ActiveNick's Big Bald Blog : Windows Phone

Xamarin EVOLVE Follow-up: Building Mobile Cross-Platform Geospatial Apps

Nick Landry — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 16:16:59 GMT

I spent a few days this week at Xamarin EVOLVE, hanging out with the Xamarin folks, the mobile cross-platform dev community, talking to attendees at our booth and speaking about mobile geospatial development. It was definitely a great event and Xamarin deserves major kudos, both for the event itself, but also for their products and impressive keynote announcements. Xamarin is a partner of Infragistics and it’s certainly an exciting time to be a mobile developer.

As promised during my talk, I’m posting all my session material here, including the slides, demos, and reference links. I had a great time at EVOLVE and I hope to speak there again if/when Xamarin holds another show.

Building Mobile Cross-Platform Geospatial Apps

This session will not reveal why we are on Earth, but it will teach you how to find out where we all are on it. Looking for the user? Just find the phone. Thanks to standard built-in Location Services and hybrid positioning hardware, every modern smartphone knows where it is. In this session, ActiveNick shows you how to build a truly “smart” cross-platform phone application by adding Geospatial Services to it. Using C# and MonoTouch for iOS, the Windows Phone SDK, and Mono for Android, you will learn how to locate the device using the phone GPS and other Location Services, display spatial data on maps, manipulate them with touch gestures, geocode addresses into lat/long pairs, and more. We’ll discuss the various mapping technologies, SDKs and APIs across various mobile platforms, how to tap into geospatial features programmatically with Xamarin tools, and explore how geospatial systems can benefit from mobile services and apps. Location Intelligence is a natural extension of mobility. Come learn how all mobile developers should also be geospatial developers.

Download the session slides here

Download the iOS & Windows Phone demo here

Download the Android demo here. It’s a modified version of the Google Maps Android API v2 demo found on Github here. Make sure to read both readme files in the Zip since you’ll need dependencies from the Github project to make the demo work.

Noteworthy Links

Generate JSON Parsing Classes in C#: http://json2csharp.com
Google Maps

Google Maps Developer Resources: developers.google.com/maps
Google API Console: code.google.com/apis/console
Google Maps SDK for iOS: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/ios
Google Maps Android API v2: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/android
Geocoding API: developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding

OpenStreetMap (OSM)

OpenStreetMap Wiki: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Main_Page
Nominatim Geocoding Service: wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nominatim

Bing Maps

Bing Maps Platform Page: www.microsoft.com/maps
Bing Maps Developer Resources: www.microsoft.com/maps/developer-resources.aspx
Bing Maps Management Portal: www.bingmapsportal.com

Esri ArcGIS

Esri ArcGIS Developer Center: developers.arcgis.com
Free Data: www.esri.com/data/free-data

Building iOS Apps with Xamarin and NucliOS

We (Infragistics) launched release 13.1 of all our developer controls yesterday. This includes NucliOS 13.1, our stellar native controls for iOS developers. With NucliOS you get a powerful data & layout grid control, a versatile chart control supporting more than 40 chart types – including the new Pie Chart control – as well radial gauges and rich-text labels.

The good news for C# developers is that NucliOS also ships with full bindings for Xamarin.iOS. With a single package, NucliOS offers the best native iOS controls for developers, whether they build their apps in Objective C with Xcode, or in C# with Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio.

If you’ve never built any apps for iOS or even learned iOS development, this is your chance to get started. Download the free starter edition of Xamarin.iOS here, then download the trial for NucliOS and start building gorgeous iOS apps for iPhone and iPad today.

Here are some links to get you started.

Download a trial version of NucliOS 13.1 here

NucliOS Product Page at Infragistics.com

What’s New in NucliOS 13.1 for iOS Developers

Visit the NucliOS 13.1 page in the Xamarin Component Store here

Creating iOS Apps with Xamarin.iOS and NucliOS – Webinar by Brent Schooley

Download the NucliOS 13.1 Samples Browser for free on your iPhone or iPad from the iTunes App Store here

Until Next Time…

I will be doing a very similar session to my mobile cross-platform geospatial apps talk at Code PaLOUsa, April 25-27 (next week!), in Louisville, KY. Make sure to attend if you’re in the area.

You can also catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:

Prairie DevCon, May 6-7, in Winnipeg, MB
Visual Studio Live!, May 13-16, in Chicago, IL
Philly Code Camp, May 11, in Abington, PA
DevTeach, May 27-31, in Toronto / Mississauga, ON
TechEd North America, June 3-6, in New Orleans, LA – Look for me at the Infragistics booth!
Visual Studio Live!, August 19-23, in Redmond, WA

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

VSLive! Las Vegas Event Recap – A Quintet of Mobile iOS & Windows Phone Dev Talks

Nick Landry — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:04:59 GMT

I’m exhausted…

I’m still recovering from my days in Vegas last week…

You might say “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, but then again you’d get the wrong idea about why I’m exhausted. It probably has something to do with presenting FIVE breakout sessions at Visual Studio Live! Las Vegas at the MGM Grand last week, four of which were presented back-to-back on Thursday. Also to blame was the hotel network which decided to wreak havoc on my mobile push notifications demos for Windows Phone and iOS, and my Windows Phone emulators that decided to crap out on me (I hate Hyper-V), both forcing me into late night debugging sessions while attendees & speakers were partying at Tabu.

All my demos worked out fine in the end, but my sleep patterns suffered the most. Well, almost. The true sufferance came when my back gave out at the Vegas airport on Friday morning, forcing me into an excruciatingly painful travel day aboard connecting flights after my direct flight was cancelled “because the pilot did not feel too well”. Two chiropractor appointments and one deep muscle massage later, I’m still on the road to recovery, but thank goodness for Advil!

Back to my talks. I promised attendees I would post all my session slides and demos, and I’m here to keep my promise. Below is a list of all my talks, along with descriptions, links, slides and zipped demos.

I want to thank all the attendees who came to my talks. Prissy networks and emulators aside, I love getting on stage in front of developers and geek out for an hour or so about cool mobile practices and development techniques. I especially want to thank the attendees who came to my Windows Phone & Speech talk on Thursday morning at 8:00AM. Considering the early hour and the fact this was a last minute replacement session where I stepped in for a speaker who sadly couldn’t make it, you guys are troopers!

Designing Your Windows Phone Apps for Multitasking and Background Processing

It may be called "Windows" Phone, but Microsoft's smartphone operating system does not share its big brother's multitasking model. "Fast and fluid" is the motto to insure the best user experience possible while at the same time optimizing power consumption on the device. Windows Phone may only allow only one application to run in the foreground at a time, but several features were introduced in version 8.0 and 7.5 to allow an application to perform some actions even when it is not the active foreground app. This demo-heavy session will focus on those techniques including scheduled tasks & background agents, playing audio & tracking the user location in the background, and we'll also discuss how Voice-over-IP (VoIP) integrate deeply into the OS for better background processing. You'll also learn about Fast Application Switching & Tombstoning should your application ever get terminated. Learn how to make your application a first-class citizen on Windows Phone and put this session in the foreground of your schedule.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from my Windows Phone talks:

Developer Portal: dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
Developer Blog: blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
Consumer Blog: blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Windows Phone Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
www.dvlup.com by Nokia
Jerry Nixon, Microsoft Developer Evangelist: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg, Microsoft Developer Evangelist: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone: infragistics.com/mobile

Developing with Speech in Windows Phone 8 Apps

Can you hear me now? Move over Siri, here comes an army of speech-enabled mobile applications on Windows Phone. Mobile applications are not always easy to work with due to the small screen and small on-screen keyboard. Using our voice is a natural form of communication amongst humans, and ever since 2001: A Space Odyssey, we’ve been dreaming of computers who can converse with us like HAL9000. Thanks to the new Microsoft SDKs for voice recognition and speech synthesis (aka text-to-speech), we are now several steps closer to this reality. This session explores the development techniques you can use to add voice recognition to your Windows Phone applications, including in-app commands, standard & custom grammars, and voice commands usable outside your app. We’ll also see how your apps can respond to the user via speech synthesis, opening-up a new world of hands-free scenarios. This reality is here, you’ll see actual live demos with speech and you can now learn how to do it.

