I’ve heard the back-and-forth debate about whether you should write your phone app as a native app or as a web app more times that I care to recall, but it’s never been done as well as Jason Alderman and Matthias Shapiro do it…rap battle style!

Here’s the pre-recorded version:

and in true 8 Mile style, here they are doing it live at the last Ignite Salt Lake:

By the bye, if you’re building stuff for WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone, you really should be reading Matthias’ blog, Designer Silverlight. I’ve already bookmarked it, and so should you!

And for the truly nerdcore, here are the lyrics:

Jason:
You bought three coding books for reading on your Kindle,
They never got read, the whole deal is a swindle,
Pony annual fees for app sales, then they tax it,
I’m telling you man, that app store is a racket!
You are MUCH better off with HTML–
The web page markup that I know you know well–
The latest spec lets you store data on phones
Even when offline, but the browser phones home!
Your iPhone, Android, Palm, soon Blackberry:
Local data storage! SQL! it’s no worry!

Matthias:
Cross platform apps are a real seduction
But you give up your form, and most of your function
And your app, it hobbles in the passing lane
Like a one-legged zombie but with far less brains
Running your crap on the web, no performance
Mine is greased lightning, you run like a tortoise
You don’t understand the mental model users are adopting
They don’t want to hit the web, they want one-stop shopping
Here’s how you make an application fun
Turn it on, do your thing, turn it off and you’re done

Jason:
When the iPhone came out, sure the browser was slow,
But the new smartphones? half a gigahertz or mo’
That’s faster than the box on which your mom does her taxes
Pretty snappy–WinME!–, but now it’s like molasses
In praxis? I already write scripts, it’s easy
Better than compiling native code till my teeth bleed
Time that I saved, I put in media queries,
add UserAgent switch statement, stylesheets fear me!
Custom chrome, each phone? Modus operandi.
Willy Wonka’s schooled by my custom eye candy!

Matthias:
Did that school teach usability cause I think you missed it
With apps for devices the use is holistic
Gotta look act like you belong, not draw their attention
Like a steam punker crashing an Avatar convention
Use is more than just Chrome and colors, look at navigation
Modern users look for standard gestures, menus, animations,
And what about the richness of movement & location
Do you want to surf the web or record your whole vacation?
When I tilt your web app, it’s just stuck in a groove
With my purely native code I can bust a move.

Jason:
But that’ll only improve–heck, web apps get location
And if the case came where I needed acceleration
I’d wrap my web app in the library Phonegap–

Matthias:
Excuses, excuses, You’re giving mobile a bum rap
Try adding 3D to your list of what apps do
Or write a game that’s not scrabble, chess or sudoku
And you know CSS competes with OpenGL
Like a cub scout against 10 marines with a 50 cal
Boom! 3D mushroom cloud filling the room
Now go back your text adventure version of Doom

Jason:
Sure games make money, but think of their use,
They’re casual, waiting in line at Jamba Juice,
You’re making the mistake of the hardcore PSP,
When a simple DS meets the goal just as easily
Heavy duty third-dimension graphics drain the life
Of your battery, more than the scripts I’m paid to write.
But, hey, if you want 3-D page flip transitions,
Perspective transforms of element positions,
Web apps can do that, CSS has you covered,
To your Mel Gibson, C-S-S is Danny Glover!
(I’m too old for this!)

Matthias:
CSS animations, are you out of your gourd?
That’s a terrible sin in the eyes of the web lord.
Every time I bring up something hard
You just dance around it, pulling out your library card
Or some spec or framework only halfway done
As if javascript and CSS are rainbows and fun
Look, there’s only one way that this thing can go
Build your web apps for free or jump into the cash flow
Advertising won’t help you survive
But just one little iFart can get you set for life
No app store, no eyeballs, no business plan.
Making just enough dough to pay the rent on your trash can
I hate to play the role of Scrooge McDuck
But without a good market you’re pretty much… well, you know

Jason:
Trash can? Your app waits in limbo for a month,
You’re stuck eating ramen, watching reruns of Monk.
Your funk? Only lifted if the app store approves it
And we both know the king of the process is ruthless!
The truth is, even if it does get approved
There’s a chance that your make-it-rich dream comes unglued
When a bug in your app that slipped through the process
Makes users hate it, they leave lots of comments,
And you fix it real quick, test patches and submit it
But it still takes a month, so your app gets attritted
From all the top ten lists, losing all worth,
It’s a digital coaster, like "Battlefield Earth"!
My apps sell anywhere, and update on the fly.
You can’t have your cake OR eat it, ’cause the cake is a lie.

