Over the weekend, I had a twitter conversation with the Wordboxer developers, trying to get them to port their game to Windows Phone. It brought to light an important point about the Windows Phone (and for that matter, Blackberry) app problem: most cool games and apps are being built by small shops or single developers who just don’t have the time to build and maintain more than one or maybe two versions of their app/game. I really hope the Windows Phone (and Windows 8) teams realize this and create ways and means to reach these folks and help them out with the education needed to have them port their apps.
I know with the addition to C++ and support for cross-platform game engines on both Windows Phone and Windows 8, things are easier in terms of porting, but the point is most devs look at market share numbers and shy away from the platform. Of course, the market share going up and reaching some level of respectability (10% in the US?) may automatically help, but until then, Microsoft has a tough problem on their hands. They have to increase sales of devices, they have to attract the big brands and they have to make sure the indie devs also consider Windows Phone, if not at launch, at least soon after.
Small devs really don't have time to develop and maintain code for more than one or two platforms. Even though Windows Phone dev tools are arguably better than anything else out there, and porting is easier with Windows Phone 8, it comes down to resources. Here is a great example of that.
I got an invite to play this game from someone on iOS. As usual, after not finding the game in the Windows Phone Store, I ping the developer twitter account.
Seeing the opening, I ping a good twitter friend and a prolific developer and now a Nokia Developer Ambassador. They can help and in fact, they encourage developers to port their apps.
....but, Windows Phone users are more loyal to the platform and the early adopters tend to support developers who bring their stuff over from other platforms.
My turn to throw some reality into the mix. It is easier to develop/port to Windows Phone because testing involves a finite number of resolutions and device types. Especially if they focus only on Windows Phone 8.
Yup, continuing the reality trend - if they can re-use much of their code then the incremental effort to bring the app to Windows Phone may not be too much, but the upside is huge.
Much has been discussed among Windows Phone (and Windows 8/RT) circles about lack of podcast features in the phone and lack of a native app on big Windows.
I am a big podcast listener. Not huge, but I do listen to a few podcasts regularly. In fact, so regularly, that I have formed a nice list of things I would want in an ideal podcast app/service. The reason I put app/service is because we are now no longer in a single device world.
Native apps for my devices: I use Windows Phone, Windows 8/RT and Windows 7. I would like native apps for at least phone and "Windows Store".
Catalog: Big enough, and fresh enough catalog so that I don't have to add podcasts by URL.
Easy subscribe settings: Options during subscribe should include auto downloads, number of episodes to keep, episode delete settings, etc.
Remember played position: For each podcast, for each episode.
Cloud: Sync settings, subscriptions and played positions to the cloud. Configurable setting for syncing on-device episodes to the cloud as well.
Refresh/check for new episodes: Check for new episodes when app is opened, automatically. Also, check on a schedule that can be configured and have a default. So if the default is 3am and 3pm every day, I know when I get up and am ready for my commute, there may be some fresh episodes waiting for me. Same, with a 3pm check for the commute home.
Playback speed adjustment: Must-have for me, at least 1.5x.
Some bonus territory items:
Playback in the cloud: If my subscriptions, settings and on-device episodes are synced to the cloud, I suppose I should be able to play those episodes from the web too. That would take care of machines which don't have native apps, for example Windows 7 or Macs/iPads/iPhone/iPod.
Discovery: Based on what I have subscribed to, and perhaps extending it to my social networks, suggest other podcasts.
Live tiles: I don't care much about getting notified of new episodes, so I put this in the bonus territory. Live tile notifications of new episodes.
Usage notifications: Notify (via live tile or otherwise) me about space used being above a certain threshold, or unplayed episodes going above a certain threshold.
Things I don't care about but I have seen in some apps:
Visual niceties: Like the tape player in the iOS app. Don't care about it since I always lock the phone screen anyway.
Social sharing: I don't share either while listening or otherwise, so I don't care about that feature.
Too much to ask? Is there any podcast app/service that does this already? I think Downcast on iOS comes very close in terms of functionality but they are only on iOS so far, but have expressed that they may look at WP with no real commitment provided. The iOS Podcasts app does not seem to delete episodes after they are finished which is a bummer (either a bug or a feature, but either way, a bummer for me).
None of the Windows Phone 3rd party apps do auto-download yet. There are some in the process of getting released with promised functionality but none generally available yet.
The native Windows Phone feature does not have a manual check for new episodes, and there is no clear understanding when exactly it checks for new episodes. Besides, there is no corresponding app on Windows 8, and of course, there is no playback speed adjustment.
Plex, the “media center” software application built for a multitude of devices, has a Windows Phone app now. They wrote up a blog post about it and while I am excited that there is a WP7 app now, it was heartening to see the praise they had for WP7 both from a user’s perspective as well as from a developer’s perspective.
There are so many gems in that post, I felt compelled to not only write this blog post, but highlight a bunch of the gems from the post:
Android phones never managed to capture my interest. They just looked and felt like bad photocopies of the iPhone, and didn’t offer anything new I was interested in, like the ability to install a custom theme that looked even uglier than the default, or download torrents on my phone, or play a Matrix animation in the background, or remove my battery, or spend time killing random processes, or over-clock my CPU, or any other beardy sort of thing.
Fast-forward to this January, I ordered a second hand Samsung device to help with development, and promptly fell in love with it.
As much as Android felt like (poorly) recycled ideas and bad new ones, Windows Phone felt original, well designed, and fun to use.
The performance was great, really smooth in a way iOS is and Android isn’t even in ICS.
The “pivot” and “panorama” UI concepts were fresh and a great way of making good use of a small screen in portrait mode. The typography was clean and brazen.
The integration of Facebook and Twitter made them feel like first class citizens, not an afterthought.
The live tiles on the home screen were a great way to make the phone feel alive.
But the iPhone felt staid, for lack of a better word. I wanted to be able to pin a few email folders to my home screen and watch them update live. I wanted to see all my social updates in a more integrated way. I missed being able to go to a contact (which I could also pin to my home screen), and easily see the conversations (Facebook, or SMS) I was having with them, and recent photos they’d uploaded.
The iOS development environment is quite good, with the weakest link being Objective-C, which has a steep learning curve and feels like it stepped out of the 80s with a cocaine hangover.
Android, oh, Android, I don’t mean to pick on you once again, but your edit-build-deploy cycle is long enough to make a grown man cry, and then stab himself in the eyeballs, and then cry some more. Java is fine, but the surrounding environment and piss-poor emulator makes it much harder to develop for than it should be.
So how is the Windows Phone development environment? It’s scary good. C# is a great language, .NET is a solid framework, XAML is a really nice way to design user interfaces, and the edit-build-deploy cycle is fast.
We were able to write the [WP7] app from start to finish in two months, between two engineers working part time, which is almost an order of magnitude faster than it took for the iOS and Android app.
Related (linked to from the blog post):
58 minutes later an a new wp7 Instagram client is born. I think that's a record for me (but #nuget helped me along the way)
My last thought on Windows Phone is that it’s got all the ingredients it needs to be successful: It’s a fun, useful, well-designed platform, with sexy (Nokia) hardware, and it’s as good for developers as it is for users. It deserves much more marketshare than it has, and Microsoft seems to be making most of the right moves (about time).
Since I use WP7 all day and follow a bunch of WP7 developers on twitter, I am very well aware of all these benefits. I am glad the folks at Plex thought of putting all these thoughts on their blog.
Hope to see many others release their WP7 apps. Are you listening, Instagram?
The Windows Phone bloggers have been active recently, for good and bad reasons. Just yesterday, the ESPN ScoreCenter app finally was released for Windows Phone so I thought it may be a good idea for me to look back at what I thought were missing features/apps for me going from iPhone to Windows Phone.
The list was something like:
Corporate email: I still don't have access to my work Exchange server and that is the single-biggest issue I am facing. I am completely handicapped without knowing what my next meeting is about and where it is. I am dying to get *some* access to my corporate Exchange server. (note: access to Exchange server is available but my company does not allow it outside of McAfee EMM app or Good Technology's app, neither of which are available on windows phone yet)
Notifications: I was looking for Boxcar type, clean and universal notifications. I did not get that yet, but a lot of the apps are slowly building some sort of indicators (Live tiles, toast notifications) and it can only get better. I am not missing it as much as I thought I would be.
ESPN: Done! Finally, it is here.
Hipporemote: There are many remote desktop apps but since I have my iPad with Hipporemote, I have not bothered to try any other apps. Don't miss this one too much.
Amazon: Done! Came a while back.
In-browser video/Flash/HTML5: Coming in Mango at the end of the year. Or maybe sooner? Who knows. Not there, but coming soon.
Hidden wireless networks: Not resolved and not sure if NoDo is going to resolve it. But I guess it's fine for now.
Now, what I am missing today:
Bank of America app: This has been made visible in public but I am not sure what the hold up is.
E*Trade app: This is not in order, but this is one app that I can use which is not yet in the Marketplace.
Liveshare is one app that was released for iOS, Android and Windows Phone at once. I would love more apps like that, especially the social ones (Instagram, anyone?) so that I can include my friends on other platforms in my mobile sharing life :-)
Not going to look at features that I feel are missing because that will make this a 15-page post :-)
(I forgot to mention the games I have on my Windows phone in my earlier post. Here is that list (most of the games, I have tried first before buying, but at this time, I only one have trial on my phone):
Assassin's Creed (trial) Bejeweled LIVE Carneyvale Need for Speed Undercover Fast & Furious Adrenaline Flowerz Fruit Ninja Artisan Glow ilomilo Monopoly Oregon Trail Pocket God Project Sunburst Avatar Gadgets XBOX LIVE Extras
Blackjack Metro 21 Hangman (by JPG Solutions) Hearts Hungry Castaway Puzzle Touch Tic Tac Toe by Ximad
It is about 6 weeks and here is my update on my windows phone.
Two most common questions/gaps first: have not missed multitasking yet because of most of the apps being able to tombstone while inactive, and have missed copy/paste once when I wanted to tweet a link. Having said that, I am really happy with the rate at which apps are being added, and am hopeful that the bigger missing properties like ESPN and Amazon will come soon with their version of the WP7 apps. In the past ten days, I have walked through this phone with about 20 people who had never seen a Windows Phone before, some of whom had heard about it, and some of whom are already heavy Blackberry users. It was unanimous that the phone rocks. All of them were impressed with the Focus' screen, and how snappy the phone was. Not too many "got" Metro but all of them appreciated the aggregation (hubs) idea and how Facebook is deeply integrated into the phone. Cherry on top was the Zune Pass, unlimited, on-demand streaming of music. Here is a list of the apps I have on the phone as of today: Adobe Reader AP Mobile App Reviews AT&T My Wireless AT&T U-Verse Mobile Beezz Bollywood Beats Breaking News Cocktail Flow Color Sprouts Craigs7 Pro Cricket World Cup Directv Facebook Fandango Flickr Manager Flixster FML Foursquare GasBuddy Graphic.ly gReadie History Here HollywoodsHottest HSN Shop App Huffington Post Iheartradio IMDb KAYAK Last.fm Lyrics Metro Web Browser Mira TV MSN Money Stocks MSN Movies MyChannel9 Netflix Now (Samsung app) Photo Sharing (Samsung app) Photogram (Samsung app) Piano 7 PODCASTS! Project Emporia Retrevo Scores Seesmic Send to WP7 Shazam ShopSavvy Slacker Sound Recorder Tag Reader TED Top Cities 2011 Travelocity TWiT Twitter UStream Viewer Valpak weather Weatherbug Where Wipolo Wordpress Xkcd Yelp YouTube Lazy YouTube National Geographic Atlas
I wrote on Friday about my switch from iPhone to Windows Phone 7. I am now a proud (really proud) owner of a Samsung Focus Windows Phone from AT&T. (side note: see how easy it is to refer to Windows Phone? No need to say Windows 7 Phone, Windows Phone 7 Phone, Windows Mobile 7, Windows 7 Mobile, etc. Just go with Windows Phone. That easy)
First and foremost, I cleaned up my hotmail contacts and also hooked up facebook, flickr, linkedin, yelp, wordpress, and more. (This was done earlier, in anticipation of my move to Windows Phone.)
I signed in with my Live ID and set up my personal account (google apps) for email, hotmail for contacts and email, facebook for contacts, photos and feeds, other gmail for email and calendar. All went well and in a few moments my phone was being "lit up" with information from various places that I did not even have to care about.
I downloaded the common, popular apps like:
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Seesmic
Adobe Reader
Breaking News
DirecTV
Fandango
Flixster
Foursquare
Last.fm
IMDb
iheartradio
Netflix
Shazam
Slacker Radio
TED
UStream Viewer
Weatherbug
Then I went and downloaded a bunch of games from the Marketplace - happens to be that most of the games (perhaps all) are XBOX Live enabled. I am not an XBOX user yet so I was aslo able to set up my own XBOX Live Avatar.
Most of the games I downloaded, had a trial mode and I did go with the trial mode for those games. I have converted to paid on a few games already. Trial mode is simply fantastic, especially for games and especially for kids games where I can see if it is going to fly with the kids or not and then decide to put the $ down.
As you can see most of the big, common apps are already there and I am really not missing a beat.
I can say my needs are completely met (and exceeded in a lot of cases) except the following apps/scenarios:
Corporate email. Of course, my iPhone was a huge factor in my corporate email/calendar management. I am going to miss this feature the most. However there are multiple things to consider here - I have an iPad which is provisioned for corporate email and calendar, so I can use that when I am not at work. Also, it is only a matter of time before Windows Phone gets the at-rest encryption which will then make it feasible to get corporate email on it. Not a huge concern, in general.
Notifications. Even though Windows Phone provides multiple types of notifications (toaster alert like the SMS app does, Live Tiles like the Weatherbug app does and push notifications), common apps like facebook and twtter/seesmic have not implemented any notification method yet. This is an app maker's problem so I am positive the next iterations of these apps will take care of this issue. However I like the simplicity and features of Boxcar and I hope they get their app over to Windows Phone.
ESPN. I did not realize how much I used the ESPN ScoreCenter app on the iPhone. This weekend I wanted to keep track of multiple close Pac-10 football games and the website was simply not as efficient as the app is. I wish this app comes really fast and given how cutting edge ESPN has been until now, I don't doubt at all that a sexy-looking app is coming soon.
HippoRemote. For now I am not concerned much because the iPad takes care of it.
Amazon. Again, like ESPN I feel the app is much more efficient to use than the website and again, I am pretty sure these guys will release the app soon.
In-browser videos/flash-HTML5. This is quite an annoyance because even browsing to the ESPN website for example, from the iPad, plays videos in the page because they have made those videos HTML5-compliant. But the mobile IE browser does not support HTML5 and Windows Phone does not support flash or silverlight in the browser. So this is truly something I have to wait for Microsoft to deliver, hopefully in their next update.
Another big problem in the OS is that it cannot connect to wireless networks that are hidden. I do not broadcast my SSID and now I have to, hopefully again, only up to the upcoming update.
On the other hand, there are plenty of small things on the phone that made my smile. Simple stuff like the back button - I opened twitter, clicked on a tweet which had a link, clicked on the link and opened the browser. After I was done reading, I closed the browser and clicked the back button and I came back to the opened tweet in twitter. Small thing, but so cool.
Another thing - the voice command and voice search is FANTASTIC. I have not had a single incorrect interpretation of my voice command. Love it.
I could go on and on about how awesome the phone is, but this post is not about that. As you can see, the switch from the iPhone is going to be a good one and hopefully in the upcoming WP7 update as well as some of the app updates (or releases) most of my pending concerns would be addressed.
