Tag: Windows Phone

Counting Down to Seven: Exploring XNA

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date March 5, 2010
1 Comment on Counting Down to Seven: Exploring XNA

Welcome to another article in the Counting Down to Seven series and the first article in the Exploring XNA series — it’s like the chocolate and peanut butter of mobile development!

If you haven’t read Windows Phone team member Charlie Kindel’s latest blog entry yet, do so now. In explaining what’s different in Windows Phone 7, he also lists some technologies that form it basis:

.NET
Silverlight
XNA
Web 2.0 standards
Microsoft’s developer tools

That’s right: along with Silverlight, one of the core elements of Windows Phone 7 is XNA, the toolset that makes it quite easy to build games for the PC, Xbox 360 and Zune. Kudos to those of you who ratiocinated that Silverlight and XNA would figure into Windows Phone: both are proven user interface technologies that have also shown that they’re capable of living on different platforms.

I’ll cover each of the core elements of Windows Phone 7 in the fullness of time, but for now, why don’t we start with what I consider to be the really fun one – XNA?

(It’s not only fun – it’s the gateway to customers: according to eMarketer, the number of people who play games on their phone has more than doubled in the past couple of years, from 155 million in 2007 to a predicted 340 million by the end of 2010.)

XNA: A Quick Overview

In the venerable geek tradition of using recursive acronyms to name things, XNA is short for “XNA’s Not Acronymed”. In the Microsoft-y tradition of using one name to represent a smorgasbord of things, XNA is a framework, toolset and runtime that makes it easier to build and deploy games.

XNA provides a great skeleton for building 2-D and 3-D games with a set of game-centric class libraries and a straightforward programming model. Its design frees you from a lot of the “yak shaving” and related drudgery involved in game development, letting you spend more time on programming the gameplay instead. Its “simple but not stupid” quality recently allowed me to walk a workshop of Humber College students from an initial “let’s draw a static sprite on the screen” project to a pretty decent “run around the game field, dodging the flying spinning blades” game, complete with animated sprites, sound effects and soundtrack and scoring, all in about three hours. Better still, we had fun doing it.

Required and Optional Tools for XNA Development

Here’s what you need (and some nice-to-haves) to get started with XNA development:

Required

Windows 7, Vista or XP, with the latest service packs installed.
Visual Studio 2008, which costs money, or Visual C# 2008 Express Edition, which is free-as-in-beer. Don’t let its being free throw you off; it’s a complete IDE and more than enough for developing games. As of this writing, the 2010 editions of Visual Studio, which have not yet hit the “Release to Manufacturing” stage, don’t support XNA game development yet.
XNA Game Studio 3.1. This is a set of Visual Studio add-ons and tools for developing games for Windows, Xbox 360 and Zune using XNA. This is also free-as-in-beer.

Optional

A PC-compatible Xbox 360 controller. This can be:
- A wired Xbox 360 controller, which plugs directly into your PC’s USB ports.
- A wireless Xbox 360 controller with the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver plugged into your PC’s USB port.
- A wireless Xbox 360 controller for Windows.
An Xbox 360, if you want to build console games, for which you’ll need a Premium membership with XNA Creators Club Online (CDN$119 per year, or CDN$59.00 for 4 months).
A Zune, if you want to build Zune games. You can deploy to the Zune for free.

Platformer: XNA’s “Right Out of the Box” Game

If you’re the sort who wants to play a game before doing some game development, you’re in luck. XNA provides Platformer, a fully-functional “platform jumper” game as one of its project templates. You can simply treat is as a game, but that would be a waste – its true value is that in its source code are a lot of lessons in building 2-D games with XNA. I’m going to show you how to build a Platformer project.

(In the screenshots below, I opted to use free Visual C# 2008 Express. If you have one of the full version of Visual Studio, the experience will be similar.)

Start up Visual C# 2008 Express or Visual Studio. From the File menu, select New Project… You should see a dialog box like the one shown below appear.

In the Project types: list on the left-hand side of the dialog box, select Visual C# and the select XNA Game Studio 3.1 from its sub-menu. In the Templates list on the right-hand side of the dialog box, you should see a number of game application templates. Select Platformer Starter Kit. Fell free to the edit the contents of the Name: textbox if you want to give your project a different from the default and click the OK button.