Thanks to John Bristowe for finding this!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Say the word “silicon” and chances are, you’ll think of technology. After all, silicon’s relationship to tech – it’s part of what makes transistors and chips – has been part of popular culture for decades, from the “Silicon chip inside her head” opening line from the Boomtown Rats’ song I Don’t Like Mondays to “Silicon Valley” as the nickname for the suburban expanse between San Francisco and San Jose.

Silicon is only part of the equation, however. The chips that drive our computers, mobile phones and assorted electronica are actually a “layer cake” consisting not only of silicon, but also oxide and metal.

There’s also the matter of key non-chip components like capacitors, which momentarily store an electrical charge. They’re made of thin layers of conductive metal separated by a thin layer of insulator. We use their “buffering” capabilities to smooth out “spiky” electrical currents, filter through signal interference, pick out a specific frequency from a spectrum of them and other “cleaning up” operations.

One of the metals used in the manufacture of capacitors is tantalum, which you can extract from a metal ore called coltan, whose name is short for “columbite-tantalite”. About 20% of the world’s supply of tantalum comes from Congo, and proceeds of from the sale of coltan are how their warlords – the scum driving the world’s most vicious conflict, and who’ve turned the country into the rape capital of the world – are bankrolled.

Nichloas Kristof of the New York Times wrote about metals like tantalum purchased from Congo – conflict metals – in an op-ed yesterday:

I’ve never reported on a war more barbaric than Congo’s, and it haunts me. In Congo, I’ve seen women who have been mutilated, children who have been forced to eat their parents’ flesh, girls who have been subjected to rapes that destroyed their insides. Warlords finance their predations in part through the sale of mineral ore containing tantalum, tungsten, tin and gold. For example, tantalum from Congo is used to make electrical capacitors that go into phones, computers and gaming devices.

Electronics manufacturers have tried to hush all this up. They want you to look at a gadget and think “sleek,” not “blood.”

Yet now there’s a grass-roots movement pressuring companies to keep these “conflict minerals” out of high-tech supply chains. Using Facebook and YouTube, activists are harassing companies like Apple, Intel and Research in Motion (which makes the BlackBerry) to get them to lean on their suppliers and ensure the use of, say, Australian tantalum rather than tantalum peddled by a Congolese militia.

He also points to the Enough Project’s latest video, which used humour and a reference to the “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” TV commercials to draw the public’s attention to conflict metals and to encourage them to contact electronics manufacturers and ask them to be more vigilant when sourcing components:

The Enough Project says that auditing component supply chains at the smelters to see whether the metal was sources from “clean” places like Australia or Canada instead of lining the pockets of Congolese warlords would add about one cent to the price of a cellphone, and that this figure originates from within the industry. I’d happily pay a thousand times that for each of my devices – a mere ten bucks – to ensure that I wasn’t bankrolling rape and murder.

I’ll close this post with the closing paragraph from Kristof’s op-ed:

We may be able to undercut some of the world’s most brutal militias simply by making it clear to electronics manufacturers that we don’t want our beloved gadgets to enrich sadistic gunmen. No phone or tablet computer can be considered “cool” if it may be helping perpetuate one of the most brutal wars on the planet.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

“Truck Nutz” let you communicate to the world that you’re a bold and sassy guy in a way that words just can’t convey, but what if you don’t have a truck? For that Truck Nutz message without truck ownership, this iPhone case might fit the bill:

Cartoonist Chris Onstad came up with this idea back in January 2006 with this surreal and funny Achewood comic in which Ray Smuckles comes up with “ChatSacks”:

If someone will make one for a Windows Phone 7 device, I’ll buy one of those cases.

Windows Phone 7 is coming soon, and we’re holding a couple of full-day workshops to show you its underlying architecture, walk you through its development frameworks, show you how to build apps with Visual Studio Express and sell them in the Marketplace, and then hold a codefest – and yes, it’s free-as-in-beer to attend!

