Tag: mobile

More Thoughts on Windows Whatever-it-is-That-Runs-on-Phones

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 16, 2009
2 Comments on More Thoughts on Windows Whatever-it-is-That-Runs-on-Phones

The Developer Angle

In case you don’t recognize the photo on the right, it’s the “Sad Darth Vader” photo from my earlier article titled This is How the Current State of Windows Mobile Makes Me Feel. I posted it in response to The Empire’s seemingly directionless efforts with its phone platform, Windows Mobile. Or, as it’s called now, Windows Phone. Or, as it used to be called, Windows CE. Or was that Windows Embedded?

Therein lies the first problem as far as developers are concerned: finding documentation on the subject of developing for Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones. It’s confusing because it’s hard to even figure out what the name of the SDK you’re supposed to use is – they all sound applicable. Is it Windows CE? Windows Mobile? Windows Embedded?

(By the bye, for current phones, it’s Windows Mobile, which is based on Windows Embedded CE. Now that this new brand, Windows Phone, is kicking around, there’s a chance that it’ll get filed under that name soon.)

Joey deVilla's Palm Treo

As an evangelist for The Empire, it’s my job to help developers figure their way around our various platforms, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a platform that appears more shrouded in mystery and confusion than Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones. Over the next little while, I’m going to post pointers to existing Windows Mobile/Windows Phone development articles as well as articles based on my own experiences developing for the Windows-based phone I picked up while at the recent TechReady 8 conference in Seattle. It’s a Palm Treo Pro, pictured on the left, and I chose it because out of all the mobiles at the Expansys booth (they always have a booth at the big Microsoft developer conferences), it was the one with the best “feel”.

My first pointer is to Microsoft’s own Windows Mobile 6 Documentation, located a couple of levels into the MSDN site. The main page for this section presents a giant point-and-click map of key topics for developers who want to write apps for Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones. I’m going to try out some of the exercises on that site and report back with stories of my experiences of getting started with Windows phone development, and whatever tips and tricks I pick up along the way.

If you’ve got any questions about developing for Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones, feel free to ask me, whether in the comments or via email. I may not have the answers myself, but since I’m on the inside at Microsoft, I can say that “I know a guy who knows a guy,” if you get my drift.

The User Angle

The upcoming 6.5 version of Windows Mobile – or more appropriately, Windows Phone – was announced earlier today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. It features a user interface that’s considerably more finger-friendly than the current 6.1, whose stylus-reliant design seems stuck in the era of the Palm Pilot. Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz seems to really like it, as evidenced in the video he shot for his article titled Windows Mobile 6.5 Hands On: The New Interface Rocks:

Windows Mobile 6.5 Running on HTC from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo.

Diaz ends his article on a positive note, a rare thing for a writeup on Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones:

From this first touch on, it looks like Microsoft is back in the game. They don’t have the upper hand yet, but they are clearly waking up. We will see what happens and how deep these changes really are once it gets released.

The Developer Angle, Once More

The apparent improvements in 6.5 and promised continued improvements in Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones version 7 are a good sign, but a lot of the success story I’m hoping for rests with applications for these phones. For that, there has to be a developer community that has the tools, resources and encouragement to develop for Windows Whatever-it-is-that-runs-on-phones. Building that community is a challenge that I’m taking up. What can I do to help?

Tags Microsoft, mobile, phones, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Phone

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This is How the Current State of Windows Mobile Makes Me Feel

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 11, 2009
10 Comments on This is How the Current State of Windows Mobile Makes Me Feel

Photo courtesy of Alex Brown Photography.

Tags marketplace, Microsoft, mobile, sad, Windows, Windows Mobile

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Cheap as in Crap

Just over a year ago, I quipped that Acer – the world’s most successful vendor of slightly sub-par but very cheap computer hardware – didn’t have any more sub-par vendors to buy after acquiring Gateway and the dreaded Packard Bell (which I prefer to call “Taco Bell” since both offer dirt cheap products yielding unpleasant results once you’ve consumed them). This was a good thing, I thought, as gathering all the crappy vendors into a single uber-crappy vendor makes them rather easy to avoid.

However, these are tough times, when “cheap and crappy” becomes attractive to customers. As if in answer to the credit crunch, the good news is that there’s been an announcement about a new netbook that promises to be sub-$100 (well, technically $99.95 is below $100).

The bad news? It’s being made by Coby.

If you’ve never heard of Coby, you probably don’t hang out in Chinatown, “grey market” electronic stores or Walmart. They’re a manufacturer of consumer electronics of dubious quality bearing a logo that I always found suspiciously similar to Sony’s. They’re the sort of electronics you buy when you need something decent-seeming to give away as prizes at a fundraiser or when your diet consists largely of Top Ramen. I’ve seen too many people burned by the false economy of a Coby purchase to have any faith in the company.

Still, my curiosity cannot help but be piqued. The availability of cheap, very portable, network-capable, almost-disposable computers that you’d pick up at places like discount stores, drug stores and perhaps even those kiosks in the middle of the aisles at your local shopping center is a potential game-changer for both everyday life and us developers. If you look at schoolyards and playgrounds, you’ll see that the Nintendo DS has changed kids’ recreation; what would a grown-up version like dirt-cheap netbooks do?

