Mobile Development

The need for a different Marketplace

2012-01-01T16:36:00.006+01:00

My grandmother always said that in the first day of a new year you should do what you would like to do the rest of the year. Even if the last year I didn't had a lot of time to blog I always wanted to so here I am wanting to start the year with my blog.

So what is wrong with the current version of the Marketplace? I could say nothing really, but there is so much that could be improved/changed. I am referring here to the marketplace of all major mobile platforms: Android, iOS and Windows Phone. They are more or less the same. Right now I have experience as a developer with Windows Phone marketplace and as a customer/consumer with all three of them. The marketplace was/is one of the greatest marketing/selling instrument in the software industry. In theory it gives the opportunity to everyone to sell their ideas/software all over the world. I say in theory because it enables developers to do that, but it doesn't make it easy.

One of the biggest problems I see for the moment is the number of applications. I am looking at the Microsoft "race" to catch up with the number of applications in the marketplace. In this race the number is the priority and the quality comes second. The result of this race is that the marketplace get filled with "junk". It is the same situation on all the three platforms, but today the analysts judge the success of a platform by the number of apps in the marketplace. Let's face it there are 500.000 application in the Apple marketplace and, maybe, not even 10% are quality apps. When I say junk I say applications that don't bring any innovation, written as fast as possible and thrown into the wild just to have an application out there. From my experience (I have a small application in the marketplace) in order to have a decent application there is a lot of work to be done in developing and maintaining it. Having so many applications in the marketplace "kills" the opportunity marketplace gives you if you have a quality app because it makes it almost invisible. If today you have a quality app and you publish it will be there with (I will take the Windows Phone marketplace numbers published by http://wp7applist.com/en-US/stats/ today 01.01.2012) other 451 applications published the same day. Does you application stand any chance? Some will say yes, I would say the more apps are in the marketplace the harder will be. You can only count on the people that are trying new applications. So inevitable a quality app will go down (maybe a little bit slower ) with the others and you have to find other methods to get it "visible". Another consequence of having a lot of applications published every day without a quality check is the degrade in the service offered to developers. I remember that when I wrote this post: http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2011/01/windows-phone-marketplace-more.html the quality of certification the service was great. Things changed a little in the last two months (I think they had an increase in the number of applications to certify) the certification time jumped from two days to more than a week. More frustrating is seeing applications like this one published in "bulk":

So is it worth having thousands of applications without any quality filter (just rules on how to write your app)? I would prefer a quality marketplace, but maybe having both is better. It's like when you go to the market to shop: if you want products that cost less you go in one place, if you want quality products you go to another shop, if you just need one product you go in the first shop you find. The marketplace in the marketplace could improve a little bit on the quality part. It would need quality reviewers that would select the apps for the "quality" marketplace. It is easier than to go on all review websites and look for top applications on each platform. A place in the marketplace where you go when you don't know what you really want but you would like to try some quality applications. Apple, Google and Microsoft should not be the quality reviewers but continue to do what they do and then the best reviewers/websites on each platform should intersect their chosen applications (easy to say and hard to do). It is not a bullet proof mechanism.

Other suggestion regards the reviews specifically bad reviews. In this moment if you want to make a concurrent application go down you just go and slowly start to make bad reviews in all the marketplaces. (it is a situation I am dealing with). I would suggest that, if someone makes a bad review and give one or two stars, he should be "forced" to write a reason. This should help the developers understand the problem, and, if it's not true at least ask the review to be removed. Also the reviews should be disabled when the application is hidden. For the hidden applications the reviews don't make any sense.

Being able to publish a beta version of the application in the marketplace is an awesome feature, but in this moment, for me is almost useless. You have to find your beta testers, but it is a difficult task. So there should be an "open" beta option. This way anybody that wants to test the beta and has a link to it can do it with a limit of 100 users (more or less like the hidden apps but limited to a number of users).

In my opinion 2011 was a great year for Windows Phone even if the market shares don't reflect it . The 7.5 version is a great step forward and I hope that 2012 will bring us another big step. I still think that the application list is "ugly" and not really usable, we need some way to group applications (maybe an evolution of the "folder" concept).

I really hope Microsoft will make Apollo an EVOLUTION and not a REVOLUTION.

Happy New Year to all my readers! A better year to everyone.

NAMASTE

WP7 A better InkPresenter using XNA

2011-10-27T00:25:00.000+02:00

Last week I was at SMAU Italia together with Matteo Pagani giving a hand at Windows Phone 7 labs and having a good time with my friends at Microsoft. I also got the pleasure to meet Ben Riga. One of the attendees at the laboratory raised a really good question about the performance of the InkPresenter in WP7. He is using the control to capture a signature, but if you are pretty fast (usually people when they do their signature are fast) the result is "ugly" and not really usable. You won't get a smooth curve, but something like this:

This screenshot is taken in the emulator, but on the real device the curve looks worst and it's easy to reproduce this behavior. I took this "problem" as a challenge (two nights of work and now the third to write the post) convinced that I can get better results with a mix between XNA and Silverlight, mix that in Mango is possible. T

The main problem is the number of points returned by the event MouseMove of the InkPresenter control which is not enough points to draw a decent curve.

