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Hardware and Gadgets

Reporting from MIX10 Tomorrow!

by Joey deVilla on March 14, 2010

Windows Phone 7 @ MIX10: Reports on the new hotness from MIX10 in Las VegasI’m in Las Vegas to attend the MIX10 conference, Microsoft’s conference for both developers and designers. This year’s MIX conference, which runs from Monday March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th, is a hotly-anticipated one, thanks the fact that Microsoft will be making announcements about Internet Explorer 9 and Windows Phone 7 Series.

As the Canadian Developer Evangelist charged with the responsibility of promoting Windows Phone 7 to small and independent developers (who make up the lion’s share of the people who write smartphone apps), I’ve been writing about Windows Phone 7 and mobile development in general in the series Counting Down to Seven. I plan to continue writing about Windows Phone 7 from several angles, including:

  • Writing software for the phone, both on the phone end and well as in the cloud
  • Creating compelling mobile user experiences
  • Ideas, both sane and wacky, for mobile applications
  • Lessons to learn from the successes and failures of other smartphone vendors
  • The mobile industry in general

I’ve just come from an all-day hush-hush closed-door set of presentations covering the details of Windows Phone 7 and the tools and technologies that drive it. I’m impressed by what I saw. I can’t say much right now, and you’ll find out from me (and many other sources) tomorrow, but I can tell you this: Windows Phone 7 is cooler than the other side of the pillow.

Keep an eye on this blog over the next couple of days: there’s going to be a lot of information – and more! — from MIX10, and lots of useful information about developing for Windows Phone 7 over the next few months!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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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.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeIf you’re a developer itching to get started writing apps for Windows Phone 7, you’re going to want to follow Charlie Kindel’s blog and Twitter stream (as well as Yours Truly and this blog, of course). Charlie’s one of the developers on the Windows Phone team, and while he won’t be delivering the first presentation on WP7 at MIX10 (Windows Phone’s VP Program Management Joe Belfiore will do that), he’ll be delivering the first technical presentation later that day.

The video above shows an interview that’s as informal as it gets. It’s a hand-held camera interview featuring CNET’s Ina Fried and Charlie on the Embarcadero in San Francisco, talking about what Windows Phone 7 will be like for developers, with Charlie demonstrating on his Windows Phone 7 prototype. I’d love to get my grubby paws on one of those!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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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.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeWe’re a week away from the start of the MIX10 conference! I like to refer to this as Microsoft’s most “right-brained” gathering, as its target audience and topic isn’t just developers and writing software, but designers, design and user experience.

With designers and design in mind, it’s only fitting that I show you a video featuring Nic Fillingham interviewing a couple of Microsoft User Experience gurus who also hail from Canada:

  • Bill Buxton: He’s a Principal Researcher for Microsoft Research, and before that, he was Chief Scientist at Alias Wavefront and a professor at University of Toronto. And I’m pleased to report that he got his bachelor’s degree – in music – from my alma mater, Crazy Go Nuts University (which some of you may know as Queen’s University). He was the guy who thought of applying Fitts’ Law to human-computer interaction, did some pioneering work with multi-touch interfaces and invented the pie menu (which means that we owe weapon selection in Saints Row 2 and the full combat/spellcasting system in Dragon Age: Origins to him).
  • Albert Shum: He’s the Director of Mobile Experience Design for Windows Phone 7. Albert’s from Winnipeg, studied engineering and architecture at University of Waterloo and went on to do design work at Nike before joining Microsoft. You can watch a video showing him talking about the new Windows Phone 7 experience and the thinking behind it in a previous article of mine, Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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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 my last article in the Counting Down to Seven series, I showed you Platformer, the game starter kit that comes with XNA, the toolset/framework for developing games for Windows, XBox and Zune:

image

Let me now show you this – Platformer running on Windows Phone 7:

That’s Microsoft’s Eric Rudder, Senior VP Technical Strategy demoing Platformer at the TechEd Middle East conference. Not only does Platformer play on Windows Phone, Windows, XBox and Zune, but he also demoed saving the game state on the phone and resuming it from the saved state on an Xbox 360.

Eric also showed that even though Platformer runs on a number of platforms, it’s based on a single codebase with slight platform-specific tweaks for the platforms it targets. This isn’t new: XNA has been about targeting Windows and Xbox 360 from the very beginning, and with version 3.0, the Zune was added to the set of target platforms.

Take a look at this screenshot of the Solution Explorer from Visual Studio 2008 with XNA 3.1 with a Platformer solution loaded. Note how the solution has three projects, one each for targeting Windows. Xbox 360 and Zune:

image

All three games share the same sounds, but the Windows and Xbox 360 versions use a set of higher-resolution graphics while the Zune version uses a lower-resolution set.