Visual Studio will generate a new project. You’ll know because the Solution Explorer pane will be filled with projects and their files:

Press F5 to run the game. In moments, you’ll be greeted by the screen below:

Platformer looks like an homage to both platform games as well as Raiders of the Lost Ark. You’re represented by an Indiana Jones-esque sprite and must reach the “Exit” sign before time runs out. You have the option of collecting gems to increase your score.

You move to the next level if your reach the exit sign before time runs out:

Here’s level two, which features more platforms, more gems and a shambling mummy who can kill you with a touch:

Here’s level three, which is filled with platforms that you can jump through:

Make sure you check out the code for Platformer. Reading it is a great way to learn XNA game development techniques and tricks.

Hello, XNA!

Once you’re done playing Platformer, you might want to try your hand at XNA development. I’m not going to show you how to write anything resembling a game in this article (I’ll do that over the next few articles in this series), but I thought I’d quickly show you how to get the world’s simplest XNA application – in the best “Hello, World!” tradition – up and running.

Just as you did with Platformer, click on the File menu, select New Project… This time, when the New Project dialog box appears, select Windows Game (3.1), give the project a name in the Name text box (I chose HelloXNA) and click OK:

Visual Studio (or Visual C# Express) will then generate your game project.

A newly-created XNA game project has all its code living in a single class, which is given the name Game1, which in turn is stored in the file Game1.cs. I want to rename that class to HelloXNA. That’s easily done by moving the cursor over Game1 at the start of the class declaration, right-clicking on it, selecting Refactor from the menu that appears, and then Rename… from the submenu:

I could use good ol’ search-and-replace, but it blindly taking the search term and changing it into the replacement term, no matter where it is. Refactor –> Rename… is smarter; it does a true renaming of the identifier without mangling other identifiers that happen to contain the search term. It also allows you to specify whether you want to do the renaming in comments and string literals, which old-school search-and-replace doesn’t do.

When the Rename dialog box appears, enter the new name for the Game1 class, HelloXNA, into the New name: text box. Make sure that the Preview reference changes checkbox is checked before clicking OK:

If you checked the Preview reference changes checkbox in the previous dialog box, you’ll see a preview of the changes that will result if you apply Refactor –> Rename…. Click Apply to finalize the renaming:

You’ll see that the Game1 class and any references to it in the code have been changed to HelloXNA. For consistency’s sake, we’ll rename the Game1.cs file in which the class formerly known as Game1 to HelloXNA.cs in the Solution Explorer:

By default, a brand-new XNA game project without any code added to it does a very simple thing: it draws a blank screen with a cornflower blue background. If you hit F5 to run the application right now, you’ll see this:

Now “all you have to do” is write some game code! I’ll walk you through that process over the next few articles in this series.

Next Steps

You could wait for the next article in this series, but if you’re rarin’ to learn how to develop games with XNA, let me recommend Learning XNA 3.0, written by Aaron Reed and published by O’Reilly. It has a 4.5-star rating at Amazon.com, which it’s earned – it’s a great introduction to XNA development. The first half of the book is devoted to 2-D game development, starting with drawing a sprite on the screen and finishing with a pretty complete game. The second half of the book adds the third dimension and works towards building a 3-D game.

You should also get a look at XNA Creators Club, the online community for XNA developers. It features:

Links to all the downloads you need to get started developing games with XNA
Starter kinds for various game genres – you get Platformer with XNA; you can download starter kits for other game genres, including:
- Marblets: a marble colour-matching puzzle game.
- Spacewar: the classic “spaceship vs. spaceship” game that comes in two flavours – retro and evolved.
- Role-Playing Game: A tile-based RPG engine with support for character classes, multiple party members, items and quests.
- Racing Game: A 3-D auto racing game featuring advanced graphics, audio and input processing, where you race against the ghost car for the best time.
- Ship Game: 3-D spaceship combat in a tunnel system with advanced lighting and textures, a full GPU particle system and an advanced physics engine.
- Net Rumble: A 2-D shooter showcasing XNA’s new multiplayer features in an arena with asteroids, power-ups and up to 16 players.
Forums to discuss ideas and ask questions with your fellow XNA game developers
A catalog of games created by members of the XNA game developer community. You can try out their games, submit games and vote for games to be included in the Xbox Indie Games catalog, whose games can be purchased through Xbox Live.