Download the slides and demos here

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

The trend continues where .NET developers show their hunger for iOS development. This was the SIXTH time I presented this talk to date, and despite the larger keynote room, I once again had a full house. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from my iOS talks:

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Code by SteveZ: www.infragistics.com/community/blogs/stevez
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:
- iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
- iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
- Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Modern Apps Live! – Building a Modern iPad App

Co-located with VSLive! Las Vegas, Modern Apps Live! was a novel 3-day event, presented in partnership with Magenic, that brought Development Managers, Software Architects and Development Leads together to learn the latest and greatest techniques in low-cost, high-value application development.

What sets Modern Apps Live! apart is the singular topic focus; sessions build on each other as the conference progresses, leaving you with a holistic understanding of modern applications. Attendees got to dive deep into MyVote, a full-featured polling platform hosted in the cloud with multiple front-ends on Windows 8, Windows Phone and iPad.

In this session I presented a high level overview of how the iPad version of the MyVote client was built, and what were some of the design decisions behind it. Attendees learned how to implement a mobile iPad application that provides a comparable user experience, while leveraging the same back-end code that supports Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8.

Download the slides here

The MyVote application code for all components will be posted as a whole by Magenic. I’ll be sure to update this post once everything is made available.

Additional links for this talk:

Windows Azure Mobile Services for iOS: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-ios
AFNetworking open source library: http://afnetworking.com
TFS on a Mac via Eclipse Integration: http://bit.ly/YRT3Nt
Git-tf: http://gittf.codeplex.com
TestFlight: http://www.testflightapp.com

Building Multi-Platform Mobile Apps with Push Notifications

The best mobile applications don't live in a vacuum. They are augmented by dedicated servers, the Internet and Cloud services. While it's one thing to reach out to server-side services from a mobile application, it's a completely different affair when the tables are turned and the server needs to reach the phone. Enter push notifications. From iOS to Android, Windows Phone and Windows 8, discover how to send push notifications from cloud-hosted services to a mobile app running on a tablet or phone, and learn how to handle those alerts in your mobile app. We'll discuss the various push notification services from Microsoft, Apple and Google, how to leverage them in your mobile applications, how to deal with push scenarios for any given multi-platform app, and we'll also look at platform-specific notifications, like scheduled alerts on iOS and Live Tiles on Windows Phone and Windows 8. The live demos will include a variety of iOS, Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps, and also include technical details about Android.

Download the slides and demos here

Additional links for this talk:

Windows Phone Tiles & Notifications: http://bit.ly/Y5axJS

Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training - Push: http://bit.ly/Y5ahut

Windows 8 Tiles, Badges and Notifications: http://bit.ly/YnPOgn
Apple iOS Local and Push Programming Guide: http://bit.ly/X05046
Google Cloud Messaging for Android: http://bit.ly/YnP9vr
Windows Azure Portal: www.WindowsAzure.com

Azure Mobile Services: www.WindowsAzure.com/mobile
Windows 8 Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources/
WP8 Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-wp8/
iOS Azure Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-ios/
Android Tutorials: www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/resources-android/

Until Next Time…

I will be speaking at the next Visual Studio Live! conference at the Hilton in Chicago, May 13-16 2013, as well as the VSLive! Redmond event at the Microsoft Campus on August 19-23. I hope I will see you there.

You can also catch me and attend more of my talks at the following events over the next few months:

Xamarin Evolve, April 14-17, in Austin TX
Code PaLOUsa, April 25-27, in Louisville, KY
Prairie DevCon, May 6-7, in Winnipeg, MB
Philly Code Camp, May 11, in Abington, PA
DevTeach, May 27-31, in Toronto / Mississauga, ON
TechEd North America, June 3-6, in New Orleans, LA – Look for me at the Infragistics booth!

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

What’s New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers

Nick Landry — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:13:02 GMT

Another one of my popular conference talks is now available as an on-demand webinar! Excited?

Who is this webinar for?

You can approach this webinar from many different perspectives, depending on whether you are a:

.NET Developer: You already know Visual Studio, C# and/or VB.NET, Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Silverlight or WPF. You’re now ready to make the jump into the world of mobile development. Windows Phone is a natural transition as your current skillset translates very easily to this platform.
Windows Phone Developer: You’re already familiar with Windows Phone 7.x but maybe you haven’t had a chance to explore the new consumer and developer features in Windows Phone 8. This webinar is a great way to get started on your ramp-up.
Mobile Developer: You already know mobile development on iOS, Android or maybe jQuery Mobile? Windows Phone is a platform that is definitely worth exploring. The market share may be small today but it is growing fast, especially given the similarities between Windows Phone, Windows 8 and Windows Store apps. This webinar does go over some of the reasons why you should care about Windows Phone too.

What is covered in the webinar?

In this session I discuss how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and hybrid HTML5 apps (i.e. PhoneGap). We look at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the Windows Store is at, and what the opportunity is for you as a mobile developer.

I present a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dive into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, what the upgrade story is for WP 7.5 devices, and explore some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs, Nokia Maps control and more.

Watch the Webinar Video

The webinar video is available via GotToWebinar. Free registration is required if you did not register for this specific webinar before. You can access it with the video image link below:

Download the Webinar Materials

The webinar slides and demo are available using the links below:

Download the webinar slides here
Download the webinar Text-to-Speech demo project here (with links to other demos)
Download the final app version of the Text-to-Speech demo for free from the Windows Phone Store: talk2me
Other demos I showed can be found in the Windows Phone Developer Portal at:

Noteworthy Links

Windows Phone Developer Portal: dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
Windows Phone Developer Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev/
Windows Phone Blog: http://blogs.windows.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone/
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile

Interested in iOS Development?

Windows Phone is a great platform, but you can’t really call yourself a mobile developer until you’ve learned about other mobile platforms, especially when it comes to iOS development. Fortunately, we have another webinar for you!

More and more .NET developers seem to be considering iOS development. This webinar is targeted at developers who know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#.

Watch the webinar here: iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in this webinar, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick. Also make sure to let me know what other topics you’d like to see in future webinars.

ActiveNick’s 2012 Year in Review and Predictions for 2013

Nick Landry — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:00:00 GMT

Every January 1st for the past 9 years, I’ve been getting an email from Microsoft titled “Congratulations 20YY Microsoft MVP!” ( enum YY {Max = 13, Min = 05}; ) where I have the honor and privilege of being re-awarded as Microsoft MVP for Windows Phone Development. This is an awesome way to start the year and 2012 was no exception. It’s been an awesome year in the Windows Phone community and I love that I was able to take a more active part in it this year. I just received my 9th such email yesterday on January 1st 2013 (yay me!) but I’d like to take a look back at 2012 and reflect on some influential moments.