Here’s what can be gleaned from Inidymedia Arkansas’ article about Coby’s netbook:

Expected release date: March 2009
Expected models: PoquetMate-7” and PoquetMate-9” (“PoquetMate” is pronounced “pocket mate”), with 7- and 9-inch screens, respectively
Processor: Something made by Loongson

I expect that at $100, it’ll run some flavour of Linux. I wonder if it’ll be another case of “Worse is Better” and beat the OLPC at its own game. I may end up picking up one of these suckers on a lark.

Tags cheap, Coby, ghetto, mobile, netbooks

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Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto?

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 27, 2008
2 Comments on Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto?

Over at CBC’s Search Engine, Jesse Brown asks an important question: Is Canada Becoming a Digital Ghetto? I’m reproducing the article in its entirety below.

Here are three things that suck about being Canadian right now:

Last week the CRTC sided with Bell against a group of small Internet Service Providers who want to offer their customers unthrottled connections where what they download is their own business and not subject to interference.
In last week’s throne speech the Conservative government renewed their intention to “modernize” Canadian copyright law. Their effort to do so last session was Bill C-61, a woefully unbalanced and retrograde piece of legislation that led to the greatest citizen backlash to any proposed bill in recent memory. Yet there has been no indication from new Industry Minister Tony Clement that a much-needed public consultation will take place. The best he has offered is the possibility of a “slightly different” version of the bill.
Twitter has just announced that they are killing outbound SMS messaging in Canada due to exorbitant and constant rate hikes from Canadian cell providers (former Industry Minister Jim Prentice vowed to get tough on SMS price gouging, then backpedalled). Cell phone rates in Canada are among the highest in the world, and the result is that mobile penetration is pathetically low and that emerging new cultural platforms like Twitter are being hobbled.

This growing list of backwards policies is already creating a sense of digital isolation: Canadians can’t stream the videos Americans stream, download the files Americans download, remix the media Americans remix, or tweet the way Americans tweet.

With the election of Barack Obama, digital culture in the U.S. hit a tipping point, where a robust online public sphere proved itself capable of changing the world. Meanwhile, here in Canada we’re approaching our own tipping point, where a series of ignorances and capitulations threaten to turn our country into a digital ghetto.

[Thanks to Mark Relph for pointing me to this article.]

Tags "The Man", backwards-thinking, Bell Canada, Bill C-61, call to action, Canada, copyfight, copyright, government, mobile, packet shaping, policy, SMS, telcos, telecom, throttling, Twitter, wireless

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GeoSocial Meetup: Thursday November 6th at the Charlotte Room, Toronto

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date November 3, 2008
1 Comment on GeoSocial Meetup: Thursday November 6th at the Charlotte Room, Toronto

Earth, as seen from space The folks from PlanetEye — the travel-planning site whose motto is “Discover destinations. Plan trips. Share experiences” — are hosting a GeoSocial this Thursday, November 6th at 6:30 p.m. at the Charlotte Room (19 Charlotte Street, Toronto, not far from the corner of King and Spadina).

GeoSocial?

Organized by PlanetEye’s Mark Evans and Juan Gonzalez, a GeoSocial is “a group for people interested in exploring the uses of geodata to enhance the relevancy of information on the web and create new means of social interaction.”

Juan explained more in a recent post on the PlanetEye blog:

We firmly believe the GeoWeb has succeeded in providing an easily understood framework for gathering, analysing and displaying information. The challenges that remain ahead are now about leveraging this framework to create better ways for people to explore and discover their world.

GeoSocial wants to provide an open forum for all people developing ideas, technology and products that leverage the GeoWeb to create advanced social applications that can deliver personalized, geographically relevant content. We also want to invite people from other areas (bloggers?) to participate and discover how these technologies can fundamentally impact their own products.

If you’re building (or just thinking of building) location-based mobile applications, mashups, maps, producing or consuming geodata, writing about your city or neighbourhood or just have an interest in what’s being called “Where 2.0”, come out to this event and meet some like-minded people!

(I’ll be attending this event, by the way.)

Apple Drops iPhone NDA

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date October 2, 2008

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

On the off-chance you hadn’t yet heard, Apple has finally dropped its much-reviled NDA for iPhone developers for released software. It was so restrictive that developers were forbidden from discussing or writing documentation on iPhone development, even with or for other iPhone developers.

In the announcement on Apple Developer Connection, they explain why they put developers under the excessively-restrictive NDA:

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

This sort of behaviour harkens back to the 1990s, when Apple behaved as if all third-party developers who weren’t Adobe existed on a spectrum ranging from “unwanted houseguest” to “the enemy”. Speaking as a guy with a strong technical evangelist background (note to employers: hint, hint!), this is not the way you foster developer love nor build a developer community.

Expect iPhone development tutorials and tips to start popping up all over the web and for the Pragmatic Programmers’ book iPhone SDK Development to finally see the light of day.