rudy huyn

One of our favorite apps on Windows Phone is TVShow by developer Rudy Huyn (Dan especially loves this one). It last received a fairly big update in early-December when it made the jump to Windows Phone 8. That update at the time was mostly to get doublewide Tile support and improved graphics. Today it TVShow gets a proper update bringing functionality unique to Windows Phone 8.

Read on, crouton.

One of our favorite and must-have apps around here is TVShow by Rudy Huyn—developer of such great apps as Wikipedia, Fuse and 9Gag.

TVShow is meant for those who want to keep abreast of all the latest episodes of their favorite programs. You enter in your shows and then TV schedules, info, photos and more are pulled down for the 'nets. You can then have reminders set, pin Tiles to your Start screen, share your thoughts via social networks and it’s all wrapped up in what is one of the prettiest apps we’ve come across.

For those familiar with our site, you’ll know we have some developers whose work we consider to be generally the crème of the crop. Rudy Huyn is one of those and he released his new app recently aptly titled Wikipedia (his other apps include TVShow, Friend Tracker, 9Gag and Fuse)

Long story short, Rudy previously had a similar app called MyEncyclopedia. MyEncyclopedia was actually part of a contest involving the carrier Orange. Huyn wanted to control the app and updates  though so he was going to relist it under his account but alas, the developer-bug got him and he decided to redo the whole thing making it even nicer than ever.

Ah, Facebook. We don't really get nor use it very often but we recognize that we're in the minority on that one. We also have those friends who meticulously and methodically check their status, friend count, "Likes" and what have you numerous times a day.

For those people, we humbly direct you towards Friend Tracker, the new app from Rudy Huyn (TVShow, MyEncyclopedia, Fuse, etc.). The app is simple enough: it looks through your contacts who are synced with Facebook and/or Live and keeps track of who's there, who's not and showing you a graph of the number of friends and activity.

According to the app's "How it works" section, Windows Phone checks this about once a day. But if you really want "real time" you can have the app login to your account and pull down the info on a much more frequent basis, like every 30 minutes or so.

It's a nifty little addition and completely free. Plus like all of Huyn's apps, really elegant. Here are some of the other features:

• Live tile
• Statistics on the number of friends
• Scheduled agent

So if you need to keep abreast of your social status, sounds lke you'll want to pick this up. Grab it here in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

If you don't recognize the name Rudy Huyn, he's the developer behind TVShow and Fuse, two of the most popular apps on our platform. The reason why those apps are so popular (and revered) is due to his excellent design and coding skills. Even our own developer, Jay Bennett, called him one of the top devs on Windows Phone these days.

So with that intro, how do you not want to take a look at his new app MyEncyclopedia, which according to him is his "...little Christmas gift for all Windows Phone users"? The app is a Wikipedia front-end for Windows Phone, which in of itself is not unique, but the design, features and speed of it make it top notch. For one, it's extremely fast on loading articles which are formatting perfectly for our screens. Second, he's enabled the ability to pull down your location, show it on Bing maps and then show you Wikipedia entries around you--pretty slick. He also used his excellent sharing-screen from Fuse, which allows you to post the article to email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter and our favorite, generate a QR code for others to scan with their phone. Other features on board are:

• Search in 100 languages
• Offline mode to view article without internet connection
• Display the summary of the article
• Find your favorite articles
• View previous versions of article

The crazy thing? He developed it 18 hours (3 nights). The app is not only free, but ad-free as well. So if you need any kind of Wikipedia app, we have to give our highest recommendation for this one. Pick it up here in the Marketplace or click the QR code below to enlarge and scan.