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

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

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