How to use Team Foundation Service with MonoDevelop

  As you probably know Team Foundation Service team announced a few days ago full support for Git protocol. This was AWESOME news for our small company that needed a FREE source control solution for our MonoTouch and Mono for Android projects. We were already using visualstudio.com for our Windows Phone and Windows 8 projects and previously to Git support in TFS we had an in-house svn server but I was not really happy with it. The thing it took me most was to understand what is the Git endpoint address than everything is standard.

  Here is a quick guide on how to create and then use a TFS Git repository with MonoDevelop:

1. First you need to create a new Team Project with Git support 

     

     Once the project is created press the "Navigate to projec"t button. 

2. Go to Code explorer and you will be able to see the the Git endpoint address. It might not show the git endpoint the first time but if you navigate away and try again you will see it.

3. Use the Git endpoint address to register a new Repository in MonoDevelop

4. Then just publish your solution using the registered repository. You can see all your files in Code Explorer and also all the commits:

Tip: If you want to use a more simple user name than you full live id you can enable your Alternate Credentials on the User Profile page 

The same Git endpoint can be also used to "Connect to a repository" in Xcode for your Obejctive C projects.

Thank you TFS TEAM for this great feature.

NAMASTE

Phone Call screen in Windows Phone

   I've wanted to write this post for quite a while but I've always postponed it as it is a very subjective matter. In the end I decided to write my opinion. Windows Phone is really great but there are some aspects that could be improved and seem that have been designed in a hurry and never finished. One of this aspects, and it is not what this post is about, is the Application List. It is ugly and not very usable. How is it possible that Windows Mobile had before anyone else folders/groups but they are still missing in Windows Phone after more than 2 years? The application list really needs improvements/redesign.

    This post instead is about the Phone call screen. I've have always had problems with my windows phone devices starting with the Omnia 7 and ending with my Lumia 800 (I've actually tried 3 different Lumia 800 all of them gave me the same problem). The short story is that I am able to drop the call with my face by pressing the Endcall button, put the call on speaker, put it on mute or hold. I am not the only person that has these problems: my wife has the same problem with her new Lumia 710 and also heard from other people. It is a combination between the proximity sensor that activates the screen and the way I am holding the phone. So I've wondered if maybe there is a better location for the Endcall button.

    Lets start with a photo I've found on the web  (have no idea who she is) :

 

If you look at the way she is holding her phone (which I think is 90% of the cases) the upper part of the screen is in contact with the face. Let's presume that by a faulty behavior (bad driver, hardware fault, OS fault or the fact that the hardware and the software are not designed by the same company) the screen turns on while you talk. The highest probability to touch the screen with the face is in the upper half of the screen. Let's see what it means in Windows Phone:

So it is Endcall, Speaker, Hold, and Mute (exactly my case).

If you look again at the picture you can see that the less exposed part of the touchscreen(so the better choice for the buttons location)  is the lower part of the screen. The lower you go the smaller the probability is, so the best choice for the End call button is the lower part of the screen (this way you minimize the probability to press the button on faulty behavior). This is exactly (I don't know if this is the reason) what iPhone and Android did:

Both of them have chosen to put the End call button near the lower part of the touch screen. For Android (which also depends on the hardware implementation) Google concentrated all the buttons at the lower part of the screen. On the iPhone they kept the other buttons in the center region but they do have really good control over the hardware and putting a call on hold or mute is not as bad as dropping the call.

So it would be better to move the buttons in the lower part of the screen. The blank space could be filled with social information, last call, email, sms. 

Hope we will see some improvements in Phone Call screen in Windows Phone 8

NAMASTE

The need for a different Marketplace

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

Mobile HTML5 Speed Reading Again

 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

A phone lifetime: an epic battle between Microsoft and OEM

     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

Get Monotouch with 15% discount

Apple decided to take out the restrictions introduced in the iOS Developer Program earlier this year making Monotouch a "SAFE" environment to develop apps for iOS. Novell is celebrating this decision by offering a 15% discount on Monotouch for the next two weeks. If you are interested just use the discount code "MONO-331" on http://monotouch.net/Store

I hate marketing people

This post was not planned, but I have to write about it. The only reason I am not buying the iPhone 4 is the price. Today, watching the Apple presentation from 1st of September, got another confirmation. The new iPod Touch 32GB, that even Steve Jobs calls an iPhone without the phone and seems to have the exact same hardware of the iPhone, costs (in Italy) 309 Euros. The iPhone4 on the other hand 32GB costs 779 Euro, so 479 Euro for the Skyworks SKY77541/42 GSM module. That's why I hate marketing people: they decide. If they say the product will sell for that much that will be the price, but if you pass on the excitement of having a "cool" gadget you realize it doesn't worth the money. So I guess I will buy an iPod Touch for development and debugging.

P.S. Microsoft should be careful and react fast cause they are completely loosing a market on which they had some shares (that would be the PDA without a phone). The devices are still widely used (especially for restaurants) and will be used for gaming, apps. The iPod Touch is not only music anymore. Again Microsoft will have to choose a name for the OS because Windows Phone 7 without a phone it would be Windows 7 :) which is not the best choice. They've changed so many time the name of the mobile OS so one more won't count. Anyway a Windows Phone 7 without a phone makes a lot of sense to me

NAMASTE