Mobile Concerns

With 15,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch, I have to ask, “Is this really the long tail?”. The marketing department at Apple would have us believe that the App Store provides iPhone users with a myriad of applications to suit your every specific need. But is there really a need for 50 different task management applications? I think that iPhone customers would benefit from two or three best of breed applications for managing tasks instead.

So is the current App Store ecosystem in the best interest of consumers and developers? It is undoubtedly a great selling point for Apple and it is definitely easier to buy, download and install an iPhone application than a Windows Mobile application. However, Apple may have has set the barrier to entry too low for iPhone developers. Today the most popular iPhone applications will bubble to the top, but what will happen in the future? Will the next great iPhone application remain undiscovered among the noise of 100,000 lesser applications?

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Microsoft announced a new free service called My Phone. Currently in beta, this service allows you to back up your mobile phone data to a password protected web site. Check out the Windows Mobile Team Blog for more details.

When I first saw My Phone, the first thing I thought about was Microsoft’s Live Mesh service. This is where Microsoft is light years ahead of the competition - including Google.

Cloud computing services such as Microsoft's Live Mesh allow you to sync and share your data between devices as well as access your data from anywhere using the power of the Internet. Live Mesh also allows you to remotely control the desktop of any device from anywhere.

At the moment Live Mesh only supports devices with Windows XP, Windows Vista and Mac OS X but Windows Mobile support is coming soon. If you access the Live Mesh beta, you get access to 5GB of storage to get you started.

Now this is interesting. I have just found Net60 from RedFiveLabs - an implementation of the .Net Compact Framework designed to run on an S60 Symbian mobile. It allows you to do your development in Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 and builds an SIS file for you so you can deploy your application on your mobile device. You can use C# or VB.Net from Visual Studio and make use of the .Net Compact Framework class libraries. You can also make Symbian API calls using the the .Net Platform Invoke (PInvoke) services.

When developing applications for Windows Mobile, you can use the Calendar button in the device emulator to quickly see how your application behaves when you change the screen orientation. Below is a sample application in portrait orientation. Pressing the calendar button in the device emulator immediately switches you to a landscape orientation. The image above is anchored to the the top, left of its parent form. If we change the anchoring behaviour so it is anchored to the top only, we get the following behaviour so it is centred in the form when we switch from a portrait to landscape orientation.