2012 was indeed a great year for me and for Infragistics, and I hope it was for you too. Allow me to indulge in a little retrospective as I contemplate all that transpired in what was supposed to be the last year of our existence. Since the Mayans were (thankfully) wrong about their predictions, I’ll try to offer my own for 2013.

New Job, New Responsibilities, New Products

Shortly after that MVP award announcement in 2012 came more great news: I accepted an offer to work at Infragistics and I joined this awesome company as Senior Product Manager for Mobile & Data Visualization Developer Tools. I joined up with old buddies Jason Beres (who is my new boss) and Ambrose Little, and met many new folks who have become good friends, like Brent Schooley, Brian Lagunas and many others. It was a weird feeling to leave the world of consulting services after 16 of my 20+ years career, but in retrospect, that was the best thing I’ve ever done. 11+ months later I still come to work with a huge smile on my face and I this is the most fun I’ve ever had in my professional career.

Being a Product Manager at Infragistics is a dual role. Not only am I the owner for several products, I also have community responsibilities to write, blog, tweet and speak at events. After several years on hiatus as a blogger, I relaunched “ActiveNick’s Big Bald Blog”, discussing mobility, devices, development in the Microsoft & Apple worlds, events, and more.

Some of my most popular posts this year have been:

From a products point of view, it’s been a very busy year for me here at Infragistics. We launched 2 releases of our full NetAdvantage collection, introduced new mobile products for Windows UI, iOS, Android and jQuery Mobile development and many more. Here are all the products I own which we shipped in 2012:

Two releases of NetAdvantage for Windows Phone: 12.1 & 12.2
Updates to the Data Visualization controls (charts, maps, gauges, bullet graphs, etc.) which are all now bundled in the following products:
- NetAdvantage for WPF
- NetAdvantage for Silverlight
- Ignite UI (HTML5 & jQuery)
Introduced New jQuery Mobile controls in Ignite UI
Launched the initial release of NucliOS for native iOS developers
Launched Iguana UI, a free Community Pack for native Android developers
Launched a new bundle for mobile developers: MobileAdvantage
Introduced new Data Visualization Controls for WinRT & WinJS developers in NetAdvantage for Windows UI Beta

Infragistics also launched many more products I was not directly involved with, including new versions of SharePlus for iOS and the inaugural releases of ReportPlus for iOS and Indigo Studio for UX designers, and many more. Yes, it has been an awesome year at Infragistics.

Community Events

My community role goes beyond tweeting and blogging of course. Traveling to community events and conferences is a key part of my job. As a product manager, it’s important that I connect with developers to hear about the projects they work on, what technologies they care about, and what topics they are interested in learning. It also allows me to spread the word about our awesome Infragistics products, meet current customers and get feedback from them about what we’re doing great and what we could improve upon.

Speaking at events is actually something that I’ve enjoyed for many years, going as far back as 1996 when I did a seminar tour in the province of Quebec, speaking about Internet and intranet development with Microsoft technologies, using Active Server Pages, ActiveX and all the other “Active” products at Microsoft. This is in fact when I was nicknamed “ActiveNick” by co-workers, a name that has stuck around since then. My responsibilities over the last few years at my previous job at Infusion had forced me to scale back my speaking engagements, sticking mostly to DevConnections and TechEd, and sadly neglecting the other conferences, code camps and user groups.

Thanks to my new role at Infragistics, I was able to jump back in the community head first, speaking at and/or attending the following events in 2012:

Central New Jersey .NET User Group in Cranbury, NJ
Microsoft MVP Summit in Redmond, WA
Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, CA
Code PaLOUsa in Louisville, KY
Deeper in .NET in Milwaukee, WI
TechBash in Nanticoke, PA
Stir Trek in Columbus, OH
Philly Code Camp in Abington, PA
TechEd US in Orlando, FL
TechEd Europe in in Amsterdam, Netherlands
New Jersey Azure User Group in Iselin, NJ
That Conference in Wisconsin Dells, WI
Heartland DevCon (HDC) in Omaha, NE
Prairie DevCon in Regina, SK, Canada
Visual Studio Live! in Orlando, FL
NYC Mobile .NET Meetup in Manhattan, NY

I was also scheduled to speak at the Windows Phone Developer Conference in October in San Francisco, which sadly (but understandably) got cancelled/postponed, and I was also forced to cancel my sessions at DevConnections Fall in Las Vegas, but I also had the chance of appearing in a few online webcasts and podcasts, including:

The Tablet Show Podcast with Carl Franklin & Richard Campbell
Bytes by MSDN with Jerry Nixon
AJI Report with Jeff Julian and John Alexander

2012 was an awesome year, and 2013 promises to be even better for Community events. I can confirm that I’m already scheduled to speak at VS Live! Las Vegas in March and VS Live! Chicago in May, and also Code PaLOUsa 2013 in April.

If you want me to speak at your event, code camp or user group in 2013, don’t hesitate to contact me directly at activenick@infragistics.com or via Twitter at @ActiveNick.

Windows Phone, Nokia Devices & WP8

It’s been an interesting year for Windows Phone to say the least. Nokia finally started releasing their long awaited Windows Phone devices, including the Lumia 800 and 900. The problem is these devices came late (March 2012) in the Windows Phone 7.5 cycle that started in Fall 2011, and by then everyone was already wondering about the upcoming Windows Phone 8. Microsoft continued to uphold their veil of secrecy over all things Windows Phone, although they suffered from a lot of leaks in 2012. It looked like Windows Phone was on an upswing in Spring 2012, but it all came to (relative) crashing halt when Microsoft dropped the bomb that none of the current Windows Phone 7.5 devices would be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8. Even those shiny Nokia Lumias we had just bought a couple months before.

What a downer.

Microsoft sometimes suffers from being too honest. Microsoft seeks to emulate Apple to generate buzz in the mobility world, but Microsoft will always be Microsoft, and the two companies work in different ways. Allow me to illustrate the contrast. If an app or the OS suffers from a fault, Microsoft will tell you via an error message and you can often track down a log entry to diagnose it. Apple will just make your app disappear… *poof!* Error messages are bad, so instead of acknowledging the error and help you address it, Apple just sweeps it under the rug, hoping you’ll forget about it as they sprinkle more of that “Apple Magic” dust in your eyes. I prefer the Microsoft way because things will eventually go wrong in a piece of software. The interactions are too complex and errors will occur. Pretending the error didn’t happen is downright arrogant.

Why am I bringing this up? Because this same mentality is what drove Microsoft to announce Windows Phone 7.8. Microsoft’s approach for current devices was to borrow a few great features from Windows Phone 8 (like the new Start screen, tile sizes, Bing lock screen, etc.) and tack them onto Windows Phone 7.5, giving birth to Windows Phone 7.8. Microsoft is too honest. Apple prefers the “let’s fool our customers” approach. When Apple announced iOS 6, they also revealed that older devices would not get all the new iOS 6 features. Yet, Apple still calls this watered-down version of the operating system “iOS 6”. Why couldn’t Microsoft simply take a page from Apple’s dirty book? They could have announced that most current Windows Phone 7.5 devices would be upgradeable to Windows Phone 8, except that some new features wouldn’t be available on older devices.

