As some of you might now, I have left Wellington and gone to Las Vegas for the MIX10 conference. I just saw an interesting keynote. However, I felt it being somewhat boring. There were no big surprises. A lot of Windows Phone 7 Series talk, which was to be expected. One of the news that did come up however, is that the dev platform will be made available for free. This is an awesome step. It will enable a lot of devs to try it out without having to commit too much. This will in turn hopefully give us a lot of interesting applications and maybe even lure some non .NET devs into the Microsoft space. One can at least hope…
But the highlight of the keynote was probably the totally awesome 16 year old kid that entertained the crowd before the keynote using yoyos. Being 16 years old and that comfortable on stage is impressive. Not to mention his l33t yoyo skills…
Right now I am waiting for Joe Belfiore to take stage and show more WP7S stuff. The entire conference will be phone sessions for me as I have been invited to become a trainer for the platform…just hope I can get hold of some hardware…ASAP…
Anyhow…for those of you who haven’t followed the WP7S as much as me, there might have been some interesting information in the keynote. So check it out at the MIX10 site… Main points is the extremely simplistic UI, the great integration of the 3rd party apps, the XNA integration that enables good games with full 3D support and of course a lot more. But I would say that the main selling point for me as a dev, is the way that they have enabled the app integration. You don’t have to start up apps as separate applications, but instead they can integrate into the phones functionality and UI. So if you are writing a picture application, your application can be made available when looking at images on the phone…instead of having to launch a separate app and then locate the image you want to work with… And yeah… Your app can run in the background and show the user notifications while doing other stuff. So you can build an application that continuously gives the user updates even though the user is off doing something else. And yeah…full support to the microphone’s raw audio, which was showed off by a nice Shazam application…
So in general…there was a lot of SWEET information. It’s just that I had followed a bit too closely before the conference and knew a bit too much to make the keynote REALLY interesting…
Time to listen to Joe… More later…