Writing Software for Windows Phone 7

I’ve recently been porting the Alb The Bear Interactive Children Stories (www.albthebear.com) from iPhone to Windows Phone 7 (WP7) and thought I would comment on some of the experience and how I think the developer story bodes very well  for the platform

Development

If you have done any .net development for Windows, particularly if you know WPF or SIlverlight, then development is a breeze on the phone. The supplied templates make it very easy to incorporate your application into the WP7 look and feel (known as Metro). you can choose to develop using Silverlight or XNA.

I choose the latter to allow for better performance of the book page turning I wanted to implement. It is interesting to note that we haven’t implemented this page turn effect on the iPhone version as it just wasn’t performing well enough on the older devices. On WP7 its performs wonderfully.

In many ways this was less of a port than a complete redevelopment as I wanted to ensure the app fitted with the Metro styling to some extent.  Partly due to having a lot of Windows development experience, the process went a lot smoother than the build for iPhone did. Taking about 30% of the time. I was also able to add more features to what is although a relatively simple application still quite challenging to achieve something that fits in with the WP7 user experience but is still child friendly.

Some of the bigger challenges were getting  Metro style control buttons implemented in XNA, allowing for children to trigger sounds by tapping areas of the screen and capturing swipe gestures. None of which were too tricky for me to work out. The biggest challenge was working out how to avoid an XNA program that isn’t a game appearing in the games experience rather than as a normal program  (Application Manifest is a clue here). Having said all that development is a breeze and this is going to mean a wealth of really good applications should appear shortly.

Marketplace

The market place for WP7 hasn’t been as joyful experience as the development experience. To give Microsoft their due they have been very upfront about what you need to do and not do in your app to be published. I immediately had to ask for an exemption from one of those rules about the back button. In the rules it says the back button has to take you back to the previous screen in your application unless on the first screen when it should exit the application. However this did not make sense for a book – who wants to have to go back to the first page of a book to exit!

To be fair the process to apply for an exemption was fairly painless although it does significantly delay the application process.

My main concern with the submission process revolve around the lack of ability to edit your application details once submitted. Not all my application artwork was available when I began the process so i though I would just upload what I had to get the process started and, like on the Apple Store, go back later and upload the new artwork. No that didn’t work as soon as I moved off the images page I could no longer upload any images to that application. Neither could I edit the program text -this is frustrating.

Discoverability is another concern. With the Apple App Store as soon as you publish a Google search for the program title will find a link fairly near the top of the list to your application in the App Store and even if you do not have iTunes installed you can view a preview of the application information with the WP7 marketplace even a Bing search shows nothing. The only way to, as Microsoft put it, deep-link to your application is through Zune.net and in the UK that will only work if you have the Zune software installed. This really needs improving.

Feedback from the Marketplace seems very limited as well during the submission process. I do respect that these are very early days and this whole experience may improve leaps and bounds over time but I do have one real pet peeve at the moment. I carefully formatted the description text for my application during submission but in the Zune marketplace it just appears as one block of unformatted text – for a platform based on typography this is just not good enough.

UPDATE: someone was obviously listening as, the day after this post, all the text formatting I had put in magically started appearing in the Zune Marketplace.

I do still remain very positive about the platform, these gripes are very easy to fix and the development experience is fantastic.

If you would like to try the software (one of which is a free introduction) the Zune Marketplace links are:

http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=1711e6a9-31dc-df11-a844-00237de2db9e

http://social.zune.net/redirect?type=phoneApp&id=eecc8f90-c8d5-df11-a844-00237de2db9e

Note you will need to have the Zune software installed.

If you would like to compare with the iPhone versions these are at

Alb and the Strange Thing

Alb and The Shop

Alb and Halloween

The last which is my personal favourite so far isn’t on WP7 this year as I couldn’t guarantee release in time for Halloween but will be next year.