Marco Argenti reports from Microsoft BUILD

jasonblack | 14 September, 2011 23:58

This week, Nokia Senior Vice President Marco Argenti (@marcoargenti) spent time at Microsoft BUILD in Anaheim, Calif., to meet with colleagues from Microsoft, industry analysts, and of course lots of developers. In this blog post, Marco shares his impressions from the event …  

I’m excited about what I saw at Build in the past two days. And I was surrounded by thousands more enthusiastic people. Excitement is contagious, especially being in the midst of so many developers from all over the world.  You can read about Microsoft’s Windows Phone perspective from my counterpart, Matt Bencke, here. Personally, I’m most excited about what’s new with Metro, and how much momentum Nokia and Microsoft are building together, creating an opportunity for you, here and now.

Metro style Apps, or Metro Apps, were the main focus of this week’s Build conversation.  They were the 'new thing’ that set the aspirational level, and everyone felt they could comfortably walk towards it, no matter what the camp, business, or background they are coming from. This has truly been a show for everyone. C++ developers, C# developers, Javascript developers, VB developers.



'Metro Apps' is being defined as a new application paradigm, more than just an evolution.  A paradigm based on gestures, clean interface, fast and fluid experience. Rethinking the Windows experience in a modern way and finding the way to innovate with respect to what’s out there today.  And the Metro apps were born on the Windows Phone.

Metro Apps have their own stack, which is different from the desktop apps stack.

At the core is the new WinRT API which binds to C++, C#, VB and Javascript code equally and democratically. Developers can declare views in HTML/CSS or XAML as well as choose the language they're more familiar with for the application logic.

Metro Style User Interface can be created directly through the IDE (with hand crafted HTML/CSS or XAML) or visually through Expression Blend. Expression Blend is greatly enhanced, with the support of HTML/CSS for example, and it clearly becomes a first class citizen in the development toolset.

What I think was clearly achieved:

  • Clearly position Metro Apps as the 'New thing' with high aspirational value and great consumer appeal.
  • Give developers multiple ways to create a Metro App, and make those ways all feel equally valid and with the same level of support.
  • Showing a clear parallelism between Phone apps and Windows 8 apps. Phone is the current opportunity to create, test, deploy and monetize Metro apps. They look and feel similar from a user standpoint, and from a developer standpoint most of the existing knowledge can be leveraged across platforms (C#, XAML, expression blend etc).
  • Innovate on the UI and functionality, taking the gesture paradigm to the next level with the introduction of things such as Semantic Zoom (objects change behavior depending on zoom level), live Tiles (as in Mango), introducing application contracts (every app can be the target or source of information, locally installed apps become a 'web of apps') just to name a few.


The opportunity is here and now:

Writing an app for Windows Phone is the opportunity that’s available here and now for consumers to experience Metro apps, and for developers to build, distribute and monetize Metro apps.

The Windows Phone Marketplace currently has over 50,000 registered developers and over 30,000 apps available. The rate at which apps have been submitted has increased significantly since the announcement of the partnership with Nokia. Registration in Nokia developer programs, has increased 55 percent since February 2011 – the single largest increase in membership our program has seen, which can be directly attributed to our partnership with Microsoft.

I’m expecting to see another inflection point as a result of what we’ve seen at Build, with the Windows developer community being activated and excited about building Metro apps.

Members of our developer community are already seeing the value of publishing their apps to Windows Phone. Niklas Karlström, co-founder of Pico Brothers notes that, “We have seen the reach of publishing through Ovi Store and there's no doubt about jumping on the WP7 train. Ovi Store is an amazing marketplace where we have reached markets we didn't know existed. This you notice when your freshly brewed app is downloaded in over 200 countries. We have no doubt Nokia will do the same for our WP7 apps as well”. He went on to say, “we have coded in Microsoft tools since we were kids so it's like being in the backyard – making apps for WP7 will be quite a natural choice for us.”
 
Similarly, Larry Goldberg, CEO of Tunewiki said,“we view Nokia's collaboration with Microsoft as a positive because WP7 is an OS that can both take advantage of the advanced social features of our music player and also enhance the experience with the OS's unique UI and capabilities. Also, because 56 per cent of our Social Media Player audience is international and our scrolling lyrics are available worldwide, we think Nokia and its strong international presence makes it an ideal partner for TuneWiki and our global music community.”
 
As we continue to work more closely with Microsoft, we recognize the need to educate and offer as much support as possible to grow our ecosystem globally and locally, the local aspect being probably the biggest opportunity ahead of us.

Starting next week there will be hands-on training sessions in six countries to help developers get started on apps for Nokia with Windows Phone. There is still time to register online.

We’ve planned literally hundreds of developer events that we’ll conduct together with Microsoft in many of the countries where we operate, with sessions specifically targeted on monetization opportunities, on preparing our developers to best leverage the great opportunities ahead of us.

As I said, I’m excited – for Nokia, but most importantly for our developer community. This is really cool stuff.

Marco Argenti

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Avoid the top QA failures

pkrass | 14 September, 2011 16:27

Quality assurance (QA) is vital to your mobile apps and content. A new Nokia document, ‘Avoid the top 10 QA failures’, can help you assure the quality of your QA. According to this document, these are the top 10 reasons why content uploaded to Ovi Store fails Nokia’s QA testing:

1. The selected language and country distribution do not match.
2. The content does not display correctly when it changes orientation from portrait to landscape.
3. The Symbian package file specifies the incorrect OS.
4. The content does not prompt for an installation drive.
5. The flow diagram submitted with a Java app is inaccurate.
6. The content does not use the full screen.
7. The Java app does not include About, Help, or Exit options.
8. The MIDlet-Name parameter in the .jad file uses non-alphanumeric characters (Series 40 phones only).
9. When the content is suspended in background, the content sound is not disabled.
10. The touchscreen keypad is not disabled by default (S60 phones only).

Learn more: Download the Nokia document, ‘Avoid the top 10 QA failures’.

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