If you want to be a rock star on Windows Phone 7, you’re going to want to sharpen your XNA chops. Get a head start and take it out for a spin!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, Exploring XNA, game development, Windows Phone, XNA

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Counting Down to Seven: Millennials and Mobile

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date March 2, 2010
2 Comments on Counting Down to Seven: Millennials and Mobile

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

Who are the Millennials?

In Andy Hunt’s book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (which we’re covering in Ignite Your Coding in a couple of days!), there’s a chapter devoted to recognizing and compensating for your cognitive biases. In that chapter, there’s a section titled Recognize Your Generational Affinity, and it begins with this quote from Douglas Adams:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that is invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

It’s an interesting quote to keep in mind when discussing that demographic known as “Millennials” or “Generation Y”. While there aren’t any hard and fast rules for defining the boundaries of a generation, it’s generally accepted that when we’re talking about Millennials, we’re referring to a group of people born after 1982.

Here’s a quick video introduction to the Millennial Generation from Futurist.com [length 8:04]:

By Douglas Adams’ maxim above, even the oldest members of this generation, who were 15 in 1997, would consider the web and mobile phones that actually fit in your pocket as normal and ordinary and just a natural part of the way the world works. Members of this generation who are in university or just about to enter the job market probably can’t even remember a world where the internet and mobile phones weren’t household items.

How Millennial are You?

I followed a tweet from my friend, co-worker and fellow Generation Xer David Crow which lead me to the Pew Research Center’s How Millennial Are You? Quiz. David scored 51/100, which suggests that his tendencies fall somewhere between Generation X and Millennial. Here are my results:

I don’t know how I should feel about that score (I was born in 1967). Millennial tendencies or not, I don’t think you’re going to hear me blasting any Justin Bieber tunes out of my car anytime soon.

(Go ahead, take the quiz. If you feel like sharing, tell me your score in the comments!)

Millennials: Under the Microscope and With Mobile Phones

The quiz led me to the Pew Research Center’s study titled Millennials: A Portrait of Generation Next [1.25 MB PDF]. It’s subtitled with “Confident. Connected. Open to Change.”, and it’s a pretty interesting read if you’re the sort of person who likes to know what makes people tick (and if you know me, I’m just that sort of person). It’s also worth reading – at least parts of it are – if you’re planning to get into developing for Windows Phone 7 (and yes, any other vendor’s smartphone platform, but those don’t pay my bills).

Millennials grew up in the networked world and spent at least part of their adolescent years in the era of what Microsoft Research’s danah boyd calls “networked publics”. They’re the first “always connected” generation, having grown up with broadband, wifi and mobile devices. They’re more technophilic than previous generations, as the chart below shows:

(Note the use of the phrase “cell phone” – clearly an Xer or Boomer wrote the study.)

The stats about mobile phones are worth repeating:

88% of Millennials use their mobile phone to send text messages
80% have texted in the past 24 hours
64% have texted while driving (how you do this, I don’t even know)
Of those who’ve texted in the past 24 hours, the median number of texts they have sent and received is 20.

Here’s another observation: 83% of Millennials sleep with their mobile phones nearby, according to the chart below:

Most Millennials have a mobile phone, and many of them have the mobile as their only phone (as opposed to having a land line at home):

Millennials are also big on wireless ‘net access:

In the past 24 hours, Millennials are more likely to have watched an online video, posted a message to an online profile and played a video game than the other generations. Here’s a chart showing “Past 24 Hours” activities for various generations:

Motorola on Millennials

Given the Millennials’ technophilic tendencies, it’s not surprising that a number of high-tech companies have researched this generation. Here are a couple of videos posted by Motorola Media Center:

Microsoft on Millennials and Money

The Empire has also done some studies on Millennials. One of the most recent was on the difference between the way Boomers and Millennials deal with banks:

Millennials are much more likely than Boomers to use web banking (49% versus 35%)
See online service capabilities as important when researching a bank (54% versus 42%)
Care less about doing transactions in person at a bank branch (32% versus 44%)

Summary

Keep the Millennials in mind when you’re thinking about apps to write for Windows Phone 7. Think of the sorts of application that would appeal to people who:

Don’t think of mobile phones as just phones that fit in your pocket, but as remote controls for the world.
Send a lot of text messages, sometimes at inadvisable times.
Always have their phones close by, even when they’re asleep.
Are bigger videogame players than any previous generation.
Are more likely to have their mobile phone as their primary and sole phone.