The first thing I've tried in the XNA version was to use the TouchPanel.GetState() but I was surprised to see that I get the same number of sampling points as the MouseMove in InkPresenter. The things improved a lot when I've used TouchPanel.ReadGesture() with GestureType.FreeDrag. Using these sampling points as StylusPoints for the InkPresenter the situation improved a little:

The black line is the one obtained with MouseMove and the red one is the one obtained with ReadGesture.The result is better, but not satisfying. The only way to further improve the result was to manually draw the curve without InkPresenter. I've have used BezierSegment to draw the curve. Without any processing this would be the result:

The new curve is the blue one which is better than the others, but it is still not smooth in some points. This is because a Bézier path is smooth if each endpoint and its two surrounding control points lie in a straight line. In other words, the two tangents at each Bézier endpoint are parallel.

There is more than one approach to solve this behavior and I've implemented two (with all the mathematics I felt back at the University http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve).

The first is an algorithm for Automatically Fitting Digitized Curves with the Douglas Peucker algorithm to reduce the number of points (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5525665/smoothing-a-hand-drawn-curve).

The second one uses Bézier splines which creates the First and Second control points for each Bézier segment http://www.codeproject.com/KB/graphics/BezierSpline.aspx .

With both algorithms the results are pretty good:

If you are interested to play with the sample you can change the following parameters:

double PhilipSchneiderTolerance = 0;

double PhilipSchneiderError = 4;

-used when the fitting algorithm is PhilipSchneider (run this sample http://cid-c27e99281f78a67a.office.live.com/self.aspx/Public/Simplify.zip on the desktop to understand what changes when you change the Tolerance and the Error)

private bool _showPoints = false;

-shows or hides the points read by ReadGesture

private bool _showOtherCurves = false;

-shows or hides the InkPresenter curve using MouseMove and ReadGesture

private FitCurveAlgorithm _algorithm = FitCurveAlgorithm.PhilipSchneider;

-changes the fitting algorithm: None, BezierSpline, PhilipSchneider

Here you can download the project!

P.S. The project still needs some working/polishing in order to be used in production, but that is the simple part so... HAVE FUN

NAMASTE

Skydrive Library for Windows Phone v1

2011-10-21T00:15:00.002+02:00

I've started this project before Build. At that time I didn't know what Microsoft was preparing for the skydrive REST Api so there was no way to fully access your skydrive folders and files. The idea was to be able to get the modified files (word, excel) from Skydrive back to the dropbox account (a lot of people requested that feature and, as you probably know, in Mango you can save the files directly to your skydrive account). So I've started by contacting the people that already had developed applications that use Skydrive for Windows Phone 7 ( it doesn't make sense to reinvent the wheel if you can borrow or buy one) . I've found 2 applications: Sky Wallet and the other Skydrive Player and the answers from the developers were not what I was expected: the first one pointed me to Skydrive.Net which is(was) unusable for Windows Phone and then didn't replied to my other emails (so I understood it was disturbing for him to share his work) and the other said that the source code was not really clean (so more or less I don't want to share it). The only option was to start digging up and find out how they did it (that day I've also promised to myself that i will publish the code even if this will mean that the application I have in the marketplace will loose some value) It took me more than I expected to understand and implement the mess (for me it's a mess) behind the WebDAV, but the results are not bad ... it works. The source code is quite a mess but it's free and you can use it (if I wait to have time to "clean" the code I will never publish the library). When the REST api will be out of beta (you cannot publish an app with the beta sdk) this library will be obsolete, but till then you can use it in your applications and they will pass certification (at least mine did ... till now ). The list root folder method is slow because I have to call two methods in order to have all the files and folders. You will also find a test project that will show you how to browse your skydrive. Creating folders and uploading files are not implemented in this version and it doesn't make sense to implement them because it will be much easier to do it with the REST api. If you need this functionality contact me and I will point you in the right direction.

The project is published on Codeplex: http://wp7skydrive.codeplex.com/

If you have questions, need support, or want to improve the library please let me know. If you wanna see a better integration of the library than the simple test project you should buy my dropbox client Boxfiles :) .

NAMASTE

DropBox library for Windows Phone 7 v1.1

2011-10-20T21:32:00.002+02:00

I have just published an updated version of my Dropbox client on CodePlex. You can download it here. I have rewritten the library from scratch (took out all dependencies - Json.Net and Hammock, added the download progress event and a lot of other things that I cannot even remember). It's faster, better and it's the exact same library I am using in my Dropbox application . I really hope that it will be useful for your projects and hope your projects will not be something similar to Boxfiles.
That's all folks!