The cold wet towel that is Windows Phone 7.8 basically sent Windows Phone sales to a grinding halt. Why buy a new Lumia now when it’ll be hitting a glass ceiling in the Fall? That was an unfortunate course of events and the slower adoption for Windows Phone in 2012 is what led many analysts to severely scale back their expectations for the next four years.

Windows Phone 8 really has a solid shot at succeeding. This is the fabled “third version” where Microsoft typically gets things right, and while I’ve been a fan of the platform since the initial reboot in 2010, Windows Phone 8 finally reached top contender stage. Nokia brought us new devices, and HTC showed us they actually know how to design a sexy phone. Hopefully Samsung can bring some sexiness to their own devices. They have awesome specs and quality, but they need a phone borne out of the mind of creative designers, not engineers.

The combination of new OS features and new devices finally make Windows Phone much harder to dismiss as “irrelevant”. The good news came late in the year, but this was nonetheless a good year for Windows Phone.

Surface Announcement & Launch

The Surface announcement and launch was a real surprise. Microsoft may have released a LOT of hardware in the past, but nothing comes close to the Surface in terms of involvement or investment (with the exception of Xbox). Microsoft used to be primarily a software company, but we can’t really say that anymore. Sinofsky may be gone, but the Surface remains. For the first time in its history, Microsoft shipped a new version of Windows, Windows Phone and Office and yet none of those are the most talked about product coming out of Redmond within that same calendar year.

Surface is.

I wrote extensively about the Surface and if you have not had a chance to peruse my series titled “From iPad to Surface”, I invite you to do so via the following links.

The jury is still out on Surface and I plan on writing more about it in 2013. I just hope we get a brand new official Mail client because the current one really sucks.

Let’s now dive into my predictions for 2013…

ActiveNick’s Top 10 Predictions for 2013

I’ve never done this publicly before. Like a lot of people, I’ve offered many technology predictions casually through conversations in the past, but those are often more wishful thinking than actual predictions. Given my really bad track record on some of these (e.g. Beta VCRs, NEC TurboGrafx 16, Commodore CDTV, Star Wars Galaxies, Windows Mobile, HD-DVD, etc.) I expect to do really poorly on many of my predictions. Still, let’s have some fun and reflect back on them in a year.

1. Return of the Windows Start Button

I’m probably wrong on this one given how Julie Larson Green was so deeply involved in the UI design of Windows 8 and Windows RT, but I think that now that Sinofsky is out, Microsoft will cave to enterprise pressures and bring back our beloved Start button. This will only be available in Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise, and it’ll come back as an optional feature through some form of service pack or Windows Update. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was only available via enterprise policies / settings.

2. New Apple Devices

The fact that we’ll get new Apple devices is not really a prediction, it’s more like stating the obvious. What will we get though? Or more importantly when it comes to Apple, what WON’T we get? Here is what I think we’ll see from Cupertino in 2013:

Another iPad Mini, this time with Retina Display and better specs
New MacBook Air with Retina Display
iPhone 6 will ship in 2013. I’m not sure what Apple will add, but the screen size & resolution will remain the same, whatever new features Tim Cook introduces will be lifted from Android or Windows Phone, and it still won’t support NFC. Whatever it is, Apple fanbois and fangurls will proclaim “the Apple Magic is still alive” yet Apple’s global market share will remain stagnant.

Oh, and Apple Maps will still ~~suck~~ be inferior to Google, Bing and Nokia Maps. In terms of wishful thinking, I really hope Siri gets an SDK.

3. Windows Phone 9

IDC recently predicted that the worldwide Windows Phone market share will reach a very modest 11.4% in 2016. I think this is a very conservative estimate, especially given the big marketing campaign currently under way and the fact that every single Windows 8 computer and Windows RT device acts as an advertisement for Windows Phone. The Metro UI and Live Tiles will become more and more familiar to consumers and this will positively affect Windows Phone sales.

Microsoft will probably introduce the Windows Phone 9 OS along with new partner devices, and I predict that all current and future Windows Phone 8 devices will be compatible with it. This will prevent any slowdown in WP8 device sales, something that negatively hurt the platform in 2012. Disclaimer: At this point in time, I know absolutely nothing about any future version of Windows Phone. This is pure speculation on my part.

Based on IDC’s data, Windows Phone is at 2.6% market share today and I predict it’ll climb to 7% by the end of 2013 and officially claim the third spot ahead of RIM in the mobile ecosystem.

4. Nokia Devices

My new Nokia Lumia 920 is as perfect a phone as I’ve ever owned one. But it’s still not perfect. It only has 32GB of storage, no storage card slot, and the battery life could be better. Nokia is not all about devices, they have Nokia Maps and their “Here” location services that bring in a lot of dough after all, but if they want to stay competitive in the phone space, they’ll need more than the current three Windows Phone 8 devices (Lumia 620, 820, 920). We’ve seen rumored concepts for the Lumia 720, and we also know that Nokia wants to bring more of its PureView technology to Windows Phone.

I predict that Nokia will introduce a new wave of Nokia devices in 2013 *before* we see the Windows Phone 9 OS ship, and all these phones will be upgradeable to WP9.

5. Star Trek

The new “Star Trek Into Darkness” movie will be awesome and will rank over 90% on Rotten Tomatoes. I really miss having a good Star Trek TV show though, and sadly I don’t see 2013 changing this situation. Hopefully the new HD remasters of Star Trek: the Next Generation will make their way to Netflix.

6. Microsoft Surface 2 & Surface Phone

Microsoft sunk a lot of money in the development of the Surface and while the sales have been good, they have not been iPad-spectacular. Surface Pro also hasn’t been released yet. The question nonetheless remains: will Microsoft ship a “Surface 2” device, and if so, when?

There are already rumors that Microsoft is hiring for such a project and while the current Surface RT is great – though not perfect – there is still room for improvement. I was very doubtful about calling for a new Surface 2 – announcement or launch – in 2013, but now that I think about the potential features, it seems obvious Microsoft can keep raising the bar for other OEMs.

Potential Surface 2 improvements could include:

High resolution screen, matching the ppi count of Apple’s Retina display on the Newest iPad
More SKUs with higher storage options, including tablets with 128GB and 256GB built in
Better battery life
Built-in NFC
Built-in GPS
Improved TouchCover keyboard
Optional SKUs with cell radios for built-in 4G LTE support

There have also been a lot of rumors about Microsoft manufacturing their own “Surface Phone”. I would really love to see such a device get announced, though it would really create tensions with Nokia and HTC. The bar has also been raised when it comes to Windows Phone and both these manufacturers have proven they can design truly competitive devices.

My call: No Microsoft-branded “Surface Phone” announced or launched in 2013.