We’re holding two of these workshops, which Yours Truly along with Paul Laberge and Jamie Wakeam will be co-hosting:

• In Mississauga, Ontario (at Microsoft Canada’s headquarters) next Wednesday, June 23rd
• In Richmond, British Columbia (at the Microsoft Development Centre) next Friday, June 25th

Here’s the agenda:

Want in on these workshops? As I said earlier, they’re free – just click the links below to sign up:

• Click here to register for the Mississauga Windows Phone 7 workshop (Wednesday, June 23)
• Click here to register for the Richmond Windows Phone 7 workshop (Friday, June 25)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Sometimes, you have to do more than just start from scratch. Sometimes, you have to burn the boats.

“Burning the boats” is an expression that comes from a story – some say legend — about Cortes, the Spanish Conquistador (and yes, the subject of Neil Young’s Cortez the Killer). Wishing to guarantee that his men would stay in Veracruz (which he’d just taken over from the Governor of Cuba) and only move forward into terra incognita without retreat, he ordered them to burn the ships that brought them to the New World. It was an extreme measure, but without the distraction of a way home, they committed themselves completely to business of exploring and conquering.

The Original Mac: No Arrow Keys

Bruce “Tog” Tognazzini, former user interface guy at Apple and the company formerly known as Sun, and now member of the Nielsen/Norman Group, wrote about how Apple burned the boats back when they released the original Macintosh in his 1992 book Tog on Interface and more recently in an article on his blog, AskTog.

In 1984, the Macintosh represented a break from the dominant paradigm at the time: the command-line interface. Back then, you’d issue commands to a program these ways:

• Typing them in
• Using control-key combinations
• Using function keys
• Using the arrow keys to navigate

Software developers at the time had little experience developing for GUIs, which meant that there would be great temptation for them to simply develop apps for the Mac the way they did for other platforms. The software they’d end up writing would be a command-line app that just happened to run on the Mac.

Steve Jobs and Apple’s Macintosh team, an unconventional bunch who were said to have nary a classical computer science degree among them, thought that existing software sucked. I was 16 at the time, and I’d have to agree. In order to prevent straight ports of existing software to the Mac, they decided to “burn the boats” and make it difficult for developers to “go home” and simply rely on the UI techniques from the Old World. The first Mac keyboards didn’t just omit the function keys, they also left out the arrow keys:

Tog writes:

That was a big deal. Almost every application then in existence depended on the arrow keys (then called cursor keys) for navigation. With that one stroke, Steve reduced the number of apps that could be easily ported to the Mac from tens of thousands to zero, ensuring that this new computer would have a long and painful childhood.

It’s counterintuitive to want to have your creation go through a long and painful childhood, but there was a method to their madness. In “burning the boats” by getting rid of the function and arrow keys on which developers relied and taking away their “way home”, they forced developers to redesign and rewrite their applications to fit a mouse-driven graphical interface rather than a keyboard-driven command-line interface.

They eventually brought back the arrow keys about a year and a half later. By that point, developers had grown used to developing GUI apps that took advantage of the UI controls and mouse that we’ve come to know and love. The return of the arrow keys at that point would now be a welcome addition and convenience, rather than a dangerous temptation to return to “the old ways”.

It was a bold move, but when you’re making radical changes to the way things are done, bold moves are often required.

Windows Phone 7: No Copy and Paste

There’s been some talk about Windows Phone 7’s lack of copy and paste. It’s similar to the hue and cry about the original iPhone’s lack of copy and paste, and having been reminded by Tog’s article about the design decisions made for the original Mac, I can see the method to Microsoft’s madness.

“Copy and paste already exists in Windows,” people have said, “why not Windows Phone 7?”

The answer is simple: because Windows Phone 7 apps aren’t supposed to be like Windows apps. For non-enterprise, non-industrial use, the “Windows, but scaled down” approach of previous versions of Windows for phones, which goes under the name Windows Mobile, didn’t catch on (Windows Mobile still rules the roost for compact devices used in enterprises and industries, and will be supported for years to come). Hence Albert Shum’s completely different-from-the-desktop, and even different-from-other-phones Windows Phone 7 interface, which went by the codename “Metro”.

The use of copy and paste implies a keyboard-centric user interface, which isn’t what Windows Phone 7 is about. People often use their smartphones one-handed, with only their thumb to access the touchscreen. Windows Phone 7’s interface takes this usage into account, which is why it’s sensor-centric, and applications, should get their information from touch, gestures, accelerometers, location and other sensors where possible. By not including copy and paste in the first release, the Windows Phone team is “burning the boats” and asking developers “How do you write apps so that they don’t need intricate more-suited-to-the-desktop operations like copy and paste?”