P.S. It doesn't have a test project, but you can use the one in the first release. It should be easy to use and pretty intuitive. If you find bugs or want to improve the library please let me know

NAMASTE!

BoxFiles for Dropbox v2 Beta

2011-09-08T10:04:00.001+02:00

Dear readers,
We've just published the first beta of BoxFiles for Dropbox Mango edition :). The beta is available at: zune://navigate/?appid=8cfa8f66-3174-48e1-99b5-f2d0146113e8 and is limited to the first 100 users that will download the app (if we reach that limit and we still have requests we can publish another beta). We've rewritten most of the source code so it needs a good testing and some feedback. Send your problems/suggestions to: info@neologics.eu .
The Dropbox library was rewritten from scratch taking out all the 3rd party components (JSON.Net and Hammock), but the featureI am most proud of is the integration with Skydrive. You can now upload your modified Office files back to your Dropbox account.
We need your help to make our product better. If you can, please tweet the link.

NAMASTE!

Mobile HTML5 Speed Reading Again

2011-09-01T19:39:00.000+02:00

Today I've upgrade my iPad 2 to iOS beta 7 and I was thinking that a more "realistic" comparison for the HTML5 Mobile Speed reading would with the new iPhone compared to a new Windows Phone Mango device (new year new hardware). On my Omnia 7 with 7712 build and video drivers not optimized for Mango I get around 30fps, the same that I was getting on my iPhone 4 with iOs5 beta. I remember that on a tweet I read that, on some devices, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango was doing 60 fps. On the other hand the new iPhone will probable have the A5 processor just like the iPad2 so I've run the same test on my device and the results are not bad at all. The iPad2 with iOs5 beta 7 is doing a stable 60fps. This is the frame rate we can expect from the new iPhone.So Apple and Microsoft are, for now, at the same level and let's hope that the OEM's will optimize their video drivers for Mango in order to get 60 fps, if not it could be a boomerang for Microsoft (the new iPhone, doing 60fps, would smash WP7 Mango that is doing 30-40fps). Hope it won't happen.

Here is the test on the iPad2

NAMASTE

Where XNA beats up Silverlight

2011-08-25T22:32:00.000+02:00

Finally a blog post. I am in the process of updating (it's more of a rewriting) Boxfiles for Mango. Till now I have rewritten the Dropbox library from scratch (took off all the dependencies Hammock, Json.Net and now it's pure HttpWebRequest) and developed a library for accessing Skydrive resources (it works and it is possible to list the folders and download the files mainly what I need to get the modified Office files back to Dropbox). Anyway the Skydrive API it's a mess for the moment and I really hope they will get a "clean" API. The current version of the Rest Api is usable only for contacts, photos and videos. I will post both libraries on Codeplex (very probable after I finish the update of Boxfiles).

So what is this post all about. One of the features of the new version of Boxfiles will be pinch to zoom. Searching on the web I have found the XNA and the Silverlight solutions. I've started with Silverlight and with pinch to zoom added the application would easily eat more than 90MB of RAM while the image window is opened. Digging up on what was consuming so much memory it turned up that the image window eats around 40 MB of memory (also because I have enabled CacheMode="BitmapCache" in order to have a smooth zoom). This is an abomination for a simple page with one menu and an Image control displaying a file of 3MB. I than remembered that, in Mango, Silverlight and Xna can "live" together. The feature was introduced for enabling Silverlight in Xna (menus and stuff) , but in this particular case I will use Xna in Silverlight. I've created a project where I can compare the pinch to zoom on both Xna and Silverlight. The results are not bad: XNA uses around 10MB while Silverlight uses 40MB and the pinch to zoom is much smoother in Xna (the sample starts with 10MB of memory occupied).

In order to have a realistic comparison I've added an ApplicationBar to the Xna window and both of the windows have a Menu where you can force the GC to collect. While testing the solution I've found a really strange behavior (in my opinion it's a memory leak of the image control and maybe somebody from Microsoft should have a look into it): the Silverlight window, after the first launch, was not releasing 10MB of memory. In order to release the memory I had to manually remove the Image control from the ContentPanel and give it a null value.

ContentPanel.Children.Remove(image);
image = null;

If you play with the solution just comment the two lines located in OnNavigatedFrom (ImageSilverlight.xaml.cs) and you will see the leak.

Here is the Source Code

NAMASTE!