What needs would they have? What goals would arise from those needs? What user contexts would they have, and how would you use them to filter what your apps would present to them?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, millennials, Windows Phone

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Counting Down to Seven: 7 Rules for Your Mobile Strategy

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 26, 2010
3 Comments on Counting Down to Seven: 7 Rules for Your Mobile Strategy

Welcome to another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

In an earlier article, I wrote that Brian Fling’s book, Mobile Design and Development, led me to a couple of instances where the number 7 appeared in writing on mobile development. The first was Tomi Ahonen’s thesis that mobile is the 7th mass medium.

The number 7 also appears in Chapter 5 of Mobile Design and Development, titled Developing a Mobile Strategy. In it, Fling lists seven rules for developing your own mobile strategy, which I’ve summarized below.

1. Forget what you think you know.

The mobile industry is highly competitive, evolves quickly and produces a lot of press releases full of speculation and empty promises on a scale that dwarfs that of the early dot-com days.

“Do yourself a favor and forget everything you think you know about mobile technology,” writes Fling. Instead, he suggests that you:

Ask the hard questions about your business, your customers and your development capacity without considering the latest hype about a new tool or technology.
Focus on what’s right for your user instead of simply emulating what your competitors are doing.
Forget what you think you know about mobile – it’s most likely wrong.

2. Believe what you see, not what you read.

Fling writes: “In mobile, any argument can be made, and for a few thousand dollars you can buy a
report or white paper that supports your argument.”

His suggestions include:

Mobile industry reports have a short shelf life. Anything over a year or so old is probably useless. (And you should probably ignore anything pre-iPhone other than for a good laugh.)
Ask your users questions in person, in their context, rather than relying on focus groups.
Record what your users say. “Nothing makes your case like your users’ own words.”

3. Constraints never come first.

There are many constraints in mobile development: the size of the device, processor speed, battery life, networks, business issues and so on. You will have to account for them, but if you do so too early, you might end up killing some ideas before they even get prototyped, never mind implemented.

Fling writes:

If you are concerned about the constraints of the mobile medium, know that there will always be constraints in mobile. Get over it. It isn’t a deal breaker. Just make sure you aren’t the deal breaker. Focus on strategy first, what they user needs, and lay down the features; then, if the constraints become an issue, fall back to the user goals. There is always an alternative.

4. Focus on the user’s context, goals and needs.

Here’s how Fling defines the terms:

Needs are simple. The example he uses is the need to eat. He says that our of context, goals and needs, a user’s needs are the easiest to predict if you know some basic information about the him or her.
Goals arise from needs. In his example, the goal is to get food.
Context is the user’s current state. It could be something like “I am at this location and I’m in the mood for Thai food.”

Fling’s suggested strategy for focusing on context, goals and needs:

Define the users’ context first. Without that context, you don’t have a mobile strategy, it’s just a plan of action.
Uncover the users’ goals, then try to understand how the user’s context alters those goals.
Once you know the users’ goals, find out the actions they want to take.
Look for ways to filter what you present to your users by their context.

5. You can’t support everything.

That’s right! Just stick with supporting Windows Phone 7!

But seriously: unless you’ve somehow got access to a big pool of developers to cover them all, you’re going to have to narrow down the number of devices you support – possibly even down to one. I’ll do what I can to make sure that Windows Phone 7 is the platform people want, but you need to see what platform your users are using.

Fling’s tips:

Start with the devices that your customers are using.
The most popular device or the one that’s easiest to develop for may not be the best device for your project.
If you’re converting a web application into a mobile app, look at your server logs and see what mobile devices are accessing it. Target those devices.
Go mobile phone window shopping and see what devices the stores are targeting at different types of users.