(And yes, copy and paste will eventually find its way into Windows Phone 7, just as the arrow keys, function keys and even right-clicking found their way into the Mac.)

The same could be said for many other things that were purposely excluded from Windows Phone 7, such as the compact edition of SQL Server that was part of Windows Mobile. If you think about it, this design decision forces you to build apps so they store and retrieve data from the network, which makes sense, since phones are devices that network with both cellular and wifi.

Windows Phone 7 represents a radical shift in the way Microsoft stuff works, from a very minimalistic look to its task-centric organization. In order to make sure that people built apps that fit it, the Windows Phone 7 team had to burn the boats. It’s a bold move, but it’s the right one.

Photo courtesy of M Thru F.

I assume that someone did this using this trick.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I’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.

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.

If 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.

Don’t have Silverlight? Get it here or download the video in
MP4, WMA, WMV, WMV (High) or Zune format.

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.

We’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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

A 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

1. Print
2. Sound recordings
3. Cinema
4. Radio
5. Television
6. 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

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.

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.

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 that Microsoft’s reworked-from-the-ground-up mobile phone OS will provide. As part of a team of evangelists who were picked to champion WP7, I’m looking forward to getting my feet wet developing for this new platform and sharing what I learn with all of you.

As good as the early indications are – the demos are impressive, and this is likely the first time that anything made by The Empire been described as “soulful” – WP7’s introduction won’t be without some significant challenges. As far as current-generation smartphones go, WP7 is a late entry into a fiercely competitive market featuring a rival who can boast about having an impressive 100,000 applications in its store. There’s the matter of the wait; the 7 Series phones won’t hit the market until later this year, and in the meantime, the Esteemed Competition will be releasing new models. There will also be the cries of “Too little, too late,” from the people who observed Microsoft squander an early lead with smartphones (I can understand the argument for “late”, but having seen some advance inside info on what these babies can do, “little” is not a valid argument).

The Real Challenge

I think that the biggest challenge is going to be creating a new Windows Phone culture. I believe that one of the problems with the developer culture surrounding the old Windows Mobile was that they treated the mobile phone as simply a shrunken-down version of the desktop. As I’ve written before, the desktop is what made Microsoft a successful company, but it’s also turned into an albatross that has impeded forward movement. The company built their mobile OS in a specific way with a specific design philosophy for a specific audience: “suits”. The developers took their cues from those decisions and built applications to match. The end result wasn’t pretty in any way: business-wise, functionally or aesthetically.

We – that’s both Microsoft as well as the development community that we want to gather around Windows Phone 7 — need to create a culture that “gets” the smartphone and cares about software craftsmanship, both in the underlying programming as well as in the user experience. I want to see a development culture that encourages both technical and design chops, the way that the iPhone community does, as well as that the way web app developers like 37signals do. I want Windows Phone to set the standard for mobile applications.

To that end, I decided to write this series – Counting Down to Seven – as a way to get developers to start thinking about mobile applications. I’ve been looking at applications written for the Esteemed Competition’s phones, books and articles on mobile development for other platforms and ideas from the world of user interface and user experience design as well as from science fiction (a long-standing source of ideas for neat-o devices that fit in your pocket). My hope is to convince you not just to write apps for Windows Phone 7, but also to write apps that redefine mobile computing, do interesting and useful stuff and delight our users.

Take a Walk on the Phone Side

There’s a mobile app that was designed by Lou Reed. Yes, that Lou Reed – the guitarist, vocalist and songwriter for the Velvet Underground, then Mr. Walk on the Wild Side and more recently, Mr. Laurie Anderson.

The app is called Lou Zoom, and although he didn’t implement it (that job went to Ben Syverson), he came up with the idea and co-designed it. That’s the sort of excitement that I’d like to see behind Windows Phone 7: so full of possibilities that even people who’d never think of designing applications start doing just that.

