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.

The Game Developers Conference is a good time to make game development announcements, and that we did: version 4.0 of XNA Game Studio, Microsoft’s framework and toolset for easier game development. Here’s what it means in a nutshell:

• No matter whether you develop with managed or unmanaged code, it’s what you’ll use for game development on Windows Phone 7.
• You’ll create better mobile games faster, thanks to a powerful and comprehensive set of tools.
• Xbox LIVE comes to mobile, meaning that you can take advantage of the Xbox’s popular gaming social network.
• For those of you already building games with XNA, you’ve got a brand new platform, and it’s one that you take everywhere you go.

You’re going to see all sorts of details about XNA Game Studio 4.0 over the next couple of weeks, and here are some of the best places to get them…

Follow the “Seven Samurai”

By “Seven Samurai”, I’m referring to the Windows Phone 7 Series development team:

• Charlie Kindel (blog | Twitter)
• Shawn Hargreaves (blog | Twitter)
• Andre Vrignaud (blog | Twitter)
• Anand Iyer (blog | Twitter)
• Christian Schormann (blog | Twitter)
• Loke Uei (blog | Twitter)
• Michael Klucher (blog | Twitter)

Check Out These Sites

• Michael Klucher’s blog entry, Achievement Unlocked: XNA Game Studio 4.0 for Windows Phone
• The Official Microsoft Blog: Game Developers Have a Great Opportunity with Windows Phone 7 Series.
• Keep an eye on XNA Creators Club Online’s “News” page.
• Follow the Windows Phone Developer Blog.
• Don’t forget the MIX10 conference site, which will have a lot of information from the presentations.
• ZDNet has assembled a team to cover the MIX10 conference, where all  will be revealed. The people covering it: Ed Bott, Mary Jo Foley, Kip “LiveSide” Kniskern, Benjamin “Neowin” Rubenstein, Paul Thurrott, Long “IStartedSomething” Zheng.
• Mary Jo Foley’s article, Microsoft Adds XNA Game Studio 4.0 to its Windows Phone 7 Arsenal.
• And of course, this blog!

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.

For the longest time, the sessions listed under “Windows Phone” at the MIX10 conference (taking place in Las Vegas from March 15th through 17th) have had no details – just a “more details coming soon” message. That changed yesterday, and now the sessions have full names and abstracts, which I’ve listed below in chronological order.

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 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.

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.

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:

1. Purpose
2. Principles
3. Priorities
4. Plan
5. 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:

1. Consumer Developer - Pro Devs who build products that are sold directly or given out for free to general public end-users.
2. Non-Pro Developer – Non-Pro Developers building products for academic/personal use.
3. In-ROM Developer - Pro Devs who build products & technologies that are sold to mobile operators or device manufacturers.
4. Enterprise Developer –Pro Devs who build apps & technologies that are sold to corporate clients and businesses.
5. 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.

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.

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.