Mono is back

2011-07-18T17:20:00.000+02:00

Great news today... Mono is back. Looks like the Xamarin guys were able to convince Novell to take over the Mono project. You can read more on Miguel de Icaza post. Now the first thing I hope is to be able to reactivate my Monotouch license on my new Macbook (for more than two months I got no answer to my emails - Xamarin or Novell). Multiplatform mobile development... Sweet

Windows Phone 7 Marketplace What to expect

2011-07-16T17:00:00.001+02:00

We all know that the actual version of Windows Phone 7 Marketplace can be better and that a new version is coming. As a registered developer with an active application on the marketplace I've been invited to compile a survey on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace. The survey had a very interesting part where you select what you would like to included in the next version of the Marketplace. Here is the list with what might come in the next version of the Marketplace. If you see items that are doubled it's because the system they used for evaluating was to cycle on the same answers where you select which one is the most important and which one is the least important in groups of 4:

Real-time app download information: "Watch number of app downloads in real time (no delay). App downloads are categorized by user market, device and mobile operator.
Annual paid subscriptions for technical support: "You can buy a paid subscription for advanced technical support."
App emulator: "Users can check out a full version of the app in a browser window, prior to downloading or purchasing."
Web marketplace: "An online web marketplace for users to browse the app catalog and make purchases; apps downloaded/purchased on the web marketplace show up instantly on their phones without the need to tether to the PC or perform any user action."
Easy app updates: "The App Hub will retain metadata, artwork and descriptions from prior versions and make it easier to submit updates."
Paid featured slots: "Bid money for a featured app slot within the web and phone marketplace clients. Featured slots are assigned based on a real-time auction to the highest bidder."
Early access to updates: "Developers will have early access to OS upgrades to help them update their apps to take advantage of new features."
Flexible pricing: "This will enable developers to price your app differently in different markets and also have more price tiers to choose from."
Private distribution of apps: "Apps can be published hidden in the marketplace, so only users with a special deeplink are able to download the app. This can be used for private distribution scenarios where you don't want your app to show up in the general catalog."
More intuitive category structure: "Changes to the category structure to make it more intuitive, add additional categories like education etc."
Respond to user reviews: "View and respond to user reviews. Draft responses to user reviews from your App Hub account without seeing the real user email address. Users receive your response and can optionally come back and change their review."
App gifting: "Allow users to gift apps to other users, paying on their behalf. The gift recipient gets an email with instructions on how to redeem the app."
Role-based developer accounts: "Multiple user accounts can be created to manage your AppHub account, with different permissions. For example, one account could have permissions for viewing download/payout reports (your finance manager) but no permissions for submitting or editing existing apps. Another account could have permissions to submit apps or edit metadata, but no access to reporting."
Additional payment methods like PayPal: "Ability to pay App Hub fees with PayPal. Ability to buy apps or in app purchases using PayPal."
Discount offers/coupons: "Ability to generate and offer a discount coupon to users (x% or $x off) for app promotions, etc. Users can enter the coupon code during checkout. Coupons can be unique (one time use only) and have an expiration date. Coupons can be easily generated from your App Hub account."
In-app commerce: "Ability to charge users a small amount of money from within the application. This can be used for selling extra content (e.g. a new game level, accessories) or unlocking new app functionality."
Screen capture tool: "Tool for capturing the right size (480x800) screenshots off the emulator or a phone tethered to the PC."
Video content in-app description: "Ability to upload videos to showcase app for users to see from PC or web interface while browsing the catalog."
App analytics: "Get real-time information on number of application runs, active users, app installs and uninstalls, etc. to understand how often your app is being used."
Simplified identity validation: "A simplified identity validation process that will be based on your credit card details and/or email verification."
More frequent payouts: "We will lower the payout threshold and so you will receive your payouts more frequently ."

All are great features. Let's hope they will implement all of them

NAMASTE

WP7 Network Printing

2011-07-16T10:47:00.002+02:00

As promised I am publishing the sample for network printing on Windows Phone 7 Mango. It is a proof of concept and it is the same I did more than a year ago on Monotouch. It uses sockets to connect to a network printer and send one page that contains two rectangles (one with shadow and one without shadow) and some text. It is an implementation of PCL5 (not a complete one of course). Hope that somebody will take the time to finish implementation. If so please let me know cause I will need it.

Source code

NAMASTE

My Monday thoughts on Thursday

2011-07-15T01:10:00.000+02:00

For more than three weeks I wanted to do a post on Monday called "My Monday thoughts". Too bad that on Monday I always have a lot of work to do and never got it done.

Three weeks ago was about localization and ignorance. The italian "garante" for personal data privacy, Francesco Pizzetti, declared that smartphone are dangerous because they are always "tracking" us at any step. That, in my opinion, is pure ignorance. First of all somebody has to explain to him that GPS is a receiver not a transmiter and that having a cellular phone (any cellular phone) is having a tracking device (the mobile operator is logging the sequence of cells where your phone is connecting). So if you don't want to be tracked don't buy a cell. Than there is the question what is the mobile operator doing with this data? Almost all the time it is used for statistics, and then, when an authority asks for it they are used in investigations. Would I mind being tracked by Google, Apple or Microsoft? Not really and if this could help them make better products I would agree to do it. Does anyone ask you if you want your data logged by the mobile operator? I remember the guy that discovered the logged positions on his iPhone and everybody saw it like a big problem. But if anybody, besides Apple, arrives to read that data it means that he already has access at your emails, contacts, phone calls which are more sensitive than the log of your position. If you don't have anything to hide being logged or not is not such a big deal and in some cases could save your life (accident in the mountains for example) . On the other side the persons that usually vote against it are in parliament and some of them have things to hide.