The idea behind Lou Zoom is quite simple: it’s a contact manager app, like the Contacts app that comes with the iPhone. The difference is that it has a couple of tweaks, no doubt born out of frustration with the current app. I’ve listed the tweaks below:

Tweak #1: Easy-to-Read Contact List

In the standard Contacts app, the list of contacts is shown as a standard list, with all entries the same size. In Lou Zoom, the list of contacts has variable-sized names: each name in Helvetica Neue, with the font size increased so that it is fills the width of the screen. Here’s a screen shot taken from the Lou Zoom page:

This design might make the sort of designers who prize uniformity cringe, but think about this: phones have small screens and are often used in less-than-ideal reading conditions. If you’re going to remain under 30 forever, are guaranteed to always have 20/20 vision and vow to always remain stationary and alone in a well-lit room, you don’t need this feature. For the rest of us – including me, a guy in his early forties with standard issue Asian myopia, who finds himself squinting more and more at small type, who often uses his phone from places like dimly-lit cabs going over potholes at breakneck speeds or in crowded, dimly-lit conference spaces and having had a couple of caesars – this user interface tweak is very helpful indeed.

Tweak #2: Easy-to-Read Contact Pages

Just as the contacts are listed in nice big type, so is the info on each contact page:

As with the contact list, Lou Zoom goes for legibility and displays the information in large type. It goes one step further by displaying the text in high contrast. If the contact has multiple addresses, phone numbers or email address, a left or right swipe over the appropriate field will give you those alternates.

An Aside: Windows Phone 7’s People Profiles

The “Profile” page in Windows Phone 7’s “People” hub takes an approach that is stylistically similar to the way Lou Zoom displays contact info:

…but it takes a markedly different approach to which items are displayed prominently. Windows Phone 7’s design is centered around what you want to do rather than with just throwing information at you. For example, the actions “call mobile”, “text mobile” and “call home” are in large type, while the person’s mobile and home numbers are in smaller text. This is a good idea — after all, what you really want to do is reach someone, not look up their phone number. The “address book” paradigm is a holdover from the days when phones weren’t smart enough to dial themselves.

Tweak #3: Search on Any Part of the Name

The standard Contacts app has a simple search function. Type in j and it will immediately present you with a list of all names in your contacts beginning with “j” (ignoring case, of course). If you expand that j to become john, you’ll get a list of all the names in your contacts beginning with “john”. The Contacts app will apply the search term you provide only to the leftmost end of the names in your contacts:

Lou Zoom improves on search by letting you search on any part of the name. Typing in john gives you a list of all the names in your contacts containing “john” in any part of the name, such as “John Smith”, “Alice Johnson” or “Olivia Newton-John”.

The Lou Zoom site provides its own example:

Has Kate Bell recently become Kate Appleseed-Bell? Searching for "Bell" will still bring up her name in Lou Zoom. From there, her full info is just a tap away.

It’s also great for searching for people by nickname. For instance, typing in mclovin into Lou Zoom’s search will give you the name of your buddy, who’s listed in your contacts as Christopher “McLovin’” Fogell.

What Can You Tweak?

It’s time to take a page from Lou Reed’s book and find apps that could benefit from a little tweaking. Look around at mobile apps and if you find yourself and other people saying “if only it did this”. Those are opportunities! The best applications aren’t always brand-new paradigm-shattering ideas; sometimes they’re old ones with a couple of tweaks.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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 John Bristowe pointed me to this Joy of Tech comic which attempts to ratiocinate the etymology of this unwieldy appellation:

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 Director of Microsoft’s Mobile Experience Design Team. True to my earlier statement that Canadian techies have been punching well above their weight class since Alexander Graham Bell, Albert studied engineering and architecture at the University of Waterloo.

Here’s a video featuring Albert talking about the design philosophies behind the completely reworked from-the-ground-up Windows Phone 7. It’s featured in the Microsoft News Centre article Windows Phone Designer Seeks the Right Balance.

I like what he says at the end of the video:

What will our users see first? I think hopefully they’ll see themselves in the phone. I think that’s a really key part of how we designed it. It’s really focused on making this phone your phone. We took the idea of making it personal, so that when you look at the start experience, it’s about your content. It’s about your people, it’s your pictures, it’s your music, it’s presented way up there.

My phone is going to be different than your phone, and I think that’s a really key part: that personalized way of navigating the thing that you care about, the things that you want to share, the things you want to listen to, and those are the key moments where we first present that it’s your phone.

