About a year ago (yep, not much more it seems) it was decided to completely re-write the underlying mobile OS and the application development stack and services on top. A brave but necessary move given the free falling market share numbers we’re seeing on the current windows mobile interaction.

To be fair the HTC HD2 device running windows mobile 6.5 is actually pretty good, pretty great even, and supports all the features one would expect from a modern smartphone. It does however have a limited app store behind it and also contains rather dated UI remnants built around the classic windows desktop visual metaphors that consumer users in particular appear to have long abandoned.

Windows Phone 7 Design

Well, if any of you have gotten your hands on a Zune HD, you will undoubtedly appreciate the good looks and flow of what is essentially the core of the Metro design UI. It feels good on the Zune HD, and it looks strange, weird, different but dare i say it ground breaking in the videos and demos I have seen for Windows Phone.

The concept of ‘hubs’ within the phone allows for interesting ideas, like all your turns appearing in the games section together and all photo and video updates to aggregate from photo and video applications. This creates a cohesiveness and sense of place that you don’t get on other smart phones. I have a feeling there is some additional complexity for the user in the hub concept but this will trade off against the bond the hubs will create with the user over time.

Windows Phone 7 Development

Microsoft have killed it here. Silverlight for apps, XNA for games. Visual Studio/.Net and and easy debug and deploy model. Having worked with the Apple development model it looks hugely more productive to be building mobile apps for Windows Phone than iPhone. Of course until the device reach is out it won’t necessarily be more profitable, but certainly Microsoft have done everything right for .Net developers here so far.

The game story is also compelling. A significant majority of casual games on Xbox are built with XNA and that means porting them to Windows Phone is a breeze. I think we’ll see the game studios be able to quickly port and announce Windows Phone games as part of their standard development cycles without the major overhead that must come with platform ports like to iPhone. In addition, the integration of XBox Live services and shared game state across mobile, PC and Xbox provides what I believe to be one of the killer features in the whole offering. Microsoft needs to focus on leveraging the areas where it is ahead like the XBox and allow that to help it catch up in areas where it is sorely lagging like Music and Applications.

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

We haven’t really had much detail here to be yet. It looks very similar to the Apple App Store, with the new feature of trial before buy which appears to work in a standard shareware type way which can be defined by the application developer 30 days, 30 tries etc.). However there doesn’t appear to be any ability to have in app purchases as recently announced by Apple which is a shame.

The approval process looks identical to Apple’s in principle, although Microsoft have promised to remain open and transparent and be quicker than Apple  in approving applications sent to the Marketplace.

Windows Phone 7 Hardware, OS and Updates

Microsoft has prescribed pretty tight specifications for hardware partners producing phones. A 5MP with flash camera is required, 3 hardware buttons (back, home and search), 1GHz cpu minimum and optional keyboard amongst other things. In addition there are 2 core resolutions a larger 800 * 480 resolution which will be in the devices shipped on day one and a smaller 480 x 320 resolution for second wave devices. The aspect ratios are close but not identical meaning application developers will need to be aware of this, unlike with the iPhone. Of course it makes sense to maximise the potential reach of the phones but from a development perspective I do worry about this a little as it creates that additional complexity in testing applications.

There is no news on whether or not the devices can support both front and back facing cameras or not, i’m assuming not, but this would be required obviously for video conferencing support.

The OS contains a modified version of IE7 as the core web browser and you can read more about that here: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/58638

The OS is completely rebuilt, and appears to have been taken from Zune OS at least in part. A lot of elements like Deep Zoom are built right into the OS so they are going to be super quick and hardware acceleration plays a big part in this.

Multitasking appears similar to current iPhone OS with Push Notification apis supported only.

Syncing is awesome and automatic using the Zune syncing technology. Wireless syncing is now enabled and ActiveSync no longer required.

Updates to the phone will be done in a similar fashion to Zune. All phones will be able to receive updates which seems to me a much better model than for Android which appears to have a fragmentation issue with releasing new versions and updates in a more haphazard way.