7. Xbox 720

There will be a new Xbox in 2013. I really hope they find a better name for it, and I won’t speculate… ok, maybe I will. I’m throwing my own Xbox vNext names into the hat:

Xbox 3… or 8?
Xbox Pro
The New Xbox (just kidding, but this is what Apple would call it)
Skybox (Xbox in the Cloud, get it?)
Microsoft Gaming Console 2013 Total Pwnage Edition

Anyways, I have absolutely no knowledge about Xbox vNext, but here is what I think we’ll see in this device:

More powerful specs (obviously) like CPU, memory, etc. I call for 8-16 cores in the CPU
Built-in Blu-Ray player and all Xbox game discs will move to the Blu-Ray format
Full 3D support, complete with 3D glasses and augmented reality. We’ll probably have 2 GPUs to drive the dual image
Built-in storage will be SSD
More cloud integration, cloud saves, and the cloud will also be used to tie games to users, thus severely hurting the 2nd hand game market
Fully compatible with all Xbox 360 games
The controller will be the same except the D-Pad will be enhanced
Microsoft Points will go away and we’ll just buy stuff with normal currencies
A new version of the Kinect sensor will be packaged by default with all SKUs
Xbox vNext will share a store with Windows, and most Windows Store games will be usable on Xbox. Indie developers will be able to publish Xbox games with the same SDK they use to create Windows Store games today
XNA won’t be usable (officially) to build Xbox LIVE Indie Games anymore (I hate you Microsoft)
We’ll see more features added to the Xbox Smartglass apps to truly extend the console for gaming like the Wii U does
We’ll also get more media content, more TV channels built-in and the ability to use the Xbox as a DVR

I expect Xbox vNext will be announced at E3 and ship in time for Holidays 2013.

8. World of Warcraft and Blizzard’s Project Titan

World of Warcraft will extend it’s free to play offering beyond level 20. I suspect they’ll raise the level cap to 60 for free to play accounts and lift some of the restrictions (e.g. gold cap, whispers) to make it more viable and less of a trial.

We still won’t know what Project Titan is by the end of 2013

9. BlackBerry 10 Smartphones & PlayBook Tablets

Very little is known about the new QNX / BBX / BlackBerry 10 devices and I won’t speculate much. After many delays, BlackBerry 10 should finally be revealed in February but I suspect devices won’t be available commercially until March or April 2013. At the end of the day, it won’t matter much. Microsoft rebooted Windows Phone in 2010 and many pundits called it “too little too late”. How can RIM reboot their platform in 2013 and expect to stop the free fall?

Their only salvation might be if they released their own OS with its own merits, and yet still support Android apps out of the box without any repackaging, hacking or side-loading. Now THAT would be an interesting feat of engineering.

Bottom line: BlackBerry devices will slip to 4th place in the mobile ecosystem market share, and whatever new BlackBerry PlayBook tablet is introduced will be as insignificant as the current one.

10. Android, Google, Samsung and Amazon

The Android platform holds a decent share of the tablet market but it’s definitely on smartphones that it dominates, with over 60% of market share. Android is a weird animal since so many versions have been forked or heavily customized by all those who seek to make money with it. What will happen to some of the major Android players in 2013?

Samsung is the main company making money off Android. They will keep customizing it to their heart’s content, growing farther apart from the rest of the Android ecosystem, like Amazon has done.
Amazon made Android their own. They forked it and built their own OS on top of it. They have their own UI, their own services, their own marketplace, and it’s all about selling you their content. Expect to see Amazon release newer services for your Kindle Fire tablets to insure you rely less and less on Google. I expect to see an Amazon Email service released in 2013, as well as a cloud-storage solution for consumers, akin to Dropbox or Skydrive. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see Amazon expand their search engine to go beyond content and include Internet searches as well, competing with Google and Bing.
Google is quickly losing control of Android and they’ll try to reign things in during 2013, but I don’t see them succeeding very well. They’ll probably just end up releasing more devices of their own with their own Android version. More phone & tablet OEMs will fork Android away from Google and follow Samsung and Amazon since no one is making any significant money with the baseline Android software. Android is winning but Google is losing.

What do you think of my predictions? On target or completely off? Which ones do you agree or disagree with? Which would you add? If you have any questions or comments about this post, the products and technologies discussed or my predictions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

Happy New Year!

Visual Studio Live Event Recap: Windows Phone, iOS & Data Visualization

Nick Landry — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 21:14:47 GMT

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Visual Studio Live! conference last week, located in the Royal Pacific Resort at Universal Orlando and part of the Live! 360 overarching conference. It was a fun week, I got a chance to meet many great attendees and also catch-up with old friends.

I was presenting on a wide range of topics, including mobile development and building native apps for the Windows Phone 8 and iOS platforms, and also a brand new session on designing data visualization dashboards. As promised during my talks, you can find below all the material I showed, including all the slides and demos for my 3 talks.

What's New in Windows Phone 8 for Developers

In this session I discussed how Windows Phone fits in the overall mobile ecosystem along side Apple, Android, Blackberry and HTML5 apps. We looked at why you should care about Windows Phone, what makes these devices unique, where the store is at, and then I presented a demo on getting started with Windows Phone 8 development in Visual Studio 2012. We then dove into the brand new Windows Phone 8 features for both consumers and developers, the upgrade story for WP 7.5 devices, and explored some of those new features in greater detail, such as the new text-to-speech and voice recognition APIs.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Windows Phone 8 Jump Start Training: http://bit.ly/wp8jump
Windows Phone 8 @ \\Build: http://bit.ly/build12wp
dev.windowsphone.com
Windows Phone Developer Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/wpdev
Windows Phone Blog: windowsteamblog.com/windows_phone/b/windowsphone
Windows Phone Toolkit: http://phone.codeplex.com
Nokia Developer Wiki: www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Category:Windows_Phone
Nokia DVLUP: www.dvlup.com
Jerry Nixon’s Blog: blog.jerrynixon.com
Jeff Blankenburg’s Blog: www.jeffblankenburg.com
NetAdvantage for Windows Phone Controls: infragistics.com/mobile

iOS Development Survival Guide for the .NET Guy (or Gal)

It’s obvious that .NET developers are interested in iOS development too. This was the third time I presented this talk, and once again I had a full house. This session is targeted at developers that know nothing about iOS development, Xcode or Objective C, and everything is presented from the perspective of people already knowledgeable about .NET, Visual Studio and C#. We looked at why you should care about building native iOS apps and I provided a quick intro to the Apple world. I presented everything you need to get started with iOS development (yes, you need a Mac) and we built our first iOS project. I made several comparisons with the Visual Studio world to explain iOS principles, we took a peek at the many iOS frameworks, the many options for third-party iOS controls, and where to go from here.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Register at developer.apple.com
Watch Official Getting Started Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/ios
Watch WWDC Videos at developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2012
Watch Pluralsight iOS Training at www.pluralsight.com/training/Courses#ios
Follow my list of iOS dev bloggers at twitter.com/ActiveNick/ios-dev-bloggers
Download NucliOS, the native iOS controls from Infragistics at www.infragistics.com/ios
Recommended Books:

iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Edition 3 (Conway, Hillegass)
iOS Programming for .NET Developers (Josh Smith)
Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK (Mark, Nutting, LaMarche)

Designing Data Visualization Dashboards

This was a really exciting session, and also the one with the largest turnout. What originally started as an idea for a developer session eventually turned into a talk focused on data visualization design principles. I started with a discussion on just what is data visualization, why should we care, and what makes for effective visualizations. I presented examples of noteworthy visualizations including electoral maps and the periodic table of the elements, as well as several live dashboards. We looked at the various attributes of data visualization dashboards, the UI capabilities, the widgets and the functional capabilities. I then explored the various steps to design beautiful visualizations and the many paths you can take to build those visualizations into dashboards. Lastly, I dove into the importance of maps in data visualizations and showed a live sample demo of a Twitter map built in WPF.