6. Don’t convert, create.

My mother, a piano player, bought an “electronic sheet music” tablet. The idea was that instead of having to keep lots of books and folders of sheet music, she could get rid of the clutter and have a convenient, easily expandable music library. Unfortunately, the device uses a standard desktop interface – actually, a sub-standard Linux window manager, not even a decent one like Gnome or KDE – and it’s a royal pain to use. Mom went back to sheet music on actual sheets of paper and the device is now gathering dust.

On the other hand, the TiVo – also a Linux device – has a great user interface. It’s designed around the way you use a TV, not around what’s easier to implement. It’s not a port of desktop TV recording software (most of which is terrible to use), but a whole new thing, and it’s better for it.

With that in mind, here are Fling’s “Don’t covert, create” tips:

Understand your user’s’ context. Knowing how, when and under what conditions your users will use your mobile app will allow you to create a better user interface and experience.
Don’t forget that mobile isn’t just a shrunken-down desktop; it’s its own thing, with its own strengths.

7. Keep it simple.

That’s simple, not stupid. People tend to use their mobile devices while they’re on the go or doing something else, so helping them get their task done is far more important that loading your mobile app with features. Mobile users have to deal with many constraints, so show restraint in the mobile products you build.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, Design, mobile, strategy, Windows Phone

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Counting Down to Seven: Charlie Kindel and the Windows Phone 7 Team’s Focus

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 24, 2010

Time for another installment of Counting Down to Seven, a series of articles about mobile app development that I’m writing as we count down the days to MIX10, when we reveal more about the up-and-coming Windows Phone 7 Series.

If you’re following what’s happening with Windows Phone 7, you should follow Charlie Kindel – both his blog and Twitter account. Charlie is one of the people behind the new “Phone 7” experience; I don’t think he’s exaggerating in his Twitter bio when he says “The future of application development for Windows Phones is in my hands.”

In his latest blog entry – Focus, Focus, Focus – he writes that the reason that Windows Phone 7 seems atypical of Microsoft is the power of “no”. The Windows Phone team didn’t just decide what they were going to build, they also decided what they were not going to build, and work around the “5P” framework of:

Purpose
Principles
Priorities
Plan
People

Here’s the Windows Phone developer experience team’s stated purpose:

Our purpose is to harness the energy, talent, and attention of developers and designers with a platform and ecosystem that delivers on the developer experience end to end; that, combined with the phone’s end-user experience, results in a winning virtuous cycle.

From that purpose, they derived some principles, among which are:

Every decision we make must be made mindful of the effect on end-users. Simply put, the end-user is king.
We will do a few things and do them very, very well; we are better off not having a capability than doing it poorly. There are always future versions.
No API will be created or documented without a clear use case; “build it and they will come” APIs almost always do nothing but create bad legacy.
We will build on the shoulders of giants; where possible integrate instead of create.
We will strive to not show our organizational boundaries to developers.

What’s truly interesting is the list of Windows Phone 7’s targeted developer segments. This is an ordered list, with the highest-priority segment listed first:

Consumer Developer – Pro Devs who build products that are sold directly or given out for free to general public end-users.
Non-Pro Developer – Non-Pro Developers building products for academic/personal use.
In-ROM Developer – Pro Devs who build products & technologies that are sold to mobile operators or device manufacturers.
Enterprise Developer –Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are sold to corporate clients and businesses.
IT Developer – Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are only for use by their own corporation.

I have often quipped that sometimes using Microsoft stuff “feels like eating from the dumpsters outside a cubicle farm”; that is, that their software targets enterprise and IT first and small-shop/indie coders like I was last. This list inverts the priorities I image the Windows Mobile team had, and my response to that is “good”.

Charlie makes a point of saying that the prioritization is temporal; over time, the priorities may change and they will serve some of the lower-priority segments, but all the while adhering to the purpose and principles listed above.

Then there’s the plan. The plan is to have Windows Phone 7 ready for the MIX conference, and it looks like that will happen. “Events,” Charlie writes, “are great forcing functions for engineering teams”.

Finally, the people. The Windows Phone 7 team is a diverse bunch coming from all across Microsoft – the Xbox people, developer division geeks as well as members from Windows Live, Exchange, Windows OS, Office and Developer and Platform Evangelism.

