Drewidian
New member
I posted this before, but I think this is a good place to bring this up again.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who wanted to migrate from his iphone 4 to WP7. I showed him all of the interesting and cool things I could do with Zune, XBox games (a couple that were XBox live games that were ported over), email, etc. When he asked me about books, I showed him the Amazon app which was pretty good in comparison to the ios version. He liked what he saw since he had only Amazon books, but I started to think that this is one place WP7 could and should be beating Apple and Google. A number of IOS users buy their apps from many different sources and get it "aggregated" to their Newsstand. I started thinking about a WP7 take on this using hubs and came up with a couple of ideas.
I think there should be two separate hubs to cover print and web media. A "News" hub could aggregate news from RSS feeds, Weather, News Apps, and have pivots for Favorites, New/Breaking/Now (not sure what to call it), Top Stories. It could work the way the Music and Videos HUB works with a History and New panoramic panels. Anytime a person clicks on an aggregated topic or link it would pass that info to the associated application such as the CNN, MSNBC, Fox, BBC, or now The Guardian. RSS feeds would open a specified RSS App or a web page of the article if so specified by the application due to deep linking coming in Mango. Perhaps it is even possible to set up standard sections such as Technology, Entertainment, etc. and aggregate the information to those sections of the hub. There are literally a dozen different ways to go with this, but if MS did this right it could be a huge benefit to WP7/8.
Another separate hub would be a "Periodicals/Bookshelf" hub. Obviously it is where you would
aggregate magazines, newspapers, books, and other traditional print media subscriptions. Following a similar model as the News and Information hub, this one would have pivots for Magazines, Books, and Newspapers, and have a Favorites and New pivots. The new pivot would show new issues (user specified) and could of course be pinned as well. Again opening an issue would open the respective app through which it was purchased. This one would also allow for users to synchronize their media with Skydrive and
allow for a person to go to any of the 3 screens to resume, keep bookmarks, and save issues that would be linked to your Live/Amazon/BN/etc. ID to avoid the pesky copywrite issues. MS could add a new section to the Zune software to allow for purchasing of subscriptions of Newspapers, Magazines, Comics, etc., and due to it being in the Marketplace, they could be downloaded to multiple devices or the Skydrive. On Skydrive, I'd have a folder for the hub and subfolders for each subscription. I could even see a Zune Pass for periodicals where you could bundle a number of publications together and have access to them all.Thanks for reading this. Any thoughts or opinions? Sorry for the long post, but I hope you find it worth the read.
I recently had a conversation with a friend who wanted to migrate from his iphone 4 to WP7. I showed him all of the interesting and cool things I could do with Zune, XBox games (a couple that were XBox live games that were ported over), email, etc. When he asked me about books, I showed him the Amazon app which was pretty good in comparison to the ios version. He liked what he saw since he had only Amazon books, but I started to think that this is one place WP7 could and should be beating Apple and Google. A number of IOS users buy their apps from many different sources and get it "aggregated" to their Newsstand. I started thinking about a WP7 take on this using hubs and came up with a couple of ideas.
I think there should be two separate hubs to cover print and web media. A "News" hub could aggregate news from RSS feeds, Weather, News Apps, and have pivots for Favorites, New/Breaking/Now (not sure what to call it), Top Stories. It could work the way the Music and Videos HUB works with a History and New panoramic panels. Anytime a person clicks on an aggregated topic or link it would pass that info to the associated application such as the CNN, MSNBC, Fox, BBC, or now The Guardian. RSS feeds would open a specified RSS App or a web page of the article if so specified by the application due to deep linking coming in Mango. Perhaps it is even possible to set up standard sections such as Technology, Entertainment, etc. and aggregate the information to those sections of the hub. There are literally a dozen different ways to go with this, but if MS did this right it could be a huge benefit to WP7/8.
Another separate hub would be a "Periodicals/Bookshelf" hub. Obviously it is where you would
aggregate magazines, newspapers, books, and other traditional print media subscriptions. Following a similar model as the News and Information hub, this one would have pivots for Magazines, Books, and Newspapers, and have a Favorites and New pivots. The new pivot would show new issues (user specified) and could of course be pinned as well. Again opening an issue would open the respective app through which it was purchased. This one would also allow for users to synchronize their media with Skydrive and
allow for a person to go to any of the 3 screens to resume, keep bookmarks, and save issues that would be linked to your Live/Amazon/BN/etc. ID to avoid the pesky copywrite issues. MS could add a new section to the Zune software to allow for purchasing of subscriptions of Newspapers, Magazines, Comics, etc., and due to it being in the Marketplace, they could be downloaded to multiple devices or the Skydrive. On Skydrive, I'd have a folder for the hub and subfolders for each subscription. I could even see a Zune Pass for periodicals where you could bundle a number of publications together and have access to them all.Thanks for reading this. Any thoughts or opinions? Sorry for the long post, but I hope you find it worth the read.