Two weeks ago I had a week of holiday and I was in Nice, France. Wanted to blog a lot instead I just wrote an article about Mango, fixed some bugs for some clients, and ported the code for network printing on WP7 in order to write a blog post (still have to try it with the printer). I arrived at the conclusion that writing along with a glass of wine is much easier. The project that eats almost all my time at this moment is a Home automation/Domotic one. The client wanted the WPF:

and in my spare time (usually from 10pm-1am) , for a demo for Microsoft Italy, I've developed the Windows Phone 7 client that uses sockets:

I intend to finish the application before the Mango Marketplace opens and have it as a free version with a fixed plant in our office.

This Monday I was pretty sad because I had the occasion to go Microsoft WPC and present Boxfiles for Dropbox on stage and could not go. The problem was that my visa (I am romanian and need a visa) was not ready. Anyway I already have in mind version 2.0: multilingual , add Skydrive support in order to be able to upload files to dropbox from skydrive when mango arrives (this is the only way to get your modified word, excel docs back to dropbox). Also 2.1 plans: background download/ upload of files.

Today I am just happy that my article was published. But one of the things I am more happy about is that in all this period I made new friends: Lorenzo Barbieri, Roberto Freato, Alessandro Scaradova, Matteo Pagani, Michele Locuratolo. It's good to feel part of a group that share the same passion for mobile development ( DotNetLombardia). A special thanks to Lorenzo Barbieri and Roberto Freato for making it happen.

Getting back soon with the post on Network printing on Windows Phone 7

NAMASTE

Adding and E-Mail Account to the WP Emulator

2011-06-23T01:32:00.002+02:00

I just love hacks...
http://www.j2i.net/blogEngine/post/2011/06/22/Adding-an-E-Mail-Account-to-the-WP-Emulator.aspx

Metro Style UI in iOS 5

2011-06-16T14:43:00.000+02:00

Today, when I've changed my SIM card, I've noticed this screen on my iPhone:

The icon seems more an WP7 icon then an iPhone one. Good choice the Metro UI :)

iOS 5 HTML5 Speed Reading

2011-06-07T19:06:00.000+02:00

It's hard to start a post when it passed so much time from the last one. So much things to say but when you want to write about them you realize that are not so important/innovative/interesting or at least worth reading about.

I remember back in April at Mix Keynote when they presented the IE9 mobile edition that Apple was the worst performer in the tests. This is a small part of the Mix keynote where they show how the various devices perform:

So ever since April I was curious how much time will it take Apple to get back on the track with Safari mobile browser. Luckily I am the "proud" owner of an iOS developer account with no application published on the App Store (I will blame time and now Novell as I had to change my Macbook on which I had activated the Monotouch license and now it's GONE as nobody answers of that part anymore. I can only hope that Miguel and his team will "cook" a new product as soon as possible. All the money we've spent on Monotouch and Monodroid are now a dead investment). But let's get back to the post.... So today I've downloaded the first beta of the iOS 5 and deployed it to my iPhone 4 and ... SURPRISE... after not even two months the Safari browser outperforms Android and Windows Phone 7 (the way they were two months ago). Here is a small video with the test I ran:

I can hardly wait to be able to install Mango on my device and it seems that this could happen at the end of June for developers (keeping my fingers crossed). In that case Apple and Microsoft are definitely winning a small battle against Google. It is very important to give the tools developers need when they need them and this is not when the phones ship (being able to test on a real device it's a MUST). While for Apple it is an easy battle to win as they develop the hardware so they decide what to do, Microsoft on the other side has to convince the hardware OEMs and the mobile operators to let developers get early access to Mango and also find a way to make it "work" on all the Windows Phone 7 devices available today .

iOS 5 brings a lot of interesting new features and I agree that some of them are similar/inspired/copied from Windows Phone 7, but if that makes the product better Microsoft should copy and improve some of the iOS features. Here are some things that I still don't like in WP7 :

the most annoying in this moment is the email client that doesn't go to the next email when I delete one but comes back to the inbox and make me lose a lot of time (for the moment I have mobile internet only on my Omnia 7)
I still don't like the application list even if now you can use search or jump list
HATE the InCall experience with small buttons and the "half" window (I don't understand why) that doesn't make sense as you usually will push with the face the outer area and the window will go to background or even more annoying instead of closing the call you will send it to the background

NAMASTE

WP7 Emulator Tip: Use your hardware keyboard

2011-02-17T14:25:00.000+01:00

Yesterday at MWC I was telling Bryan Agnetta how frustrating it is not to be able to use you hardware keyboard to input text in the Emulator and he told me that as long as he knows there is some shortcut that enables the hardware keyboard in the emulator. Searching with google I've found a post on Brad Tutterow's blog and in fact you can use PgUp to enable the hardware keyboard in the emulator. Hope this tip will help you as much as it helps me. No more frustration...:)

Here are all the shortcuts:

Page up / page down: Toggle between the software keyboard on the emulator and the hardware keyboard on your development machine. While using your machine’s keyboard, you can TAB between fields.