Download the slides and demos here

Noteworthy Links from this talk:

Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice), by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte, 2nd edition
Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data, by Stephen Few
Designing Data Visualizations, by Julie Steele & Noah Iliinsky
ReportPlus dashboard building app for iPad: http://bit.ly/igrplus
Sample Dashboards from Infragistics

I will be speaking at the next Visual Studio Live! conference at the MGM Grand Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, March 25-29 2013, I hope I will see you there.

If you have any questions about the topics discussed in these sessions, you can post them in the comments below or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

From iPad to Surface – Head-to-Head Comparison: Surface vs. iPad

Nick Landry — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 22:40:27 GMT

I’ve been an avid iPad user for 30 months and counting. I still love and use my Pad a lot, but I also bought a new Surface RT. Will my Surface ever completely replace my iPad? I don’t know yet, but I’d love to find out. This blog series is aimed at comparing the two devices in all sorts of situations, from work to home, and analyzing the pros and cons of each. You can read other entries in the series using the links below.

Surface vs. iPad: One Month Later

I started this blog series exactly one month ago. I bought my Surface, full of hopes that it would become my favorite device and dream tablet. If you’ve been following this series, you know by now that was not the case. The Surface is an awesome device, but it certainly isn’t ideal. It’s got its pros and its cons. I found that out the hard way last week. I was vacationing in Spain during Thanksgiving week and carried both devices with me, and it turns out I was using my iPad 90% of the time. I probably would have used my Surface more if it had been a business trip, but in the end, I’d like to just use one tablet. Period.

It’s now time to score this contest. The table below shows various comparison aspects and I’ll be attempting to score this. Note that I’m only counting 1 point per comparison. It’s up to you to weigh in which aspects are more important and which are more trivial.

If you feel there are important comparisons I’m not making here, let me know in the comments below and I’ll add them.

Device Aspects	iPad 4th gen.	Surface RT
*Device Construction & Quality* Both devices sport superior design, construction materials and overall quality. Both easily win against virtually every Android tablet device out there. This is a really close one, but I have to give it to the Surface for integrating the Kick Stand without any compromise.		Surface
Dimensions & Weight The iPad is a 4:3 device whereas the Surface is a 16:9 device. Both can be used well in landscape mode, but the iPad definitely feels better in Portrait mode. The iPad is also slightly lighter (652g vs. 680g).	iPad
*Storage* Surface gives you double the storage space for the same price compared to the iPad. Surface also has a microSD slot and a USB port to plug in USB drives. No contest.		Surface
*Performance* On paper, the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad core 1.4 GHz in the Surface sounds better than the Apple A6X dual core 1.4GHz. In practice though, the iPad is more reactive and feels less sluggish	iPad
Screen Quality I wrote extensively about the respective screens and the bottom line is the 2048x1536 Retina display on the iPad is just plain superior to the Surface’s 1366x768 screen.	iPad
Cameras Remember how disappointing the iPad 2 camera was? You’ll then understand why the Surface camera can’t win this one.	iPad
Battery Life I don’t have hard numbers to share. The iPad has a 42.5 W-h battery vs. 31.5 W-h on the Surface, but it’s all about the consumption rate, especially given the higher resolution screen on the iPad. Based on my experiences, things still look better on the iPad, but the Surface is also quite good.	iPad
Wireless Options Both have Bluetooth support. Both have Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, but the Surface’s MIMO Wi-Fi radio is iffy and often drops, or can’t give me an IP. There’s also no GPS or 3G/4G radio in the Surface, and that’s disappointing.	iPad
Ports & Extensibility The only iPad port is proprietary, and even though many accessories support it, this was invalidated with the introduction of the Lightning connector. The Surface’s charge port is also proprietary, but is joined by standard USB, microHDMI and microSD ports/slots.		Surface
App Store Selection 700,000+ iPad apps vs. 20,000+ Windows Store apps, and most of the key apps are still missing on Surface. This is a HUGE win for iPad.	iPad
Shell & Navigation The iPad’s shell has virtually not changed since iPhone v1. Some conveniences were added on the home button to switch to other background apps, but that’s it. This is an easy win for the Surface’s Live Tiles, Charms bar, edge gestures and dynamic lock screen information.		Surface
*Operating System Configurability* The iPad offers a lot of conveniences in a greatly simplified and easy to use model, but the Surface does have greater configurability. It might scare off a few average users, but you also don’t need to use them.		Surface
*Document Management & Sync* One of the biggest pains with the iPad is moving files in and out. Everything is silo’d in application storage and it’s just plain hard. Surface lets you manage files like a normal Windows machine, you can connect to network drives and add USB drives & storage cards. SkyDrive is also integrated in the OS. Strong Surface win here.		Surface
*Use Case: Email* The iPad mail client has received several improvements over the years and works relatively well now. The Windows Store Mail is just plain bad and is very sluggish on Windows RT devices. This is a huge strike for Surface.	iPad
*Use Case: eReading* The iPad feels better since most read books in portrait mode and the 4:3 screen aspect ratio is closer to a standard book. The iPad Retina display also enhances the reading experience with smaller pixels.	iPad
*Use Case: Facebook* With 1B users, Facebook is a standard use case. Facebook is well integrated in the People hub in Windows RT and Windows 8, but this doesn’t come close to the full experience. It took a while to get an official Facebook app for iPad, but we have one now, and we don’t on Surface.	iPad
*Use Case: Gaming* The Surface has a lot of potential as a gaming device, especially given the integration with Xbox LIVE, the premier online gaming service. Sadly, the selection of games is still pitiful on Surface compared to the iPad’s massive catalog at this early stage.	iPad
*Use Case: Movies & TV* Both devices offer a premium movie watching experience. Both offer Netflix and HuluPlus. Both have their own video stores. The Surface has an edge with the 16:9 movie-friendly screen and the storage card to store media, but the iPad has a LOT more apps that stream content at this point.	iPad
*Use Case: Music* Just like movies, both devices are great music players. There are also more music apps on the iPad and a bigger catalog in iTunes, but the Xbox Music service clinches this win here. The deep synchronization between your Surface, Windows Phone, Xbox 360 and Windows 8 computers makes it all so seamless, much more so than in an all-Apple ecosystem.		Surface
*Use case: Presentations* Keynote is a nice presentation software with cute little effects, but the iPad version is actually a subset of the Mac version. Both also pale in comparison to the full-fledged PowerPoint 2013 on Surface, which is THE benchmark presentation tool in the business world. The standard microHDMI port also clinches this win.		Surface
*Use Case: Sharing* All iPad apps are on their own when it comes to sharing data and documents with other apps. Each developer needs to fully implement sharing support. The Share Charm on Windows 8/RT makes everything easier here and once you start using it, you won’t want to go back.		Surface
*Use Case: Spreadsheet* Full Microsoft Excel 2013 vs. watered down Apple Numbers. No contest. None. Next!		Surface
*Use Case: Twitter* The selection of Twitter clients in the Windows Store is sadly quite disappointing. Looking at the three leading apps (MetroTwit, Tweetro, Rowi), they are slow, unreliable, suffer from usability/design issues. The iPad has great Twitter clients for all tastes.	iPad
*Use Case: Web Browsing* Internet Explorer 10 on Surface is a very powerful browser. The problem is most websites still don’t fully support it as well as they do Firefox or Safari. The partial Adobe Flash support on Surface also doesn’t make up for it given how badly Flash runs un those white-listed sites. The edge goes to Safari on iPad here. There are also more browser options on iPad (though they’re all wrappers around Safari, even Google Chrome)	iPad
*Use Case: Word Processing* Again, just like Surface easily won in the Presentation and Spreadsheet categories, the same goes for Microsoft Word 2013 easily beating Apple Pages. Word is the King.		Surface
TOTAL SCORE	iPad 4th gen.	Surface RT
	14	11

