Windows Phone App Studio Makes Building Apps Simple

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By Emily Price2013-08-07 00:51:40 UTC

Building apps is hard; even more so if you don’t have any coding experience.

Microsoft is making sure that coding experience isn’t what’s stopping people from building Windows Phone apps with the beta launch of its new Windows Phone App Studio

See also: 9 Excellent Apps For Discovering New Things

Much like the third-party app builders available for iOS and Android, the Windows Phone App Builder, launched Tuesday, simplifies the app-building process, making it easy to create your own mobile app for the platform in minutes.

To create an app, you simply choose from one of Microsoft’s templates — options include Company, Restaurant Menu, Store, Sports Team and band, among others — and go.

App templates come preloaded with sections and designs — all you have to do is customize the content displayed within the app, select a color scheme, and upload any images you’d like to be included. Once you’re done, your finished product can be loaded onto your phone for your own personal use, or made public for others to enjoy as well.

Meant for basic apps, the App Studio isn’t going to help you make the next Instagram or Facebook, but it could be a quick and easy way to create an app for your restaurant where customers can check out the menu, or to create a personal app with hotel and attraction information your friends can use to keep up with an itinerary while you’re on group vacation.

I gave the Studio a try, and was able to build a Mashable app with a feed of our most recent stories in less than five minutes. While effective, it wasn’t pretty. Rather than pull images from our stories, the App Studio instead pulled the share buttons for Facebook and Twitter from the top of each page and placed them, awkwardly, where an image should have been. The result was an unattractive-looking app, although a functional one, if I just wanted quick access to Mashable’s RSS feed.

You can give the Windows Phone App Studio a try yourself now on the Windows Store.

What sorts of Windows Phone apps would you like to make with the App Studio? Tell us about your ideas in the comments.

Image: Flickr

Topics: apps, Apps and Software, Mobile, Tech, Windows Phone