuitive design and user interface, has dozens of activities to choose from: running, cycling, mountain biking, walking, rollerblading, skateboarding, skiing, snowboarding and watersports. Active Fitness has a rich and active social network and great friends sharing features. We also recommend checking out Active Fitness sister app for snow-sports: Winter Ski & Ride, you can use the same account for both! Overall, great app.

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Reviews

Read this review on WPCentral

UPDATES ABOUT WINTER SKI & RIDE:

Microsoft Windows Phone blog about WINTER

WPCentral about WINTER

Windows Phone now has the best app in ski industry, leaving Apple and Google far behind, and raising the bar for ski apps very high: the app is called WINTER SKI & RIDE. For now the app is exclusively available on Nokia Windows Phones. WINTER SKI & RIDE app deserved recognition from association of professional ski and snowboard instructors of America (PSIA-AASI), as an official app recommended by association of more than 30,000 US ski and snowboard instructors. You can download it today from NOKIA Collection, if you are lucky to have a Windows Phone 8.

Stay warm! Skiers no longer need to take hands off their gloves in the cold, WINTER SKI AND RIDE is especially optimized for use with gloves in the cold, and NOKIA Lumia devices have glove sensitive screen, so you don’t need to take off your gloves in the cold to use the app. The app is optimized to run through your skiing day without draining your battery, and instead of punching buttons in the cold you can simply speak to it: “WINTER, Show me snow reports” for example.

WINTER SKI & RIDE is a unique app in many ways, it is developed by a Microsoftie, a professional ski instructor and a startup in Silicon Valley, an extremely powerful combination. The app is built in the US and Canada, and tested through snowstorms in the mountains of Colorado, Utah, California and British Columbia. Apparently, instead of spending time at Starbucks in Cupertino, Microsoft reached out to the field, and has developers who can ski and ride in the mountains, in cold and snow, to make the best app for skiing.

Instead of a bunch of different apps for weather, ski tracking and lessons, WINTER SKI & RIDE combines all features a skier needs in the mountain in one powerful app: snow reports, resort maps and information, such as the number of open trails, beautiful ski analytics and activity tracking, and lessons for skiing, telemark, snowboarding, freestyle and cross-country from professional ski and snowboard instructors.

SKI AND SNOWBOARD ACTIVITY ANALYTICS

Apparently, it takes a ski instructor and a Microsoftie to get a ski app right, finally! WINTER SKI & RIDE has an activity tracking switch, just turn it on when you are at ski resort, and you can put the phone back in your pocket. The smart app will automatically track your runs and present them in beautiful charts: you can see you runs by season, daily or even drill into the run details to see run details, such as speed, duration and vertical drop.

Not only that, WINTER SKI & RIDE motivates you to ski or ride more, and improve endurance, by setting goals. You can currently set vertical and run goals, and if you reach a goal, ta-da: your run is marked with an achievement pin, and you move closer to the leaders of the mountain.

LEADERBOARD OF BEST SKIERS AND RIDERS

WINTER SKI & RIDE is a very social app that lets you ski with your buddies and see the best skiers on the mountain.  You can also invite your friends and once you become friends with someone, you can share the runs and excitement about skiing.

SNOW REPORTS AND MAPS

WINTER SKI & RIDE automatically updates snow reports and you can view reports by proximity, by best conditions, powder, and maximum snow base. You can pin your favorite resorts as tiles to the start screen. The app beautifully presents resort information, shows vertical, open lifts and other information..

LESSONS: SKI, SNOWBOARD, TELEMARK, OH-MY…

Because WINTER SKI & RIDE is endorsed by Professional Ski Instructors of America, it has professional lessons from the best ski instructors on the planet. Lessons are carefully selected, adhering to the highest standards of the sport, lucky Windows Phone owners can now ski and learn.

SOCIAL

WINTER SKI & RIDE connects you with a social network of skiers and riders, making millions of ski buddies interconnected. This technology is based on Microsoft Windows Azure powerful cloud service. Do you want to see what runs your buddy did in Vail, or Whistler, or Chamonix? Just look him up on the Winter!

FOR SKI TEAMS AND COACHES

WINTER SKI & RIDE app changes the way coaches and ski instructors communicate with their students. By using the NFC technology available in Windows Phone, a ski instructor can instantly have a group of students join a team, and make recommendations based on a ski day, and individual runs.

WITH WINTER SKI & RIDE APP WINDOWS PHONE BECOMES TOP PLAYER IN WINTER SPORTS

With WINTER SKI & RIDE, Microsoft Windows Phone becomes a top player in the Winter sports. Forget the aging iPhone or battery-hungry Android. With the app endorsed by Professional Ski Instructors or America, Windows Phone becomes a very powerful player in the snowsports industry.

DOWNLOAD WINTER

Enjoy!