XNA also makes use of compiler directives to handle the differences between platforms. For example, here’s a code snippet from Platformer from the Player class, which manages the player’s character in the game:

#if ZUNE
        // Constants for controling horizontal movement
        private const float MoveAcceleration = 7000.0f;
        private const float MaxMoveSpeed = 1000.0f;
        private const float GroundDragFactor = 0.38f;
        private const float AirDragFactor = 0.48f;

...

#else
        // Constants for controling horizontal movement
        private const float MoveAcceleration = 14000.0f;
        private const float MaxMoveSpeed = 2000.0f;
        private const float GroundDragFactor = 0.58f;
        private const float AirDragFactor = 0.65f;

...

#endif

Note how the Zune version has scaled-down values of those used in the Windows and Xbox 360 versions. That’s to account for the Zune’s smaller screen.

XNA on Windows Phone 7, with the ability to save game state on one platform and resume playing on another opens up a world of “ubiquitous gaming” possibilities. I hope that this will bring about some interesting mobile games and bring some attention to the XNA, which I always felt was underappreciated.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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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.

"Counting Down to Seven" badgeA report from Nielsen – as in the ratings company that got their start with television – says that women use mobile devices for social networking more than men do and that the lion’s share of mobile social networking isn’t done by Millennials (see the previous article in this series).

First, the women: 55% of the people in their study who said that they use social networking software and sites on their mobile phone were women, while the remaining 45% were men:

men-women-mobile-social

Second, age: according to Nielsen’s study, the age group who used their mobile devices to social network the most were between the ages of 35 and 54, closely followed by the 25 – 34 group.

social-mobile-by-age

More stuff to consider as you think of applications to build for Windows Phone 7: what are you writing for women between the ages of 25 to 54?

This article appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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Counting Down to Seven: Millennials and Mobile

March 2, 2010

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 [...]

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Counting Down to Seven: 7 Rules for Your Mobile Strategy

February 26, 2010
Cover of

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 [...]

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

February 23, 2010
Mobile Design and Development

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.
You’re going to have to wait a couple more weeks before I can tell you the [...]

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Windows Phone 7: Challenge Accepted!

February 22, 2010
Hands holding a Win 7 phone

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 [...]

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Counting Down to Seven: Lou Reed, Mobile App Designer

February 22, 2010
Lou Reed

Three Weeks to Go!
We’re three weeks away from the day when a lot more about Windows Phone 7 will be revealed. On Monday, May 15th, the MIX10 conference in Las Vegas is expected to open with a bang as developers and designers will learn about “WP7’s” programming and design models as well as the opportunities [...]

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“Our Fine Tradition of Clumsy Names”

February 17, 2010

Nice phone, shame about the name.
As I quipped in an earlier post, the name “Windows Phone 7 Series” is a bit long, and suggests that the people who do Microsoft’s branding get paid by the syllable. This is the sort of left-brain-lopsided mindset that has produced names like “Windows Server 2008 R2”.
My fellow Developer Evangelist [...]

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Albert Shum on Windows Phone 7

February 17, 2010
Albert Shum

Whenever Microsoft needs to make a radical change in the way they do things, they bring in a hip Asian guy. That’s why they’ve got me shaking things up on Microsoft Canada’s Tech Evangelism Team, and it’s also why Albert Shum is redefining the way Microsoft does mobile phones in his role as the [...]

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Are You Going to MIX10?

February 16, 2010
MIX10 logo

Are you Canadian and going to the MIX10 Conference?
If you’re going to MIX10, let me know, either in the comments or via email. A number of us from Microsoft Canada will be there and we’d love to catch up with you!
Among the Canadian contingent going to Vegas are:

Gladstone Grant, Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead
Allan [...]

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Windows Phone 7 Series: Now That’s More Like It!

February 15, 2010
Windows Phone 7 Series generic phone

A New Windows for the Phone
Ever since joining The Empire, I’ve been saying that Windows Mobile needs to go back to the drawing board. While there was good technology lying in its innards – mobile versions of the .NET framework, SQL Server and Office – treating the mobile form factor as “the desktop, but much, [...]

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Netbook Experiment Report #1

January 18, 2010
The Netbook Experiment

In case you hadn’t read my article from Friday, I’m conducting a little experiment this week – I’m seeing what it’s like to use a “netbook“ computer (a Dell Latitude 2100, to be specific) as my primary machine for the whole week. I’m trying this out as a response to Jeff “Coding Horror” Atwood’s article, [...]

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