Sideloading?

[Nurgling]

So, I'm very happy with my HTC 8X. I was expecting more of a beta experience with WP8 than I actually found. Live tiles are a treat and the GUI is just as enjoyable. Not the biggest fan of the quality of the music app but oh well.

I was also happy to see that you can side load data via USB onto it. I first used the program that downlads to win 7 but I also sideloaded some music, a couple audio books, some photos, and my collection of ringtones. I also wanted to copy over a handful of comic books. Fine. Music and audio books showed up fine int he xbox music player fine. ringtones worked fine. But not the comic books. Seemingly all of the comic book readers require the uploading of comic books via skydrive or drop box or are streamed only form online services. Why can't these apps look for whats already on the freakin phone??? It's unconscionable! So I need to upload the comics to skydrive, then download them back to the phone....thanks for the waste of time and bandwidth!

Anyway...Should I expect this to be common from here on out with apps, in general? Or is there hope? MS is letting me drag/drop files on the phone; is the API there to let app writers access side loaded data?

 

[vedichymn]

These are most likely Windows Phone 7.X apps. For the most part, there really wasn't much in the way of user accessible shared storage in Windows Phone 7.X, so most apps were written with the expectation of syncing data to/from skydrive, dropbox, etc.

In Windows Phone 8 there is an API for accessing/storing things in the Document folder, so hopefully apps are updated to support that.

 

[bigkevbosky]

You should email Jay and ask him about it. I'm not sure MS allows developers to "search" through files on their phone to discover files like comics, for example.

The same way that if I download a podcast app, it can't see the podcasts I've already downloaded through the Music hub.

I think people are just kinda used to how Android does things, and that's not really how Windows Phone does things. Its like complaining that a car with a stick shift doesn't change gears automatically for me.