When it comes to application development on the Windows Phone platform things are on the move. Lessons are being learned from the iPhone and its usability experience, from the Android platform etc. The lesson learned is that you need to pay extra attention to how your application looks and feel.

You should not under estimate the possibility of usability and design being the selling point in a purchase decisions before feature richness in a case  where two  similar featured apps are compared, where one looks and feels good, and the other has an extra amount of features beyond the core functionality it should handle.

As i am on the look out for a UI toolkit to standardize our enterprise development at work  on I´ll compile a list of libraries that could do the job as i find them. The criteria for the search is ease of use and finger friendliness. Hopeful others also find this list useful. Continue Reading

Norwegian Yellow Pages (Eniro)  have created one of the first augmented reality application for the iPhone.  Augmented reality is the concept of adding value-adding information onto real time imaging. One use i think this could be a really cool tool for is visiting tourists. Hold up your iPhone and get instant tourist information anywhere in Oslo.  The application is due to be launched in November/December 2009 at no cost, but will only be available for the iPhone 3GS because it uses the digital compass.

For developers of Android applications there is an AR API called Wikitude. It is a application programming interface which allows for the open development of markerless AR experiences, providing developers with the tools to either create their own android augmented reality applications, or enhance their existing Android applications with an AR camera-view engine. Continue Reading

Norwegian online paper digi.no (Norwegain article) has an interesting article today about an anouncement from the open source project MONO. They have completed a SDK called MonoTouch. MonoTouch is the Mono edition for Apple’s iPhone and Apple’s iPod Touch devices.  MonoTouch allows developers to create C# and .NET based applications that run on the iPhone and can take advantage of the iPhone APIs as well as reusing both code and libraries that have been built for .NET as well as existing skills. MonoTouch also includes XCode integration.

MonoTouch is not open source and comes with some quirks when it comes to application distribution and licensing but it is a good step in the right direction.

MonoTouch comes in three version Personal for $399, Enterprise for $999 and Enterprise 5 for $3 99. Continue Reading

One of many new features that came with the iPhone OS 3.0, was that the IPhone should now be ready for the business market. With improved PIM functionality, true push and better integration with Exchange all of the needs for the professional user should be taken care of – that just #fail!

Iphone is business #fail

Basic PIM functionality is something that exists in every device there is that is used by the semi-professional mobile user. Continue Reading

I live about 1 hour of commuting with bus and subway from my office and my favorite past time getting there or home  from work is to listen to music and read blogs.

One of the blogs I like to read in the morning is www.smallsurfaces.com. A good blog about mobile user interfaces, but as irony strikes it, not very reader friendly on a small surface.

More blogs should be available with mobile friendly user interfaces!

I have used both my HTC Touch Diamond, and now an iPhone. Continue Reading

A 3 minute morph video showing the evolution of cellphones.

On a Tweet from Scott Hanselman I learned about his talk on ASP.NET MVC and the Mobile Browser Definition File. Really good article and I learned about a little tool that could become quite useful.

  Blackbaud Labs has created a really useful tool  called “iPhone Web Simulator for Windows” (iBBDemo) useful if you would like to see how your device enabled web solutions behave when seen through an iPhone. You download the emulator application and point the emulator browser to your site on server or localhost and browse as you would on a regular phone . Really useful in a debug situation while developing.

Only requirement is that you install Apple Safari, since the emulator uses the Safari render engine. Continue Reading

Me, as my colleague - stumbled upon the blog of Lars Wilhelmsen, a  Microsoft MVP who was writing about Microsoft Tag -  which is a new, or rather improved technology by Microsoft for enabling linked content on static objects (i.e movie posters, news ads (yes, printed) etc).

Tag has been out as a beta service since January 7th  free for anyone to try, both for commercial and personal use.  A Tag client is available if you point your mobile web browser to http://gettag.mobi. The page try to detect your device and gives you a download link. Some of the devices supported are; Android, Blackberry, PalmOS, Windows Mobile and Symbian S60. Apple iPhone is also supported, giving you a link to iTunes AppStore for download, and finally a Java 2 ME client making the client available on almost any device available. Continue Reading

As a .NET and Windows Mobile device developer i love my Apple iPhone. It is an inspiratioal device, helps me create better and more usable applications on the WM platform. For some reason everything just looks better, mobile webpages, applications etc.

Today i addet a iPhone plugin to my wordpress blog called WPtouch and it can be downloaded here. What it does is that it redirects iPhone safari requests to a iphone friendly userinterface that makes everything plain nice.

We need to learn (a lot) when it comes to usability! Continue Reading