Programming, Technology, Web Development, Whatever
Mobile
Windows Phone 7
Feb 19th
Windows Phone 7 was unveiled at World Mobile Conference last week. Since 2006, Microsoft has been struggling with its mobile market, losing much of its former market-sha
re to Blackberry(RIM), Android, and of course the iPhone. So whats new about Windows Phone 7? Practically everything. The biggest change according to Joe Belfiore, the vice president of Windows Phone program management, is “a shift in focus from buisness and enterprise users to end users”. So, what does this mean? Basically a more customizable, better-looking UI, more features everyday people want, and close integration with social networking. Windows phone 7 aggregates many services together into hubs like pictures, music, mail, etc. It integrates things like Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Live, Gmail, etc. to pull all the relevant information into that hub. For example in the pictures hub there would be your Facebook pictures, camera pictures, Myspace pictures, Flikr pictures, etc. The UI is also completely different, and is reminiscent of the Zune/Windows Media Center kinetic text look.
So is all this going to rekindle Microsoft’s smartphone market share? Will it change the mobile market for years to come? One thing is for sure though, it’s re-instilled my faith in Microsoft in the mobile market. We’ll see how things really are when “Holiday 2010″ rolls around.
Adobe AIR Coming to Smartphones
Feb 15th
In a recent press release, Adobe has announced that they will be releasing the adobe AIR platform to mobile devices, including Android, Windows Mobile, and the iPhone as part of the Open Screen Project. No release date has been set for the runtimes.
The Adobe AIR 2.0 beta SDK has been released and is available for download. It includes a handful of new features including multi-touch and gesture support. for downloads and other information, see the Adobe Labs page.
Just another reason to love being a Flex Developer.
Black SMS-Chat Skin for Windows Mobile
Jan 4th
For those of you who use the new SMS Chat for Windows Mobile, I created a new skin to replace the crappy black one that comes as the default. It works with SMS-Chat 1.25, so upgrade if you don’t have the latest version.
Unfortunately the developers hard coded in a lot of color information so we’re stuck with the blue for now(I’d rather have it as a green). Just download the black.bmp and black_alert.bmp files and copy them to /Program Files/VITO/SMS-Chat/skins/bin directory and overwrite the existing ones. Hope you enjoy!
Attached Files:
The Fall of Windows Mobile
Nov 25th
I’ve been a fan and advocate of Windows Mobile since Windows Mobile 5 was released in May of 2005. It was reasonably fast and had a bunch of applications I could install to do genuinely cool stuff, like VNC into my home computer from my PPC Apache by HTC, browse the web like a d
esktop on Opera Mobile, and I could even SSH into my web server, all from my Windows Mobile device.
So, Whats changed? Nothing; that’s the problem. Windows Mobile has barely evolved at all since its Windows Mobile 5 release. Most of the improvements are unseen, and insignificant to end-users. With the release of WM6.5, the changes were even smaller, adding simple kinetic scrolling, a honeycomb start menu, and a new home-screen called CHome that is even more useless than previous versions. Most of the upgrades in WM6.5 are a shotty attempt to mimic features of a much more user-friendly and intuitive device, the iPhone.
The iPhone changed the mobile world forever. Utilizing a capacitive, multi-touch screen, it revolutionized the way people think about a UI in a mobile device. The problem with the initial release of the iPhone, however, was a lack of extensibility. Users were limited to a few applications created by apple, and all existed on phones previously created(including Windows Mobile). Save for those who jailbroke the iPhone, you were limited to these applications. At this point, Microsoft probably believed the iPhone to be a small threat, and still made no attempt to alter the user experience.
Then in summer 2008, Apple developed an effective method to deliver extensibility to the iPhone. Enter the App Store: An 
easy and intuitive way to extend the device. Now, roughly 1.5 years later, the App Store has over 100,000 applications and around 2 billion downloads. iPhone OS 2.0 also adds Exchange and ActiveSync support, making the device more suitable to the business market, a niche long held by Microsoft.
The iPhone isn’t perfect though, you can’t multitask very well, application development is heavily controlled by Apple, and there’s barely any customizable features on the device. Now Google introduces Android, the new open source OS, allows for infinite customization. HTC even developed their own all-encompassing, snazzy UI called Sense for their line of Android devices. Although having a relatively small market share now, as more and more Android handsets are being introduced on more carriers, its going to get a lot more popular.
So as I sit waiting while my Windows Mobile phone slowly loads its text messaging app on its now aging interface, I can’t help but think that unless Microsoft really pulls itself together in the next release of WM, they’re going to be in some serious hot water, and my next phone will be an Android.