Search results matching tags 'xna', 'Silverlight', and 'Paul Foster'

TechCrunch: In Mobile, Fragmentation is forever. Deal with it

paulfo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 12:46:05 GMT

Following on from my rant on the widgets, Richard Wong – venture capitalist and guest TechCrunch blogger – makes the point with more finesse, although we disagree in technology beliefs.

In his post ‘In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It’, Wong lays out the issues of the mobile marketplace and why we aren’t going to see it simplified with ‘common standards’. He also spells out how to approach a mobile application project in a pragmatic manner. Here are the first two items from his list of five things you do to overcome this complexity:

Don’t wait for the Magic Bullet. The first step towards progress is acceptance of reality. I actually do believe that Webkit browsers, HTML5, continued progression of J2ME, Android and iPhone are all positive trends that will help make things easier for many developers, but none of them will be a single-threaded answer. There are too many markets where these solutions are insufficient. For example, India, one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets is still dominated by Nokia, which has 70%+ market share. I don’t think developing only for iPhones will be enough to dominate the India market given their < 5% share.
Bound The Problem & Get Down the User Learning Curve. So, the critical next step is to limit the boundaries of the problem so you can actually solve it. Are you pursuing an enterprise app or a consumer app? Does your success require broad scale viral use, or is it perfectly good to have 2000 profitable users? Many developers focused on the consumer market are going to find that a blend of mobile web, and prototyping on iPhone-only or Android-only is the right first step and only then expand to broader platforms. Blackberry and WindowsMobile are similarly important in business applications. Rather than the costly efforts of chasing 4-5 platforms at once, focus in on the first one or two, prove your model, then expanding will help to bound the complexity.

Playing to Wong’s article we have the recent announcement of Windows Phone 7 Series, and more specifically last night the announcement of some of the key application platforms within Windows Phone 7 Series namely Silverlight and XNA.

I disagree outright with Wong’s belief that Webklits, HTML and J2ME are going to deliver the user experience people want on their devices. The same as with Widgets, the depth of capability just isn’t there, they are ‘lowest common denominator’ technologies. Consumers flock to the best experiences e.g. the iPhone effect. Those that don’t want to or simply can’t afford to, don’t purchase good application platform devices they buy phones, and I believe are not likely to purchase applications in any great volume. Unlike those that do purchase good application platform devices - who, having got this technological wonder, want to push it and see what more it can do. There is simply a different level of expectation between these two types of device purchaser; an expectation that is fed by excellent user experience.

Now I have always been in the client application camp. I don’t see network services as reliable, I don’t see web only technologies as being capable of delivering the user experience a user wants. But I know I can mitigate all of these things by using a well designed client application. This is why I subscribe to the Software + Services strategy at Microsoft. The ability to have a smart client application on the device and external services in the network and/or in the cloud gives me all the capabilities I need to build the best user experience and deliver the highest levels functionality.

That’s why you need to bite the bullet and go with a single platform that can best deliver on your application ideas. This is why Windows Phone 7 Series, using the key Microsoft assets of Silverlight and XNA coupled with the ability to consume anybodies cloud services, is going to change the game in mobile.

With its emphasis on the user experience, and an app + cloud technology platform full of capability, Windows Phone 7 Series applications are going to deliver the best for users.

Take the time before Mix to explore the key technologies of Silverlight and XNA and imagine utilising these on a mobile platform built to deliver them. Webkit solutions by comparison are going to suck.

Once again its ‘All change!’ in the land of mobile.

Windows Phone Gaming and Rich apps

paulfo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:29:00 GMT

Shout it from the roof tops Windows Phone 7 Series application development uses Silverlight and XNA!!

If you’re a .Net developers today – you just became a Windows Phone developer, able to deliver rich applications with Silverlight and amazing games with XNA.

Charlie Kindel summarises the latest Windows Phone 7 Series announcements on his blog post here. The Twitter Q&A from the announcement is here.

Most frequently asked questions:

Windows Phone 7 Series is not backwards compatible to Windows Mobile
Microsoft will continue to support Windows Mobile 6.5 for some time to come, including new devices on 6.5 and 6.5.3
Your Xbox Avatar will be in 2D on the WP7S
There are no plans to upgrade the HTC HD2 to WP7 OS.

So there you have it. At Mix (15th/16th March) we will go into the developer tools offering and show you have to build awesome games in XNA and glorious applications in Silverlight for Windows Phone 7 Series. There are 12 sessions at Mix.

To start ramping your skills in these technologies now look at this post.

Other key Microsoft bloggers on these topics include:

Andre Vrignaud: www.ozymandias.com / @ozymandias

Christian Schormann: electricbeach.org / @ cschormann

Shawn Hargreaves: blogs.msdn.com/shawnhar / @shawnhargreaves

Todd Brix: windowsteamblog.com/blogs/windowsphone / @toddbrix

Anand Iyer: www.artificialignorance.net/blog / @ai

Michael Klucher: klucher.com / @mklucher

Ramping dev skills for Windows Phone 7 Series

paulfo — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:27:00 GMT

So you now really want to learn Silverlight and XNA to be ready to build applications for the coolest new phone on the block?

Here is a list of resources to get you going:

XNA:

Setting up XNA Games Studio on your machine. You can install the current version of XNA on your Windows PC today. This isn’t the Windows Phone 7 Series compatible version but it does allow you to learn XNA by building applications for Windows and Xbox 360 (it supports Zune too but I’ll assume you don’t have a device to run your apps on).
Build a 2D or 3D game in one hour. So you know have XNA running on your PC – lets build a game!
Building out a simple platformer game. This series of blog posts take you through building out a platformer game and show you just how straight forward the XNA architecture is.
Adding vertical scrolling to the platformer game
Adding player lives to the platformer game
Adding game state management
Creating new graphics
The enhanced platformer game
More reading. There are loads of XNA resources out there go bing them!

Websites:

Books:

Silverlight:

Read all about it and see some great examples of Silverlight. Silverlight development is currently supporting in the Visual Studio developer tools and Expression designer tools products. 60 day trials of these products are freely available from the links.
Get started with Silverlight. Starter kit videos
Learn how to use Expression Blend to build Silverlight applications.
More reading. There are loads of Silverlight resources out there go bing them!

Websites:

Books: