Windows Phone 7 adventure

I went to Ottawa Mobile Conference, and I won as a presence prize 2 day training on Windows Phone 7 (WP7) plateform, at the Microsoft office in Ottawa. The training is provided by Colin Melia from DevTeach, which is knows the plateform very well. This was for me the occasion to get an idea of what it will look like. With the iOS, Android and RIM devices, is there a place for WP7? What it stands for? Millions of theses devices are supposed to hit the market before Thanks Giving in the US, made by Samsung, LG and Dell and others, so it has to be good.


WP7 is the Microsoft implementation of the whole mobile concept from Apple. Mobile Market is equivalent of AppStore, Zune have the same role as iTunes to sync the device and basic apps are about the same, except they are based on Microsoft technology, for example Internet Explorer replace Safari, Bing map and search replaces Google. A light version of Office and SharePoint may be free on the phone for the release. XboxLive will be the basis for all games on the device. Interesting fact, IE doesn't ship with Flash plugin. Seems that Microsoft agree with Apple on this point.

Concerning the interface, it uses the design pattern Hub and Spoke, that force the user to focus on one task at a time. A tile view of apps acts as the Hub. There are three mandatory physical button on the phone itself: back, start and search. Back goes to the previous view, start goes to the tile view and the search go to Bing. There can't multi-process running simultaneously, the same as the iPhone before multitasking. Say that you start an app, then go to the tile view and start another app, the first app instance is lost.

You can use two different libraries for an app, Silverlight for straight forward forms or XNA for games that requires more heavy video display. We saw mainly how to use Silverlight to design the UI. The application code can be written in C#, using the .NET framework classes. What is realy interesting is the clear separation between the logic and display of the application. It has been thought in such a way that the designer can work on the view independently of the programmer, that fills the view. Some preview data can be supplied to the view at design time, so the designer doesn't need the whole application to work. The UI is completely defined in XAML file in a declarative manner. A factory then read the file at runtime and create corresponding objects. .NET library provides a high level of abstraction for XML handling, HTTP and SQL queries, so in very few lines of code, a lot of things occur.

For those of you who may want to give it a try, here are some notes about installation on a MacBook Pro 1,1. The requirement and installation instructions are accurate. You need the VMX extension for virtualization to get good performances. It has to be enabled into EFI boot loader. See the Parallels knowledge base to get instructions. Microsoft supplies a small utility to check if the extension is available. But, maybe more critical is this MacBook Pro have an ATI X1600 card, and the latest (and the last) driver from AMD doesn't support WDDM 1.1, which is required for decent display performance with the phone emulator. Any computer with proper drivers for Windows 7 should do, it just means I will need a new computer to run the emulator appropriately.

In conclusion, Microsoft is jumping in the arena seriously with WP7. SDK is quite lean yet, and this is a great piece of integrated technology AFAIK. Their first step is obviously to copy recipies of competitors with their own technology. It's right, because innovation comes a lot from inspiration from others. iPhone is still the blue ocean device, and except for the Office app, there is nothing that a WP7 seems to do better, so the price point must be somewhat attractive to change the market forces. The fate of WP7 is now in the hand of customers.

No network, no problem!

I got a brand new smart phone, and the first thing I noticed is that it worth nothing without network. Wifi hotspot availability is uncertain, everybody has yet beg someone to get some access. 3G data is still expansive. Roaming above all, at 20$ bucks per megabyte, could ruine somebody looking at few youtube videos. And even 3G network is not always available, for example in subways, and will make your device as useful as a stone.

We already know the solution: data cache. At least, a device with some type of cache will be useful at some level. I want to bring with me my own files on any of my devices. This way, we do not rely on the cloud for every lookup, and we can sync with low cost network connexion when it becomes available. Mail is an obvious example of asynchronous system that is working well. With IMAP and a good mail client, you can get a cache of all your emails, read them when offline, even compose an email and send them later when network is back.

Another drastic example of a device that rely only on a cache is the WikiReader, that I bought recently. It has a cache of all 3 millions Wikipedia articles on a 8 Gb SSD card. It can be updated with a computer or by subscribing to an update service by old fashion mail. Never forget that a truck loaded with SSD cards has a lot of bandwith!

Though, keeping in sync multiple disconnected data sets is harder. Yet, many interesting projects, like the distributed replicated database system CouchDB, used in Ubuntu One for online services, borrow my contacts where ever I need them. At the file system level, I'm using Dropbox that replicates my files on all my devices. Beyong replication, it acts as a continuous backup, so I don't worry anymore with hard drive crashed. Also, HTML5 cache is a great addition, and can be used to lower your precious G3 bandwith, server load and lower latency. Those are example of disconnected aware cloud services, that I think are going to take off.

This said, sync all data does make sens only if the device belong to the user for a fair amount of time. In the case of shared workstation, for example a school lab, roaming profiles are known to be a disaster, because the data has to be synchronized from scratch multiple time, and it makes the cache useless. We may think of better synchonization, based on the content the user uses frequently, and fetch other things on demand. But the "keep it simple and stupid" way would be to make user reuse the same computer, or at least the same set of computers, and not flush the cache. Keeping users files on a shared computer is always tricky for privacy reasons, but providing encryption based on the user's credentials could be a solution. Another solution would be to let the student own and borrow their computer. With all those Linux mobile tablets that are going to hit the market soon, I think that it will create a great opportunity for providing affordable computers to each and every students. And with 16Gb of flash storage on basic models, there is enough room to cache almost everything! This way, the cache hit will be much higher, and users will be happier.

In summary, let's take a GPS as an example. Would you prefer a GPS that downloads all it's bitmap maps just-in-time, that rely heavily on network, or a GPS that is using it's embedded geo data. The later will not work without network, the later is not ofter updated, or even not at all. What I would consider the best design is to get a device with both. The mapping data should be embedded and rendered on the device itself, and this sort of cache should be updated each time you get network. Or even if you don't have all the data, you should be able to select areas to cache. 

In conclusion, the cloud is so fantastic that we sometimes forget that without a link to it, we're screwed. I consider that devices that are not designed to work without network is bad design, and those devices will end into the Computer History Museum soon.

Why iPad is Evil

Apple just launched the iPad last week, and I was a bit shaken by it. It's a piece of art of human interaction design, and it changes the relation we could have with a computer, more ubiquitous than ever. The device itself is amazing at the technical level, and set the bar for competitors.

But, let's think about the concept in a whole. Apple provides stores for music, books and applications. In fact, this device is a personal buying device, where you can buy only content provided by Apple and it's partner. It's a kind of perfect world, where the consumer is captive like anything ever before, a garden of pure ideology, in each one may bloom, secure, away from the pests, and ... wait a minute! Doesn't it makes you think about 1984?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8

What a closed world we would be in if Apple had dominated the market, closed hardware, closed software, and forced to buy content from Apple!

So, I say no to that iPad, and I will wait for an truly open platform.