Windows Phone 7 – What’s missing?

Here’s a couple of interesting features that may not make it into the final RTM.

• Copy and Paste – Confirmed!
• Video Capture within applications – Not confirmed but suspected

In Summary

Will we love it as much as we love our iPhones…? well that’s a really big wait and see!

Overall i grade Microsoft an 8/10 so far on their 2010 comeback trail. This is an exciting new start for Microsoft in mobile, but end of 2010 is when we’ll really know how the fight is shaping up.

For more….

http://www.windowsphone7series.com/

If you are interested to learn more or have any questions please drop me an email at keith.p@markerstudio.com

What would you prefer me to do? Spend my time hacking around issues in older technologies like Internet Explorer 6 or would you like that time spent making the site look the best that it can on better desktop browsers, as well as on the iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Blackberry and a whole host of other mobile devices?

— Andy Clarke makes a very interesting point.

The part I played in the conference was to provide some external (read outside the firewall) examples and ideas. In particular I spoke about Web2.0 and the challenges faced by governing users in this agile and collaborative world.

Below you can find the slides from the presentation. Be sure to read my speaker notes on the Slideshare website:

The original creator of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, dreamed of an information space that was open to everyone on the planet. But like many dreams, imagination took over and the vision became layered with roadblocks that effectively brought down the shutters for many users.

Accessibility returns to that original vision – to make web content readable and comprehensible for everyone, regardless of ability.

I liken “accessibility” to installing a wheelchair ramp in your building, or to traffic lights that buzz when it’s safe for pedestrians to cross the road.

No barriers to entry, please

Vision impairment, or any physical disability that prevents a person from using a mouse, should not be a barrier to your content.

In fact, it is illegal to launch a website that cannot be accessed by everyone – as a recent US lawsuit revealed. Web developers are on to it. Marketers need to be on to it, too.

Accessibility is as important as any other aspect of web development. As a web developer, I need to bear in mind that people who cannot see or use a mouse will be using this website and it is my job to ensure that they can.

Does your website play nice with screen readers?

The first step is to avoid the gratuitous use of images. An image-heavy website locks up content from screen readers, slows the downloading of your pages, and lowers the potential for high search engine rankings.

Not only do people need to be able to read the text within your images, screen readers — technology that reads out text on a website for people who can’t read it themselves—need to be able to as well.

Accessibility can be as basic as using ‘alt’ attributes that allow you to apply meta data to your images, where hovering over the image opens the door to more information. The ‘alt’ function is the first step to making a site visible and one would certainly hope that all web developers are using it now.

Technology like Flash isn’t flash at all in the accessibility stakes—in fact, Flash is just one giant image. Your content also needs to make sense when read out of context. For instance, links in your text which say “Read more” or “Click here” mean absolutely nothing to people who can’t read what is on the page. Screen readers are able to pull out all links from a page therefore they need to have more substance like: “Read more about our latest speaking events.”

There are many other things you can do to assist screen readers, such as Skip Links. Screen readers not only scan a website to detect where you are but, as mentioned above, can pull up a list of links. At the top of the document, it’s often a good idea to include some links that can allow users to jump directly to the main content area, search function or navigation. The Skip Links function is very useful as it allows immediate access to three of the most important parts of any site—content, search and navigation.

Accessibility for the masses

Accessibility is not just for people with complete vision impairment. It is also for people who have difficulty with low contrast or small fonts. A lot of these users use screen magnifiers, therefore when building websites, developers need to ensure that images don’t separate when people zoom in on the page. Building your site with scalable fonts is also a major plus for accessibility. There is a built in feature in every browser that allows the user to increase the font size however this is only available across all browsers if you use scalable font sizes like em, % or keywords.

The Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind recently won an award for the accessibility and creativity of their website. There are nice little features like high contrast mode or the ability to adjust the color in the text. These are features that are easy to implement using CSS and should not be overlooked.