iPad vs. Surface – The Verdict

Surface RT is a v1 product, and a very impressive one at that. In fact, if this was Surface v1 vs. iPad v1, the Surface RT would win a lot more points. Unfortunately, Surface needs to be competitive against the 4th generation iPad. The 14-to-11 score above shows how the Surface has a lot of great qualities, and once the Windows Store expands, Surface might even win a few extra points. The potential is definitely there. However, I’d like to carry just one tablet, and for now, I still need to carry two.

Don’t take my scoring at face value. Assign the proper weight to each score based on which usage scenarios matter more to you. Are there also some important comparisons missing in the table above?

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. iPad, or any other tablet, feel free to ask them in the comments section below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the right tools for you with the new NetAdvantage for Windows UI. You should also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Which of the comparisons outlined above matter more to you? Based on the various scores, which tablets seem better suited for your needs?

Let me know.

From iPad to Surface – Favorite Fridays >> Google App

Nick Landry — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 18:07:33 GMT

Is it Friday already?

It seems it was just a couple posts ago that I covered the Windows Phone App for Surface in Favorite Fridays… and it was. Time flies and it’s been a busy week. I find myself wondering which Windows Store app to cover in this week’s Favorite Fridays. I’ll be honest with you: it’s slim pickings in the Windows Store and I’m at a loss. There may now be over 16,000 Windows Store apps worldwide (over 10,000 in the US), but many big brands are still missing and very few apps truly stand out.

I’m looking at my current library of installed apps and many of them are basically the “Surface picks”. You can find the usual culprits like USA Today, New York Times, Engadget (still in preview), NBC News, ABC News, Wall Street Journal, eBay, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Kindle, ABC Player, and Flixter.

There are other apps I use but either I need to play with them some more, or I’m not totally happy with them to feature them here yet. The Zinio digital magazines app was recently updated and works much better now, but I’ll have to use it more to comment on it. News Bento is positioning itself to be a true Flipboard replacement but still has many issues I want to see resolved before I switch away from Nextgen Reader.

There are apps that look really cool from the outside, but soon fall apart when you start using them. Jon Stuart’s The Daily Show Headlines app suffers from many data issues, locks up often, isn’t showing the latest videos, most videos are dated January 1st 0001, doesn’t have full episodes and is just a pale shadow of the iOS version. The same goes for the Dilbert app. You can read the last few comic strips but there is not full archive access and the UI is so simple it’s just plain bad.

Finally, my Twitter woes continue. Tweetro and MetroTwit are still light years behind my beloved Twiterrific on iOS, and I pretty much gave up on Rowi too.

So what app should I cover today?

It’s an app I stumbled upon yesterday. It’s a super obvious household name, but it certainly not the first name that comes to mind when you use a Microsoft Surface…

Google App

That’s right. Google published a Windows Store app. You have to give props to Google and Microsoft. They understand the fragmented nature of the mobile ecosystem. Microsoft has already published several apps on iOS and Android, like Bing, Skype, OneNote, SkyDrive, Xbox Smartglass, Live Messenger, Lync and Halo Waypoint. They even published games like Kinectimals for iOS and Android, and there are rumors that Office is coming to these two rival platforms.

In turn, Google also plays nice with Microsoft with a Google app on Windows Phone. Even though their relationship soured with Apple, Google still has a number of iOS apps like Google+, Google Search, Chrome browser, Google Drive, Google Earth, Google Translate, Gmail and others. It’s also rumored that Google is working to bring back Google Maps to disgruntled Apple Maps users.

It seems Google is ready to recognize that Windows 8 and Windows RT are not going away anytime soon. They’re embracing the platform with what I hope will be a long line of Windows Store apps, starting with the Google app.

Why Google on Surface Matters

The Google app’s primary purpose is of course searching the Web. It supports your Google ID and remembers you after being logged in. The base experience is very similar to the one in the Google app for iOS. The Home screen displays the ubiquitous search bar, as well as icons to access your History, Apps and Voice Search. Unlike the iOS version, the Windows Store Google app sadly doesn’t support Google Goggles. This is especially disappointing since Microsoft doesn’t offer its rival Bing Vision service on Surface either.

There are two reasons why I picked the new Google app for Favorite Fridays:

Google is the leading Search Engine

My favorite search engine back in the 90’s was AltaVista. Newer engines were appearing like Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and MSN, but I stayed loyal to AltaVista… until Google came. I resisted that movement a bit but it soon became obvious that Google was crushing the competition with their superior results, blazing speed and lightweight UI. More than 10 years later, Google still commands over 60% of the search engine market share. I personally switched to Bing in late 2008 (it was live.com back then) and haven’t looked back. I personally prefer Bing overall, but only 15% of the population agrees with me. To each their own.

It’s very important to have solid Google support on Surface. Despite the built-in Bing, people will expect it and the European Commission will be happy.

You can talk to Google

This feature was the clincher for me: search via voice recognition. Just like the iOS version, it’s dead simple and it works, very well. Ever since Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, I’ve been enamored with HAL 9000 (as have millions of other geeks been too) and I’ve been dreaming of the day we’d have conversations with computers. For some reason Apple’s Siri just isn’t doing it for me, but something as simple as the Google app Voice Search got me fired up.

Just launch Voice Search via the icon at the bottom right in the Google app.

When launching this feature, the app will ask you for permission to use your microphone, just accept and move on. I was still getting some error about microphone access, so I had to go back to the home screen and select Voice Search again. Everything worked well after that.

A huge red microphone tells you to speak your search query. The app does not seem smart enough to drop the term “search” if you say “Search bacon shortage”. It’ll actually include the word “search” in your query. To search for something, simply say what you would type in the search box without adding any extra commands. As soon as there is a short pause, the search will be executed without any need to say “Enter!”, or “Go!” or “Make it so!”

From this point on, you get the default Google experience, as you would in any web browser. Don’t expect anything special. The app won’t read results back to you. You’re expected to read the results on screen, not Google stuff while driving.

What else can this app do?

Google Apps

The Google app also features a collection of Google Applications. I was semi-excited to see what would show up when I tapped the “Applications” box in the middle of the home screen. I was greeted by a palette of application icons matching the popular offerings from Google: From Gmail and Maps to Google + and YouTube.

The excitement died. It turns out these are just quick shortcuts to various websites, offering nothing more than what’s available in a browser. These are not app screens or Metro redesigns, these are just HTML5 pages wrapped in a native Windows Store app. It’s a small convenience and nothing more.

