It had to come and competition is great. We are seeing more of 3rd party application stores for mobile solutions. Freeware Pocket PC has opened up an alternative application store for Windows Phones promising instant free downloads for your Windows Mobile phone.  OpnMarket is compatible with most of the Windows Mobile Professional devices with touch-screens, once installed it lets you browse, download and install FREE applications directly on your device. OpnMarket will use your mobile network connection or a WiFi connection to download software to your phone. It’s simple, instant and FREE  with access to more than 6,700 free windows mobile games, tools and themes.

The installer cab can be downloaded from here.

Qtek 9090 Pocket PC

This was fun. While looking around for some cables i found one of my first ever Windows Mobile phones. An ancient Qtek 9090 Microsoft PocketPC phone.

I remember when i got it I was stoked on how cool this phone was 32bit Intel PXA263 CPU with a blazing speed of 400MHz. a 3.5″ Transflective TFT-LCD screen, a camera, WiFi and bluetooth. And the QWERTY keyboard was actually quite good to use for SMS’ing and emails. Continue Reading

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

If you are in Oslo, and you’re a developer that do Windows Phone software development, or are curious about what’s in it you should come to the December meetup for Windows Phone Developer Community.

WPDC has it’s first meetup next Thursday on December 3rd.  at 6 pm. The meeting will be held at NITH, located in Grønland.

View Schweigaards gate 14 in a larger map

In this first meetup we want to use more as a “constitutional” meeting. Getting to know those who are interested in Windows Phone development and most importantly find others who are interested in being “driving forces” and help build the community. Continue Reading

To help spawn some better facebook apps and services on the Windows Phone platform someone has proposed support for compact framework as a new feature to the Facebook developer kit. 

Visit the proposition site and sign in with your CodPlex or create an account and vote for this.

It’s needed

Today was a cool day!

Finally the Windows Phone Developer Community is announced and started. I was attending a developer presentation for Windows Mobile 6.5 and Microsoft Marketplace today and just before we broke for lunch i was called to stage to “tell the world” that on Thursday 3. December 2009 we´ll host the first meeting.

This first meetup will be mostly about getting to know each other, and find out who´s interested in becoming driving forces. It is not to be taken lightly that if this is to have any form of success it needs to have support and contribution from developers.

For the occasion we have set up a meetup.com group to handle “members” and announcement of meeting events, so check it out at http://www.meetup.com/Windows-Phone-Developer-Community/. Continue Reading

On Thursday, October 15. (09:00 – 14:30). Microsoft Norway invites developers to Lysaker for a day of  Windows Mobile 6.5 and Marketplace development information. This is a free seminar aimed at developers. This is not only for those already working with mobile development, but also useful for anyone curious about what this is and how to get started.

The first part of the day will be about about WM 6.5, where Director for Windows Phones Norway, Camilla Viken Teigre gives a demo on the new UI and talks about what’s new and improved in this release.

From Finland Vesa-Matti Paananen will be walking us through Marketplace. What is Marketplace and why create Windows Phone applications. Continue Reading

It’s friday and time for some fun, and having a look at the gesture and physics engine of WM 6.5 qualifies as such . Googling for developer references i found that on august 26th and september 2nd 2009 Microsoft through Alex Yakhnin and Ron Buckton hosted two developer webcasts (level 400) on the gesture and physics engine of Windows Mobile 6.5.

This was a really useful intro on how to implement this your own .netcf applications. Gestures are supported in the existing standard ListView, Listbox, WebView, TreeView and Tab controls. and you get this characteristics just by running the application on a WM 6.5 device. But to programmatically control the gestures you need to handle the Select, Scroll, Pan, Hold and DoubleSelect events.

A detailed guide on how for the gesture apithis can be found on MSDN here. To fully understand this you need to be familiar with P/Invoke and native calls. Continue Reading

Nice! It’s Friday and in a few hours I am off to go rafting in Sjoa for the weekend. Ice cold river water and adrenaline will hopefully get me back in shape after 3 crazy weeks of 16 hour work days writing system design in a BID case for a huge national computer system.

It won’t be all fun and games tho, because part of the weekend needs to be used for work! Extra fun work tho! On Tuesday i start lecturing .NETCF and Windows Mobile development at NITH in Oslo. This is something i am really looking forward to do! and it will be fun to do it together with my good colleague Per Ola Sæther.

Through the weekend we need to review some of the class material and scheme up a plan on how to tackle this before the first class gathering on Tuesday. Luckily, most of the material looks good and there’s just a few places where we need to do minor changes. To bring it up to date on issues like security, communication and usability. Continue Reading

The Microsoft My Phone service is now out in public beta for everyone with a Windows Mobile 6.x device.

With My Phone you get 200MB of storage and you can synchronize your phone data that contains contacts, appointments, sms messages, email, music, pictures and more. Backing up applications is not possible through My Phone (yet).

You also get your own My Phone webpage where you  access through your PC , there you can edit and search your data. Edited data is synchronized back to your phone. Synchronization can be set to manual or automatic. Your My Phone account is connected with your single sign-on Microsoft Live account. Should you loose your phone you only need to install the client on your new phone to get all your data restored.

The beta is free and should provide enough storage space for most users for basic data storage. Continue Reading