BarCamp London 8: Windows Phone 7 & app development

Jess Meats

More details may be available later on lanyrd

• Marketplace purchases
  • can link to an existing Live ID with a credit card
  • or can register card details on the phone
• development kit for phone
  • get templates for visual studio & expression blend
  • get an emulator (includes IE mobile)
• visual design all done in XAML
• can use Expression Blend for design
  • allows you to drag & drop and design animations visually too
• when registering as a developer, have to go through XBox Live…
  • in order to sign up to terms and conditions
• app submission:
  • testing happens overnight
  • if there are test failures, get a report in the developer dashboard
  • problems may happen with GeoTrust…
  • need a notary to sign and stamp a physical document
  • getting paid requires you talking to US Embassy in London…
• @simonmaddox: SDK works in Fusion, but not Parallels
  • requires a VM inside a VM
• can register a device for development
• sync to Google only gets main calendar at the moment
• background processes can now put things on the lock screen (recent change)
  • as before, can also change the home screen tile and put toast notifications in the status bar

Future of Mobile 08: What's so Smart about Smartphone OSs

Panel discussion chaired by Simon Rockman — Sony Ericsson

This was a rather boring panel discussion: despite Simon’s best attempts to make the panellists squirm, they stayed very tame and non-committal. The best bits was the thinly veiled spatting between Microsoft and Google — but again, this was nothing new…

Panel

• David Wood: Research @ Symbian
• Olivier Bartholot: Purple Labs
• Andy Bush: LiMo
• Rich Miner: Google Mobile
• James McCarthy: Mobile Comms Business @ Microsoft

Why is your OS the best?

• Symbian:
  • Paul Otellini’s demo was based on a big server behind the couch + user experience was a bit rubbish
  • More to be done in terms of cooperation & collaboration
  • Defragmenting: removing all UIs but Series60 (UIQ officially dead)
• Purple Labs:
  • Created in 2001
  • Used to make phones and software, now just software
  • Specialist of Linux on low-tier device — Purple Magic handset
  • Acquired embedded software of OpenWave — including browser, messaging & widget platform
  • Platform is LiMo compliant
  • Acquiring engineers from Sagem + s/w for 2G & 3G phones from TI
  • Hoping to fight fragmentation
• LiMo:
  • gave a good description of how LiMo works as an organisation, but not how it would be better as an OS
• Android:
  • Hardware available, but software not available to make it easy to use for customer
  • Software being designed by hardware engineers
  • So Apple was able to embarrass the industry by coming from a software perspective
  • Google has struggled with building MIDP apps that work on lots of devices
  • Decided to build their own OS — led Android as chief design architects
    • Not as a committee
• Windows Mobile:
  • Started in B2B, syncing PDAs to PCs, then added radio
  • “4 out of 5 top global OEMs signed to run Windows Mobile”
    • though they don’t necessarily run them on their major devices…
  • Of the people on this panel, we’re the only ones with a single entity controlling the architecture
    • spreading FUD as usual… Symbian now totally controlled by Nokia

How does your business model work?

• Android:
  • Google has no direct business model with platform
  • Also have 4 out of 5 top OEMs working on Android handsets :-)
  • Believe that it’s fundamentally important to industry that no one company owns the platform
  • Don’t mind playing on a level playing field, but don’t like someone else owning the platform and having an advantage
    • Want to have powerful devices connected over broadband
  • Focussed on delight & delivering value to consumer
    • Then give useful ads based on understanding of context
    • Not rushing to integrate ads right now
  • Other platforms manage to bloat themselves…
    • Android designed to go downmarket quite easily
    • Runs fine on 200MHz (used this speed chips in design process)
  • Within in next 18mths most devices will be able to support Android
    • Simon Rockman disagrees — still going to be b&w, low end devices in sub $50 market
    • Rich Miner thinks that in developing economies with phone as first screen, there will be big advantages and incentives to have higher feature phones pushed into market
    • I tend to agree with Rich — it’s worth the while of the operators to subsidise handsets in developing countries, so that they get the revenue of usage. Vodafone seems to be going this way already.
• Purple:
  • Latin America buying handsets at $25 but voice only
  • Is a space for low $100 handset
• LiMo:
  • Companies pay for membership fees
  • Can share patents within IP Safe Harbour

Are you disappointed that people just rebadging HTC devices? (to Microsoft)

• Now seeing a lot of success with Samsung too
• Sony Ericsson X1 also made by HTC
• Also lots of ruggedized PDAs
• James not unsettled that HTC adopting Android
  • I think he should be!

Why can Google bring in developers better than Microsoft?

• Always an advantage to start with a clean slate…
• Android also based on a lot of existing pieces

Motorola stopping Symbian and going to Android…

• David Wood: manufacturers currently hedging their bets

What about runtime environments?

• Google: 3rd party dev based on managed code
  • Also browser in the core — can make AJAXy apps using this
  • No reason why there can’t be other runtime environments
  • Believe that native code is best way to write apps
• Microsoft: Also believe that native is best
  • If we need other runtime environments to support customers then will provide them
• Symbian:
  • Development often needs to get to native, so need to solve this problem anyway

What makes a smartphone smart?

• Symbian: Smartphone is programmable
  • Featurephone has features, smartphone open to new features
• Microsoft: Want to provide
  • “Featurephones only support voice calls and text” — what!
• Google (Rich Miner): smartphones haven’t been very smart
  • first smartphones at Orange, could barely make phone calls on them
  • hey, guess what — they ran Windows Mobile :-)

OverTheAir: Google Gears for Mobile -- Andrei Popescu (Google)

Currently running on Windows Mobile as an ActiveX control. Just launched Picasa Web Album for Mobile with Gears. Works in IE 6 & 7, IE Mobile 5 & 6, Firefox 1 & 2 (3 coming soon). Firefox plugin works on Mac. Safari support being worked on. The Mobile version has the same API as the desktop version. Google have also announced that they are porting Gears to Android (no surprise there…) — this will be a Netscape standard plugin, so will probably come to WebKit at a similar time.

Gears is a browser plugin that provides additional APIs to the browser (local storage in a SQLite database, worker threads, local server for server data offline). See http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ for documentation and samples.

Mobile version also provides a Desktop API, which allows creating an icon shortcut to the app. Can provide multiple resolution icons.

Worker threads cannot access the DOM and the window object, so Gears also provides HttpRequest and Timer APIs for them.

Security: Gears will ask the user if a URL wants to store and access information locally. Thereafter that URL is allowed to use Gears to access data from the same origin (scheme, host, port).