If you’re thinking up ideas for applications to write for Windows Phone, keep what Albert says in mind: it’s not about feature lists; it’s all about the user and the user experience.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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 Hoffman, ISV Group Manager
• Paul Laberge, Web Platform Evangelist
• John Oxley, Director, Audience Marketing and my manager
• Mark Relph, Senior Director, Windows Ecosystem (and former Developer and Platform Evangelism Lead)
• Jamie Wakeam, ISV Architect Evangelist
• Yours Truly, Joey deVilla, Developer Evangelist and guy with accordion

Hope to see you there!

What is MIX10?

MIX10 is the 2010 edition of MIX, Microsoft’s most “right-brained” conference. Its area of focus is on the web and other technologies that aren’t the desktop, which is traditionally where Microsoft “lives”, as well as on design, usability, information architecture and user experience. Silverlight made its first appearance here, under the less-wieldy name of WPF/E (“WPF Everywhere”), as have improved versions of Internet Explorer. Expect some interesting stuff at MIX this year!

Here’s a list of the topics that will be covered at MIX10:

The Full Monty on Windows Phone Development

Glaringly absent from yesterday’s Windows Phone 7 Series announcement made at Mobile World Conference in Barcelona was the “how”: that is, how do you develop apps for Windows Phone 7?

That question will be answered at MIX10 (March 15th – 17th in Las Vegas) in a number of ways.

If you go to MIX10, you will get the following:

• Access to a track dedicated to Windows Phone 7 Series platform
• An introduction to Windows Phone 7 Series’ development platform
• Tutorials on how to work with the Windows Phone 7 Series’ development tools
• A tour of the Windows Phone Marketplace
• And last – but certainly not least — access to the Windows Phone 7 Series developer tools!

The Hallway Opportunity

I’ve always believed that one of the marks of a good conference is the hallway. By “hallway”, I’m talking about the opportunities to meet people in those times and places between and after sessions. There’s something to meeting people in person that you don’t get online; hence the often-used saying “you had to be there”. MIX promises to have good hallway, partly because of the Microsoft teams who’ll be presenting some interesting new stuff and partly because the crowd is going to be a mixed bag of developer types, designer types and the type of people who like to straddle both worlds (I like to think of myself in that category).

Go!

MIX10 takes place at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, from Monday, March 15th through Wednesday, March 17th. If you register before February 21st, you’ll get a $200 discount off the MIX10 admission fee. Do it now!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

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, much smaller”, was the wrong approach. In the meantime, the Esteemed Competition were doing the right thing: designing their phones’ OS features and interface from the ground up rather than attempting to force-fit the desktop UI into a pocket UI.

Today at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft previewed the latest in a series of steps forward – consider Xbox to Xbox 360, Windows Vista to Windows 7, Live Search to Bing – there’s now Windows Phone 7 Series.

(The name’s a bit long. Whoever does the naming at Microsoft corporate HQ must get paid by the syllable.)

A Quick Look at Windows Phone’s Experience

A good starting point is this video, which covers Windows Phone’s features in three minutes, thirty seconds:

You can take an interactive tour of the UI at the Windows Phone 7 Series site:

A Closer Look at the Windows Phone Experience

Over at Channel 9, Laura Foy has posted her interview with Joe Belfiore, VP Windows Phone 7 Program Management, who gave her a walkthrough of the goodies in Windows Phone (the video is 22 minutes, 18 seconds):

Some quick notes from the video:

