Windows Phone Developer Community meetup has been scheduled for Thursday March 4th. It will be held at The Scotsman downtown Oslo.

Speakers for the evening is Frank Dahle, usability expert and designer. He’s “mantra” of “Mobile design is to mobilize – not to miniaturize” is something i strongly believe in and are looking forward to help spread. keywords for Frank’s talk will be; Design is how it works -not how it looks, understanding the user, design for flow and the next generation of mobile apps.

The second speaker(s) for the evening is Ronny Gydar and Trine Nesland of Gydar Industries and developers of the norwegian windows mobile program series “TrineSeries”.  They will be talking about their applications, how and why they started and about the technology behind their applications.

We are also lucky enough to have Kristine Bjørnstad who is the acting Windows Phone Lead at Microsoft Norway to come tell us more about the Microsoft headlines announced at MWC (Mobile World Congress) Continue Reading

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.

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

Last week we hosted our first 3 hour session on Microsoft Windows Mobile development at NITH in Oslo. The session was split into two topics - usability best practises and developing custom GUI controls. Me and Per Ola split the session where i did the first part and he did the custom control development.

Since this is an introductory class to Windows Mobile development we cannot go too deep into the how’s and why’s but rather give a brief overview with pointers to more information for those wanting to learn more.

The UX session started as i always like to do by introducing “Death to the stylus” as i am a firm believer of that it has no future in the world of mobility. It is an obstacle for efficient use of applications. Following this i talked about that it is not a goal for mobile developers to minimize an existing application or process, but to mobilize. 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.

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