Go check out Charlie’s full blog entry, which describes the Windows Phone 7 team’s purpose, principles, priorities, plan and people in greater detail, and check in on him often. If you’re planning on building apps for Windows Phone 7, he’s one of the people to follow.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, Design, Windows Phone

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Counting Down to Seven: The 7th Mass Medium and its 7 Unique Qualities

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 23, 2010
3 Comments on Counting Down to Seven: The 7th Mass Medium and its 7 Unique Qualities

You’re going to have to wait a couple more weeks before I can tell you the specifics of Windows Phone 7 development. In the meantime, I thought I’d write about mobile development in general. If you’re new to mobile development, this series will be a nice overview of the field; if you’ve built apps for mobile phones before, think of it as a refresher course, but you might learn something you didn’t know before.

Mobile Design and Development, by Brian Fling

The O’Reilly book Mobile Design and Development is a worthwhile read for anyone who’s planning to build and sell mobile applications. It’s written by Brian Fling, the owner of the “mobiledesign” mailing list (which could use a little love and attention these days), advisor to big brands getting into the mobile space and someone who (according to his author bio) has “worked with a lot of well funded companies that have failed miserably”.

Mobile Design and Development is probably the best general book on mobile development available right now. You’re not going to learn any specific phone’s API from this book; instead, you’ll learn about the industry, its state as of the time the book was published (August 2009) and the sort of things you should be thinking about if you’re developing mobile apps for an audience. While the ever-changing nature of the mobile world means that some of the information in the book has a “sell-by” date, many of the ideas covered in the book will be applicable for much longer.

“The 7th Mass Medium”

By happy coincidence, the version number of our soon-to-be-unleashed mobile OS, 7, keeps popping up in discussions of mobile technology.

The number 7 makes an appearance in Mobile Design and Development’s third chapter, titled Why Mobile? In it, Fling refers to mobile technology as “The 7th Mass Medium”, an term he attributes to Tomi T. Ahonen, author of the book and blog Communities Dominate Brands.

You were probably wondering what the 6 previous mass media are. In chronological order, they’re:

Print
Sound recordings
Cinema
Radio
Television
Internet

The interesting thing about the 7th mass medium is that it encapsulates the previous 6. Although we’re only just beginning to do so, we read, listen, watch and surf on mobile devices.

The 7 Unique Qualities of the 7th Mass Medium

Man on mobile phone: "Yeah, I'm posing for a stock photo right now..." Mobile Design and Development cites an old blog entry of Ahonen’s, in which he lists 5 unique qualities of mobile as a medium. Ahonen wrote a later article, bumping that number up to 7. They’re things worth keeping in mind when you’re designing mobile apps. Depending on your point of view, some of the qualities may be good things or bad things, but no matter what you think of them, you have to account for them. They are:

1. The mobile phone is the first personal mass medium.

We share books and magazines, listen to the radio and dance to DJ en masse, watch TV shows and movies with others, and many households have a computer used by more than one person. But for most people, their mobile phone is theirs and theirs alone.

Ahonen points to a 2006 survey by the advertising agencies BBDO and Proximity in which that 63% of the people surveyed wouldn’t lend their mobile phone to anyone else.

2. The mobile phone is a permanently carried medium.

According to a Morgan Stanley survey from 2007, 91% of the respondents said that they kept the phone within a meter of them day and night, even when in the bathroom or asleep. Many people use it as the 21st century equivalent of the pocket watch, and when I travel, I’ve found it to be a very reliable alarm clock. It’s the computing, communications and media device you have with you all the time.

According to BBDO/Proximity 2006 study cited in the previous point:

People in China were choose between retrieving a forgotten wallet or phone at home; 69% chose the phone.
Women in Japan have daytime and evening phones, in the same way they have daytime and evening handbags.

3. The mobile phone is the only always-on mass medium.

There may be times when we turn off the ringer and vibrate functions, but the only time most people turn off their mobile phones is when they’re on a plane (and if you fly often, you know that many people turn on their phones moments after the plane’s wheels touch the ground). The closest any other medium comes to always-on is the internet that subset of people who keep a computer with broadband powered up all the time, followed by falling asleep with the TV or radio on.

According to BBDO/Proximity 2006 study cited in the previous point, 81% of youth between the ages of 15 and 20 sleep with their mobile phones turned on.