• There are three mandatory hardware buttons, which are context-sensitive:
  • Back
  • Windows (the “Start” button)
  • Search
• The screen is a capacitive touch-screen, capable of supporting multi-touch
• The Start menu is built up of tiles: little block representing the information and features that you care most about
  • You can add your own custom tiles; Joe shows a “me” tile linked to his Facebook profile
• A browser with:
  • Snappy performance
  • Support for multitouch actions such as pinch zoom, double-tap to zoom and finger drag
  • Very readable text, that to sub-pixel positioning in HTML
  • Phone number recognition in HTML documents; touch them to dial them
  • Street address recognition in HTML documents; touch them to get a map
  • Multiple tabs
• The “People Hub”
  • Aggregates Exchange, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and other mail contacts
  • Provides a live feed of your contacts
• Context-sensitive search:
  • Press the “Search” button while in the People Hub, and you search your people list
  • Press the “Search” button while in the Start menu, and it runs a web search
    • Based on your query, it knows whether to give you a web search result or a local search result
    • In the demo, Joe does a search for pizza and gets a map and results for pizzerias near him, and a quick pan over to adjacent pages yield directions and reviews
    • A tap on “nearby” yield the locations of useful things like parking, ATMs and so on near the selected pizzeria
    • In another demo search, Joe does a search for “Avatar” and it returns a list of nearby theatres and times for the movie Avatar; a quick pan to an adjacent page yields the results for local business and places with “Avatar” in the name
• Email:
  • Easy pivoting between unread, flagged and urgent emails
  • A caching system prevents you from seeing the dreaded “loading” screen
  • Press “Search” within email and you perform a search of your email messages, by subject, text and so on
• Rotation: you can operate the phone in “portrait” or “landscape” mode
• Calendar:
  • Support for both work and personal calendars
• ActiveSync works in the background and keeps the phone synced with email, contacts and calendar
• User-customizable UI colour schemes
• The “Pictures Hub”
  • Gallery: Lets you browse all the pictures on your phone
  • Mosaic: Recent and favourite pictures
  • What’s New: New photos from your social networks
  • Camera roll: A folder for photos taken with your phone
  • Support for photo albums from Facebook and Windows Live, which you browse as if they lived right on your phone
• Music and Video
  • History: Most recently played music and videos
  • New: New music and videos added since the last sync
  • Zune HD-style marketplace searching and support for Zune subscriptions with unlimited music plays
• The “Me” tile
  • Lets you update your status on places like Facebook
  • Nice little typing features like auto-spelling-correction and a special soft keyboard for emoticons
• The UI concept: Windows Phone is task-centric, not app-centric, with a hub associated with each: people, photos, media
• There’s also a games hub, which ties into Xbox Live
• Third-party applications and games? Wait…

Wait a Minute…What About Third-Party Apps and Games?

Can you wait a month?

Here’s the deal: the announcement at Mobile World Congress was about showing what Windows Phone can do. As for what’s possible on the developer front, it’ll all be announced at the MIX10 Conference, which takes place from March 15th through 17th in Las Vegas.

There will be a dozen sessions at MIX10 for Windows Phone, and they promise to be quite interesting. I’ll be at MIX10, and will blog what I learn from these sessions when they take place.

You can save $200 off the price of MIX10 registration if you register before February 21st, so if you want to get in on the ground floor with Windows Phone and save some money, register now!

What the Tech Press is Saying

Pretty good stuff, actually. Rather than bury you with links to a zillion blog entries filed from Mobile World Congress, I thought I’d pick two of the big tech blogs, Gizmodo and Engadget:

Here’s what Gizmodo has to say about the new Windows Phone:

It’s different. The face of Windows Phone 7 is not a rectangular grid of thumbnail-sized glossy-looking icons, arranged in a pattern of 4×4 or so, like basically every other phone. No, instead, an oversized set of bright, superflat squares fill the screen. The pop of the primary colors and exaggerated flatness produces a kind of cutting-edge crispness that feels both incredibly modern and playful. Text is big, and beautiful. The result is a feat no phone has performed before: Making the iPhone’s interface feel staid.

If you want to know what it feels like, the Zune HD provides a taste: Interface elements that run off the screen; beautiful, oversized text and graphics; flipping, panning, scrolling, zooming from screen to screen; broken hearts. Some people might think it’s gratuitous, but I think it feels natural and just…fun. There’s an incredible sense of joie de vivre that’s just not in any other phone. It makes you wish that this was aesthetic direction all of Microsoft was going in.

Here are Engadget’s impressions, after having some hands-on time with Windows Phone:

The design and layout of 7 Series’ UI (internally called Metro) is really quite original, utilizing what one of the designers (Albert Shum, formerly of Nike) calls an "authentically digital" and "chromeless" experience. What does that mean? Well we can tell you what it doesn’t mean — no shaded icons, no faux 3D or drop shadows, no busy backgrounds (no backgrounds at all), and very little visual flair besides clean typography and transition animations. The whole look is strangely reminiscent of a terminal display (maybe Microsoft is recalling its DOS roots here) — almost Tron-like in its primary color simplicity. To us, it’s rather exciting. This OS looks nothing like anything else on the market, and we think that’s to its advantage. Admittedly, we could stand for a little more information available within single views, and we have yet to see how the phone will handle things like notifications, but the design of the interface is definitely in a class of its own.

(In another article, Engadget simply summed it up with “Microsoft is playing to win”.)

Watch this Space!

We’ll have more announcements about Windows Phone over the next few weeks, so keep an eye on this blog!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.