by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2013/11/12 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2013/11/12/10461659.aspx
Regular readers may remember my plea for an App for the phone that I made in the end of September in my blog Any Phone App developers out there reading here? I need an App for my ¡next! Nokia Lumia....
I was pretty harsh on the examples of Apps that seemed to work in theory but couldn't get the work done in practice.
It turns out I was being too harsh.
These Apps are literally doing the best they can here.
Because I have it on good authority that there is no supported way to get the entire layout of the Start Screen.
If you place something on the Start Screen yourself, then you'll be able to see pieces of the Start Screen nearby. Which is what those Apps let you do.
To my way of thinking, this is a cure that is worse than the disease, since it adds a lot of extra stuff to the Start Screen that will make it much longer for no good reason.
Unless they add special capabilities to some future version to let you check out the whole Start Screen, then for now I will have to settle for just taking screen shots of the whole Start Screen if I want the ability to have the Start Screen that you can re-apply to a new phone or replacement phone...
I don't know about you, but I change my Start Screen fairly often. I will just have to hope that a future version has more ability to query information about the Start Screen layout.... And to Group Tiles by vSoft Studios and Name Group of Tiles by Naveen Kumar, I apologize. You were clearly doing your best here!