Accessibility is not just for the vision or physically impaired. Its universality means you can view website content on any medium, such as a laptop, cell phone or fridge if the Internet is connected.

Making it happen

Web developers can do their best to make a website accessible, but the bottom line is you only know if it is truly accessible by getting vision impaired users to use it and give you feedback.

There are many companies and agencies out there more than happy to help. For instance, the RNZFB has a whole IT department who can test your website and there are international groups that will do the same. Approach your local university to set up a user feedback test for you.

Accessibility is best practice web development. It is about access—like a ramp or a lift for people who can’t walk up the stairs to your office—to your website. More and more governmental agencies are making it law to cater for all audiences. If you are building a website, you need to be aware of this.

Essentially, accessibility is all about returning to the vision that created the World Wide Web in the first place.

As a quick overview:

• Apple notifications
• Search (Spotlight)
• Copy & paste
• In application e-commerce
• Peer-to-peer connectivity
• Voice memo’s
• Audio recorder
• MMS support
• CalDAV calendar type
• Calendar subscriptions
• Shake to shuffle
• Shake to undo
• Stereo Bluetooth output
• Auto fill
• You Tube account access

The vaunted push notifications didn’t appear. Apparently they’re working on it but it caused rapid battery drain. Their Apple notifications system is the stand-in here – I’m sure developers will make it work in ways its not supposed to to mimic some push functionality.

Not getting Flash support BUT if the source uses video in HTML5 it will be supported as H.264 and a couple of other formats/options.

The update will be free to all 3G phones but a paid upgrade (US$10) for gen 1 phones and iPod Touch – some of the features won’t be available on gen 1 phones though. Developer Beta of the SDK available today.

Here’s a transcript of the event.

TwitterFon - Main Page

For ever so long I was using the Twitterific app, but, as you’d be able to tell by viewing my history, I never really used it that much.

Honestly, it was a pretty shit app, doing anything was always a hassle, and the user experience never made me want to come back. I’d only login for an update out of guilt from not logging in for an update.

Well last night I was playing around in the app store (as you do when you’re in bed at like 11:30 with a wireless network. Go wireless network! I love you even though you’re as secure as a paper mâché safe) and I stumbled across an app called TwitterFon.

(Sorry, I’d link up these things but I haven’t figured out how to browse through the app store via Firefox yet)

TwitterFon - Tweeter Information

Anyway, TwitterFon is much better than Twitterific, and still free (the ultimate measure of whether I install it or not), providing features that actually make me want to go back and use it, and not just from the guilt of not updating.

It’s got things like the ability to view Tweets by type, like Reply and Messages (of the Direct kind). You can select a tweet and get more options, such as “Reply”, “Send a DM” and “Retweet”. Not sure about the last one though, maybe it requires some more investigation. You can also view that users timeline and their profile.

TwitterFon - Search

As a (cool) aside, if you’ve got an iphone it shows the geographic co-ordinates of your iPhone.

If you view the Tweeter’s profile you’re presented with some more handy options, you can view who they’re following, who’s following them, their updates and their favourites. You’re also provided a handy link to Follow that user.

There’s also a search, which has the ability to search for Tweets near you, as well as the normal search function (finding irrelevant things not near you), to access the location search you just press on the little target icon, same as the iPhone maps.

Anyway, I’m running out of steam now.

tl;dr

TwitterFon = awesome. Twitterific = poo. Give TwitterFon a try today, made me bother to update again.

Justin

The eyes of the world will be on the US elections on Tuesday, however there is another election happening this week here in New Zealand, if you live here you might have heard about it. I decided to put my geek hat on, and look at how the three main parties (based on current polling), National Party, Labour Party and the Green Party, stack up if you look at purely their online presence.

Decision 08 Political Party Online Ratings (click to enlarge)

I have put together this ratings table which looks at the following areas:

Search Engine Optimisation

An important part of any online strategy, but particularly important as you want to have high visibility within Google (90% market share in NZ) as this is where most of your traffic should come from.

