PhotoCanvas gives you access to the pool of amazing pictures taken from photographers all around the world and uploaded to Unsplash.com. Browse through the categories, which are updated everyday, and if you find a picture you love, just set it as your start screen or lockscreen.

I created this project to prove myself I could build a relatively useful application with a nice user interface using the UWP framework for Windows 10. At the time I thought a good chunk of the apps in the store lacked in design and were somewhat dubious. I also liked the the Windows 10 APIs, they were easy for me to pickup even moreso because they were available in C#, which is a language I am quite familiar with and use on a daily basis.

I used the design guidelines offered by Microsoft and dribble to make sure I was following modern standards and then set myself to design a simple buy nice UI with Sketch - at least what I thought was a good one and based on the feedback I got.

After releasing the app I started getting some feedback, most of them positive, which made me feel like I was on the right track. I had started with nothing and had my app finally in the store, people using it and sending me feedback - wow! A few people even suggested some improvements based on use cases they required for the app, like the ability to change the background automatically on a daily basis or by setting a time interval. Others wanted to be able to save the images. Because I didn't believe in Microsoft supporting the platform and because of life and work I ended up not releasing any relevant updates to the app, I even have a version with a requested feature still not deployed. Maybe when Microsoft sorts out windows 10 store and the whole mobile strategy I will be back to the platform and make a huge update to PhotoCanvas. Meanwhile I consider this project abandoned but successful as I achieved the goals I wanted to.

You can find Photocanvas here.