Planning has started for the second Windows Phone Developer Community meetup. The meetup topic wil be usability and UX on small screen devices. We have contacted a highly skilled UX professional and he’ll be giving a 45-60 minutes speak on the topic.

We would also like to have an application showcase that shows the use of good UX and are open for suggestions from users and developers. If you are a developer and would like to show off you app at the meetup, don’t hesitate, get in touch with us.

The meetup will take place in Oslo in the beginning of March.

A bit late, but i was planning to comment on an article (in Norwegian) from beginning of November  that refere to a statement from the Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2009 conference.

Made by Gartner analyst Monica Basso that muses that the Windows Mobile OS doesn´t have a future, that Microsoft is working to slow, and that they’re not able to renew the OS according to whims and wishes of the consumers. That they will not be able to regain any market share because of that.

Basis for this is according to Gartner that the Windows Mobile platform is to big and not dynamic enough to be scaled down to function on the less powerful and not so advanced phones, aka the regular cellphones(?) that dominates today’s mobile market. Continue Reading

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

Stumbled upon this quite funny device while reading ITavisen.no (article in norwegian). It is a Windows XP based ultra portable computer called xpPhone from Technology Group Limited (ITG). ITG say they specialize in research, development and production of pocketable mobile internet devices and this looks like a Nokia communicator on steroids.

A “pocketable mobile internet device” is a device term I have not seen before but no matter what you call it, it could be an ideal device/tool for the busy representative that need to have a really portable device for slide show presentations and light typing. A ruggedized version of this device could have been an interesting feature.

Why has it been equipped with Windows XP? An almost obsolete OS but i guess it´s just a matter of time before this comes with Windows 7 installed. This is a step beyond the NetBook computers and will fit into a bit larger pocket but it has most of the capabilities from a phone adding phone features. Continue Reading

When you work with the Dexterra framework, you don’t really have access to any of the notification engines you normally would have on the front end of an application. This became a major problem for us in a project we were working on.

Our goal was that we had a details screen for data with a button that would take you to a form with a list of selectable items. When an item was selected from the list, we wanted to show the selection in our details screen without having to send the data back into the dexterra business objects from the list screen, and then read the updated data from the database into the detail screen.

We were using Dexterra version 5.6.1 for our development and the solution we found was this.

We have two forms DetailsScreen and ListScreen inheriting from the Dexterra.Framework.Screen class.
Inside the ListScreen we have an public event named ListItemSelectedEvent and on the DetailsScreen we have a button named btnListSelection. 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

Soon Microsoft Windows Mobile Marketplace will open and the power of fart and flashlight applications will be unleashed onto us, and windows mobile powered devices world wide. Windows  Mobile 6.5  will set us a blaze with gestures and multi touch, and we’ll have the coolest scrollable lists ever made for small screens. Still, while looking at the new glossy mobile UI features created with Eye Candy plug-ins for PhotoShop I wonder, how do you make money out of windows mobile as a software company or ISV? What level of enterprise support is planned into the future releases of the Windows Mobile?

As a developer and solution architect of enterprise industrial applications, mainly targeted for rugged windows mobile powered devices, I see several basic needs for improvement when it comes to support for industrialization of Windows Mobile, – Unless it’s planned life cycle is to be the OS of a fairly advanced MP3 player with phone capabilities. If so, please let us know so we can all go start our Android open source library projects sooner rather than later.

so, what’s needed? Continue Reading

Here’s a collection of useful tools for the windows mobile developer:

NETCF 3.5 Power Toys

 Power Toys for working with .NET Compact Framework 3.5. The Power Toys for .NET Compact Framework 3.5 provides several tools for evaluating performance, obtaining diagnostic information, configuring and working with the .NET Compact Framework. Download here.

ReSharper Visual Studio Add-in

Not a tool spesific for device development but definitely a must-have tool for Visual Studio development. The list of features and goodies is too long to even start here. It’s freeware for classroom or training use, $49 for an academic license, $199 for personal license and $349 for commercial use. As a commercial developer you’ll made the purchase worth after a day or two. Download the 30 day trial and you’ve saved enough to buy a 5-pack Continue Reading

If you are interested in small surface ui design and usability Gabriel White has created a blog tracking articles around the web on the topic, tags used is interaction design, usability, industrial design, user interfaces and more.

Small Surfaces news blog

Gabriel White is currently Director of Interaction Design at Punchcut in San Francisco, Gabriel was a Principal at Frog Design, led design teams at Motorola China, visited Microsoft’s Research Lab in Beijing, and consulted in Australia for The Hiser Group.

Maarten Struys had an introductory webcast (level 200) on Thursday, April 23. to Microsoft Windows Mobile 6 for developers. Useful if you are thinking about trying out device development. 

Go to the MSDN WebCast site and register. After registration you can either view or download Office Live Meeting or Windows Media re-run’s of the presentation that gives you a good overview of things you need to consider as an developer before you start.

 Event Overview: (from site) Continue Reading