Search Engine Advertising

Pay per click advertising via Google AdWords would help supplement their traffic and exposure.

Site Design

Particular attention to the homepage, as this is their best opportunity to try to engage with voters.

Social Networking

How did they do on You Tube and Facebook? It doesn’t look like anyone has got onto Twitter yet.

RSS

RSS should be the best way to keep updated on what was happening and the content they are publishing.

Here are some of the other facts and figures I found along the way.

Google Trends Prediction of the Election

This is the index of search traffic on Google for the different political parties by name, and leader. The top graph looks at search traffic, the bottom graph looks at mentions in the news.

The fact that Labour and the Green Party are so close is somewhat interesting.

As you can see, relatively speaking, the interest in the other leaders, apart from John Key and Helen Clark is limited, in fact, there isn’t enough data for Google to draw a line on the graph.

Facebook

Who is winning in the world of social networks?

If Facebook friends were representative of the voting public, then John Key is substantially more popular than the incumbent leader.

ACT vs Green looks very different on Facebook than in the polls.

Winston Peters has no Facebook Page or Profile, and the Winston Peters Appreciation Group is not exactly going that well, with a mere 32 members.

Greens.org.nz Home Page

I have singled this out, as the worst home page. An example is the big green box for “Our Acheivements” which is completely blank! Whilst I appreciate the self-criticism, surely you guys have done something as trusted coalition partners for all these years?

I think it was just disappointing that they didn’t really apply the great photography they have used in the billboards on their website. I imagine they just ran out of time and money unfortunately.

They do have the best blog though.

Conclusion

My conclusion, and bear in mind much of this was based on subjective opinion, was that the National Party has the best overall online presence. The quality, quantity and reach of content is surprisingly good, and not what I would have expected. The fact that you can leave a comment on John Key’s blog, but not on Helen Clark’s “diary” also gave them points for being open to participation and online discussion.

This explains it best:

InfoConnect is an initiative to help ensure road users have access to timely and accurate road condition information.

InfoConnect is the destination for developers and companies wanting to access verified Highway Info data programmatically in order to fill a niche market by producing appropriate information channels for the travelling public.

Highway Info includes state highway road and traffic information, webcam coverage in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, planned road works, unplanned road closures and delays, maps, and holiday traffic information.

Essentially the goal is open up the data available within NZTA to third party developers and get them using it in a way that is going to help us all on the state highways around the country. This issue affect many New Zealanders and even something as simple as being able to check out which route to take home in rush hour is something that would be really helpful to many people. In winter, particularly in the Central North Island and South Island, this information is quite critical. Believe me I know, having driven through a blizzard just last month in Otago!

As part of the project, we have developed a couple of web apps for the iPhone to try and give other developers a taste of what is available and what they can do. We developed two applications:

iCam.markerstudio.com

This allows you to browse through the available traffic web cams and view them on your iPhone. These are static images, rather than streaming video, however, they will update automatically every 60 seconds. Handy if you are not sure which route to take to the airport or to go home. Thanks to Justin for helping me with this one and coming up with the way to do the image refresh within the limitations of the iPhone browser.

iTREIS.markerstudio.com

TREIS is the system where NZTA record all major road events that affect the national highways. This could include weather related issues such as snow causing a road to be closed, or scheduled events such as road works. They also issue general warnings for both the North and South Island.

As you will only be able to view these on an iPhone I have put together a movie that shows you how they work. If you do have an iPhone, please go to the above URL’s in Safari.

I’m interested in feedback, and am planning for us to build these into one integrated native iPhone application, which would be more powerful, as you could take advantage of the GPS capability. Please post your ideas and comments via this blog if you can? I am particularly interested to know if you think you would pay for this application?

If you are a developer, please check out InfoConnect and sign up so you can see what is on offer. Neither API is particularly complicated. I wrote the developer documentation, so if you have any questions or feedback on that, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: api, infoconnect, nzta, transit