F1: Back

F2: Start

F3: Search

Windows Phone Marketplace: More frustration

2011-01-31T23:39:00.000+01:00

I wanted to do this post for quite a while, but never found the time. Hope that someone from Microsoft will have the patience to read this post and take some action.

In my opinion the current version of the Windows Phone Marketplace reflects the state of WP7 platform ... unfinished, rushed on the market. Some time ago I wrote a post about the development platform and said that it's frustrating that "normal" developers don't have access to resources that are already present on the platform like: sockets, camera stream, database. The Windows Phone Marketplace is even more frustrating and I experienced that both as individual developer and company account . So let's take it step by step:

1. Registration

As a company we were already registered as Windows Mobile developers. When Microsoft updated the Marketplace we had to update our account and something went wrong when the XBox account was generated because it was located in USA instead of Italy. This made impossible the publication of any application as the developer website went into error. We contacted Microsoft support and after almost one week the only solution was to generate/subscribe a new account.

As an individual when subscribing the Developer Program on the same webpage there were 2 prices "Abbonamento annuale Hub App € 99,00" and "L'abbonamento annuale di € 80,00IVA inclusa" but when I received the message from the credit card the real price was €113,85.

2. Publisher Certification

I know that Geotrust is responsible for the certification but they represent Microsoft in this process so it's Microsoft that has to do something to improve this service.

Company account: after waiting for 3-4 days, as we had our application ready for more than two weeks, we contacted them directly. The first time they said that everything was ok and that we will have the account certified the same day. As we had no answer we had to contact them again after two more days in order to finally have the account enabled

With my personal account was even worst.I have subscribed the Developer program on 24th of Nov. 2010, then received an email on 26th of Nov 2010 that they needed a document that I have sent the same day. Geotrust answered on 3rd of Dec 2010 that they have received the document and they will complete the verification process shortly. I wrote to them on the 3rd of Jan. 2011 asking why my account was not activated and they finally activated the account on 4th of Jan 2011 :).

3. Publication

This part is not so bad but can be improved. If you submit an application/update but you find a bug it is impossible to cancel the submission even if it's not have been tested. On one hand it's quite normal, but as time is money if the developer finds a bug why not stop the process right away meaning Microsoft won't loose time to test an application that won't pass certification and the developer won't have to wait for the certification to fail in order to be able to submit an updated xap. The alternative would be to create and submit a new application but if you don't pay attention you will end up with two applications on the Marketplace. This happened to me with BoxFiles. I then wanted to split the applications (one for US and the other for the other markets) but this meant that some users won't be able to update the application they bought because if you bought an application that is updated but not available anymore on your Marketplace you won't be able to update. So I've decided to let both of them.

I have to make compliments to the testing team. They are really well organized and you will usually get an answer in one or two days. This is the only part of the Marketplace that I can say it's great (even if my latest update was postponed because the Dropbox service was not working for 30 min so they could not login or create a new account).

4. Updates

The bad part about updates is that it is impossible to write the update text. The user will see that there is an update, but you cannot communicate what is new in this release

5.Reviews

The first thing that I don't like is the fact that a user can write more than one review. A user should be able to update his review but this should erase his old review (now both of them will be visible). I don't like it because if a user changed his opinion changing it from bad to good a possible buyer will be influenced by the bad review even if the user that wrote the bad review now has another opinion.

Another aspect is that nobody verifies the reviews. For example one of the bad reviews of my app states that the search section freezes even if, in the old version, there is no search section (1.7 will have it :) ). Another user said that it cannot login in trial version and he will not buy the app even if, for writing an app review, you will have to buy it. It looks like some users are having "fun" trying to make the applications of the others look bad instead of trying to make their applications look good and the Marketplace helps them.

I also think that the algorithm for calculating an application rate could be improved. I might be mistaken but in this moment is a mean value from all the reviews of an app which, in my opinion, is not reflecting the "state" of the app. I will explain why: an user usually, if everything works, won't take time to do a good review. On the other hand if an application does't work you will be angry and you will do a bad review. If the developer fixes the things the users that wrote a negative review will usually not take the time to write a positive review. So it would be more fair to calculate an application rating using an weighted average by the application version number. If the first version had many bad reviews and the next one have very good ones but not as many they should count more in the rating as they reflect more precise the actual state of the app.