4. The mobile phone is the only mass medium with a built-in payment mechanism.

Between the “app store” model for delivering applications and the fact that they’re tied to a networking provider that also acts as a billing agency, mobile phones are the first mass medium with a built-in toll booth. Even people too young to have credit cards can be billed; they can pay for purchases made via their phone through their phone bill with cash.

5. The mobile phone is the only mass medium available at the point of creative inspiration.

This is a direct by-product of mobile phones being always-on and always with us. Even those of us who carry our laptops everywhere have them tucked away in a carry case or bag, and I’m the rare person who always has a camera handy. While popular with the “lifehacker” crowd, not everyone carries a Moleskine notebook for jotting down ideas. But many people carry a mobile phone in an easy-to-reach place. It lets us create content in the form of writing, photos, and audio and video recordings in near real time. This is the basis of citizen journalism (whose effects were recently felt here in Toronto during the recent “cold war” between passengers of our rapid transit system and its employees).

6. The mobile phone is the only mass medium with accurate audience measurement.

“The internet gave us a false promise,” Ahonen writes, but audience measurement wasn’t what its creators had in mind. However, the mobile phone, it’s possible to know what every subscriber does since each is uniquely tied to a specific ID.

According to Ahonen:

TV audience measurement can catch 1% of audience data
Internet audience measurement can catch 10% of audience data
Mobile phone audience measurement can catch 90% of audience data

7. The mobile phone is the only mass medium that captures the social context of media consumption.

By “social context of media consumption”, Ahonen means that with mobile phones, we can measure not just what people use, but with whom. It’s the next generation version of Amazon’s “recommendations” system and a direct result of mobile’s always-on, always-with-us, and audience measurement qualities.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags Counting Down to Seven, mobile, Windows Phone

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Windows Phone 7: Challenge Accepted!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 22, 2010
5 Comments on Windows Phone 7: Challenge Accepted!

Over at Wired’s Gadget Lab blog, there’s an article titled Microsoft’s Challenge with Windows Phone 7 is Wooing Developers. They saved the most important line for last, and in case you missed it, I’ll repeat it here:

The company plans to preview its development tools at its MIX developers conference next month.

If you can wait three weeks, you’ll get a fuller story. If you attend MIX (Monday, March 15th through Wednesday March 17th at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas), you’ll even get development tools and support!

I agree with the title of the article. Complete changes of direction and the circumstances that dictate them are never easy (but then again, that’s why I signed on with Microsoft: for the challenge). We will have to work hard to gain mobile developers’ interest and trust, and it’s quite clear that we’ll have to reach out to the same sort of independent developer coding away at a kitchen table, cafe or converted warehouse office – the kind who made the apps that made the iPhone what it is today. From what I’ve seen of the developer outreach plans for Windows Phone 7, I think it’s doable.

I’d take the quotes from the people interviewed in the article with a big grain of salt. The writer took the “cover all bases given your deadline” approach and quoted a whopping three people whose collective opinions cover the full spectrum of reactions: one positive, one negative, and one (mostly) neutral. None of their titles suggests “developer”: two are CEOs and one is a COO. The negative guy completely misses the point in his remark about hubs and a cool-looking UI, and the neutral guy seems to be drinking deeply of the anti-RIA kool-aid, dismissing technologies like Flash and Silverlight as made for desktops and not for mobile, while forgetting that other technology now considered to be mobile – like browsers and operating systems — have the same supposed limitations. They were, after all, originally made for the desktop.

I accept the challenge of wooing developers. I know what it’s like, speaking as someone who left Microsoft development in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst for other tools and technologies. But what brought me back were signs of a sea change at Microsoft, from the Xbox to SDL to its initiatives to better “get” the web to dynamic languages and much more, and I think that Windows Phone 7 is part of it.

In the end, the developer whose opinion matters most is you. To that end, I plan to use every resource at my disposal to get the toolkits, tutorials and techniques necessary for Windows Phone 7 development into your hands. I’m going to support your development beyond just the “download this, and here’s the code for Hello, World!” – expect stuff on how to build great mobile experiences, what people are looking for and how to sell your mobile apps. (And hey, if you have any ideas or suggestions, I’m open to them – drop me an email, a tweet or a comment).

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Tags challenges, Counting Down to Seven, developers, MIX10, mobile, Windows Phone