6. Security

I let for last the worst of them all. This part is very shameful for Microsoft. A company that teaches Security Best Practices has such a BIG HOLE in their system and they are not patching it. At the start Microsoft was warned that anybody can download any xap directly from Microsoft Marketplace but Microsoft did NOTHING and there are programs circulating on the web that are able to download xaps directly from the Microsoft Marketplace (just search WP7 3MktPlace). It's shameful not because the Marketplace has a bug/hole but it's shameful because Microsoft is not patching it right away. This means that Microsoft has no consideration for developers. Developers are trusting Microsoft giving their intellectual property for selling and when a bug enables anybody to download any xap Microsoft doesn't take action. I remembered that Paul Thurrott wrote a blog post where he was frustrated by the fact that Microsoft is releasing software for the iPhone while Apple in the first three months of the iOS released four updates to their OS patching bugs and adding new features. Instead of using their developers for iOS Microsoft should use all their forces to get WP7 a valid alternative to Android and iOS. I know that NoDo will lock the possibility to sideload applications on WP7 but if it will still be possible to download any xap from the Marketplace Microsoft will encourage Intellectual Theft as it will be possible to use Reflector to see how an app it's done. Of course Microsoft will say that you can use an obfuscator to protect your xap, but why justify a security problem with a workaround? It is enough to patch the hole: authenticate the download of the xap using the windows live id and verify if the user can download a certain xap.

Another thing that I've noted is that you see everywhere on twitter/blogs that WP7 has more than 20.000 developers and there are 7.000 apps on the marketplace. Let's say that we have an average of 1.5 apps per publisher so we have 4,666 "active" publishers. Let's round it to 5.000 meaning that only 25% of the developers "concludes" the publishing process. In my opinion this means that developers need more. I really hope there is more in NoDo for developers other than Copy/Paste and speed. There are so many things still missing.

NAMASTE!

WP7 Barcode Scanning using ZXing and Microsoft.Phone.Media.Extended

2010-12-25T19:18:00.000+01:00

When I first saw this blog post from Kevin Marshall it crossed my mind that it could be used for barcode scanning in order to get the same user experience you have on Android and iPhone. I've contacted Kevin to give me some details/source code for the project and a few days ago he sent me his project that is already posted on his blog here. Kevin also thought of the possibility to use it for barcode scanning, but his sample works only with QR codes. Looking at the project I saw that he was using VideoCamera class that has no Focus capability needed to take a "clean" picture of the barcode. The PhotoCamera class, on the other hand, has Focus implemented so I simply changed the class from VideoCamera to Photocamera. In the Grab method I call the Focus method and then using the AutoFocusCompleted event I decode the barcode. For decoding I use my ZXing port. The results are pretty good as you can see in this video I've uploaded to YouTube. There are some optimizations that can be done like cropping the WritableBitmap at the dimensions of the red rectangle, but even with the full image (640x480) the speed was acceptable on my LG Optimus 7 .

The source code and the xap of the app (that you can deploy if you have a developer/unlocked phone) are included in my latest release of the ZXing port available on CodePlex. To compile the source you will need to follow the steps Kevin indicated in this post and also you will find some hints/files here. If you start a new project you will also need to add "ID_CAP_CAMERA" capability to WMAppManifest.xml. This, for the moment, is a hack and I don't think the application will pass Microsoft certification, but you can try.

"Reflecting" Microsoft.Phone.Media.Extended I saw no reason why Microsoft won't give access to developers to this assembly (put it in the SDK)! Why limit developers to do great apps when this is the first thing Microsoft needs for the Windows Phone Platform?

Special thanks to Kevin for the source code.

NAMASTE

DropBox library for Windows Phone 7

2010-12-23T14:15:00.000+01:00

So here it is.... I finally published the DropBox client library on CodePlex. It is a fully functional Dropbox client library for Windows Phone 7 and it is the same I've used to build BoxFiles. The first version of BoxFiles received a pretty bad review from http://wmpoweruser.com as it was using only the official API that doesn't have any method for generating links to files (the only way to open a file in Windows Phone 7), but after some searching I've found the API and I think that the current version (1.3) is a pretty good app. I will keep my bad review as they asked 50$ to review the application again. In the following weeks I will publish a new version of the Backup/Restore IsolatedStorage project using Dropbox instead of WCF.

I've put a lot of work in this library so if you use it please sustain my work by buying the application and please "try" not to publish a similar app to BoxFiles on the Marketplace.

I've also published the Sqlite and the ZXing projects on CodePlex so you can grab the source code directly from there.

I wish you a Merry Christmas!

NAMASTE

A phone lifetime: an epic battle between Microsoft and OEM

2010-12-16T13:09:00.000+01:00

Looking back at my blog it seems pretty dead, but I intend to catch up as I am on vacation traveling to Brazil and Bolivia so I have some spare time for writing. It's more than a month since I finished the Dropbox client library (that I will soon post on Codeplex) and also Boxfiles for Dropbox which is the application I am trying to publish on the Marketplace. The whole publishing process was (still is as the app is not yet certified) quite an adventure and even with the support of Microsoft Italy, which I thank, it can take up to one month to have a "functional" AppHub account.

Getting back to the title of the post. I don't know if there is/will be a battle between Microsoft and the hardware OEM, but I really hope so. I am referring to updating your windows phone 7 device. There are already rumors on the web about the "Mango" release and also about Windows Phone 8. From this point of view Apple has a winning strategy. Buying an iPhone gives the owner the certainty that his device will be up-to-date for at least 2 years (2 major releases- the one installed on the phone and the next one). On the other side there is Google and Android where the majority of the OEM choose not to update the phone OS version even if it's a minor release like 2.1 to 2.2 so in less than 6 months you will have an outdated OS. In this moment having an updated iPhone costs less in two years than having an updated Android phone. So what will be Microsoft position for the new Windows Phone? In the previous version of their mobile platform users were usually left behind between OS version updates (or to be more precise left at the OEM mercy), but the releases of updates/new versions were not so frequent which lead to the "death" of the platform on the consumer side and focus on the enterprise side were having and updated device is not so important. I hope that Microsoft will battle to bring updates to the OEM devices for at least 2 years which is a logical choice as almost every phone operator will give you a device at an affordable price if you sign-up for at least 24 months. That would be a big plus in the battle with Android platform.

So who will win? Microsoft or the OEM? Will Microsoft be interested to update the devices for 24 months and loose some earning from OS licenses but give the users more confidence with the platform and compensate with Marketplace earnings? My feeling is that the devices out now will be obsolete in one year and won't get any updates. Maybe this is one of the reasons why the sales are not as good as everyone expected them to be: it is the first version, things are still missing and if I buy a phone now it will not be updated to the next version. Will see...

NAMASTE

Telerik RadControls for Windows Phone 7

2010-11-09T21:33:00.000+01:00

I am really happy that Telerik decided to develop controls for WP7. I have been using their silverlight controls since 2007 and they always added great controls. You can already download and try the CTP from the following this link . Even if it's just a CTP there are already many useful controls (Animation, DatePicker, DockPanel, PhoneApplicationFrame, DockPanel, TimePicker, Transition Control, UniformGrid, Window, WrapPanel, LayoutTransform, PickerBox, InfiniteListBox) . I would love to see a ProgressIndicator also and a decent MessageBox (I really don't like the default one). Also if you present a friend that downloads the tools you have the opportunity to win one of the 5 Windows Phone 7.

As always it's been a crazy period and I have little (no) time for writing code for the blog. Anyway when I find some spare time (usually from 1 o'clock in the morning till 3) I work on a DropBox library for WP7 (My Greatest Work Almost Completed) that I hope to publish soon along with an updated version of the IsolatedStorage Backup/Restore solution using DropBox. Everything works great: upload, download , create/delete folders and I am pretty excited. It could be a good alternative to Skydrive support that won't be available till early 2011.

I've also added a PayPal donation link at the blog this way if you find the source code on this blog useful feel free to donate (the donation will be invested in a brand new Windows Phone 7).

P.S. Wish I could have attended TechEd Europe. I really envy all of you that are attending.

NAMASTE

The Mobile Developer Journey

2010-11-04T17:41:00.000+01:00

You have to look at the full size image

How to localize The Title in a WP7 Silverlight application

2010-11-03T19:42:00.000+01:00

This is a really interesting post by Pietro Brambati. It combines C++ and Silverlight projects:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/pietrobr/archive/2010/11/01/how-to-localize-the-title-in-a-wp7-silverlight-application.aspx

WP7 on HTC HD2

2010-10-08T16:43:00.000+02:00

Looks like there is hope on getting WP7 running on HD2 thank to Cotulla (you can follow his progress on Twitter http://twitter.com/CotullaCode )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8f_NJatLVQk

In this case HTC HD2 will become the first phone that runs WM 6.5, Android 2.2 and WP 7.

NAMASTE

25 years

2010-10-06T19:22:00.000+02:00

It's impressive how things have changed in 25 years.

1983
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVtxEA7AEHg

2007
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5Z7eal4uXI

WP7 Multi-language v2

2010-10-05T00:26:00.000+02:00

While working on my WP7 app I had to improve the multi-language library I've posted earlier on my blog http://sviluppomobile.blogspot.com/2010/06/wp7-multilanguage-app-proof-of-concept.html.

What's new in v2:

The LanguageSingleton class has now resources that can be accessed using an indexed property. In the published sample the Save messagebox uses the indexed property lang["MainPage.Messages.saved"] )
The LanguageSingleton class implements LanguageChanged property so that every window could set the localized resources when the language changes (in this case is the ItemSource for the PickerBoxDialog developed by Alex Yakhnin)
Implemented multi-language support for ApplicationBarIconButton (the same mechanism using button index as the one used for ApplicationBarMenuItem

I am still not sure if this is the easiest way to implement multi-language support (if someone has a better way to do it please send me a message and I will post it). There is also the M.V.V.M. way, but I think it would be more code to write to obtain the same result.

SOURCE CODE

NAMASTE