This web page-driven experience is not unlike the iPad version of this same app. Google for iOS also offers a variety of shortcuts to embedded web pages like Google+ and Reader, but it also acts as a launcher for other Google apps available in the Apple iTunes Store for iOS, such as Google Drive, Chrome, Google Earth and a few others. Hopefully Google will release more apps in the Windows Store and integrate them with this app in the future.

The Google Maps page is bound to be a popular choice, but don’t get your hopes up. The performance is actually quite disappointing. The culprit is actually Internet Explorer 10 on Surface RT. These Google web pages may be in a Google app, but this is still using a wrapped IE10 control, not Chrome. If you open Google Maps in the native IE10 app, you’ll note the same deplorable performance. You better stick to the built-in Bing Maps app in the foreseeable future.

The Google Reader app simply links to the Google Reader web page as well, but for some reason we’re redirected to the mobile view. If you want to read your Google Reader feeds, don’t even bother with this page here, just use Nextgen Reader or News Bento.

I was curious to see how the YouTube experience would be. There is no default YouTube player on Surface and I was hoping for this Google app to give me this experience. This is also just a YouTube web page.

I ran into some issues when I tried to access YouTube. First, the browser control itself complained that “Part of this webpage is not supported and may not render properly”, offering to open the page in my default browser. This is not a good experience.

Secondly, the YouTube page told me I needed to upgrade my Adobe Flash Player. I tried to tap the provided link, and after many failed attempts, the page finally loaded, only to tell me that the Flash Player is already built-in both versions of IE10 in Windows 8 and Windows RT, and there’s nothing else to download. Again, another confusing experience for average users out there.

I was eventually able to select videos and play them. Upon right-clicking the video I discovered it was actually using an HTML5 player. Why was YouTube complaining about Adobe Flash then?

This is why we need real Windows Store apps and not lazy web pages in a wrapper.

Another drawback of the web page approach. I found it hard to hit the video controls with fingers. Those were designed for a mouse. It’s a good thing I do have a trackpad on the TouchCover, but this needs to be more touch-friendly.

Swiping from the top or bottom edge of the screen (or right-clicking the screen with a mouse) reveals an application bar and alternate view. From this view you can view your search history (also accessible from the Home screen History button), go back to the Home screen, view a Tutorial or initiate a Voice Search from anywhere in the app. The Tutorial is actually helpful and I recommend going through it once for any new user of this app.

Search Charm & Settings

Google knows how to play nice with the Windows 8 design guidelines. The Google app actually supports the Windows 8 / Windows RT Search charm. Initiate any search within your Surface and the Google app shows up in the list Search-compatible apps. This list gets pretty long so I suggest pinning the Google app to the top via a tap & hold if you think you’ll search with Google a lot.

The App Settings for the Google app are simple enough but useful. They are accessible via the Settings charm and allow you to:

Turn Instant search on or off
Enable/disable Voice Search
Enable/disable Personalized Search
Clear your search/browsing history on this device. Note this only affects the Google app, not your whole IE10 history
Record history on the device or not

Summary: Moar appz plz. kthxbai!

The Google app is a decent start, but it’s not enough. Those app shortcuts will have to become real apps in their own right.

I also hope we eventually get the ability to launch the app via voice commands too. For this we’d need built-in voice search at the operating system level like we have in Windows Phone 8. It’s on Microsoft to deliver.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Are you happy with Bing search on Surface or you ignored it to use Google.com in your browser on Day 1?

Let me know.

[Link to next article: Head-to-Head Comparison: Surface vs. iPad]

From iPad to Surface – Day 9: Favorite Fridays >> Windows Phone App

Nick Landry — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:55:46 GMT

The Microsoft Ecosystem

For a software company, Microsoft sure makes a lot of hardware. Setting aside most of the devices Microsoft ever created, we can look at the Microsoft ecosystem today in 2012 and we find a trifecta of devices:

Windows PCs, laptops & tablets
- Windows 8
- Windows RT
Windows Phone 8 devices
Xbox 360 Gaming Console

This ecosystem is glued together by your Microsoft Account and SkyDrive. The Microsoft Account is the new name for the melting pot that is your Windows Live ID, Xbox LIVE Gamertag, and Hotmail account. SkyDrive can be compared to Dropbox in that it serves as cloud storage for your files, but it goes further. It also syncs settings, photos, music, files, notes and such across your devices and computers.

Apple has a similar ecosystem:

Computers running iTunes (Mac or Windows)
iOS Devices (iPhone & iPad)
Apple TV

Apple also has the Apple ID and iCloud service to bind everything together. When it comes to computers, there is little benefit to actually using a Mac since you can pretty much get the same benefits from running iTunes on Windows. It can also be argued that the Apple TV certainly doesn’t have the clout of the Xbox 360. It’s a media consumption device for videos, music and photos on your TV, and not much else.

The main difference I want to explore is how you can sync data between devices. The following connections are allowed between devices:

Apple Devices Sync

Sync content between an iPhone and an iTunes computer
Sync content between an iPad and an iTunes computer
Sync content between an Apple TV and an iTunes computer

The iTunes computer is the central link. All these devices can interact and sync with the cloud, but not with each other. For example, you can’t connect an iPhone to an iPad and move files & media around.

Microsoft Devices Sync

Sync content between a Windows Phone and a Windows 8 computer
Transfer content between a Windows RT tablet (like Surface) and a Windows 8 computer (via network or USB key)
Sync content between an Xbox 360 and a Windows 8 computer
Sync content between a Windows Phone and a Windows RT tablet

Don’t panic, I use “Windows 8” here but Windows 7 is still supported to sync data with Windows Phone 7.x via the Zune client. To sync Windows Phone 8 with Windows 7, use the the beta app. There is also a Windows Phone app for Mac if you don’t use Windows.

Did you notice that 4th bullet in the Microsoft list above? Indeed, you can’t connect an iPhone to an iPad, but you CAN connect a Windows Phone to a Surface. You do it with the Windows Phone app from the Windows Store.

Windows Phone App on Surface

The Windows Phone app allows users to sync their Windows Phone 8 devices with any Windows 8 or Windows RT computer, including the Surface. Yes, you heard me right, I said Windows Phone 8. Don’t try to connect your Lumia 900 or Samsung Focus running Windows Phone 7.5 , it won’t work. This is why the app rated so low in the Windows Store. Not supporting the current generation of Windows Phones is a lame omission and I really hope this gets fixed in the Windows Phone 7.8 update.

When you launch the app, you see a list of Windows Phone apps available in the Windows Phone Store. You’re instructed to connect your phone via USB. Upon connecting for the first time, you get prompted to name your device. Don’t worry, this name is not permanent and you can change it in the app settings.

You can tell the app to automatically import all your photos from your phone to your Surface upon connecting. If you connect your phone and the app is not running, a popup shows up in the upper-right. Tapping it presents you with options, including launching the Windows Phone app (the recommended option).

Once connected, the app imports all your Windows Phone photos if you opted to do so. The app shows your device name, device type, phone number (I erased mine from the screenshot) and battery level of the device. You can indeed charge your phone with your Surface via USB. You can also see at the bottom of the screen how much space is used and remains on your Windows Phone.

The app scrolls horizontally and presents several sections. It doesn’t rotate and can’t be used in portrait mode.

On your phone

This section presents a preview of the photos, videos and music on your phone. Photos can be browsed by album, music by albums, and videos by type (e.g. all vs. personal). Three tiles are available to add photos, videos and music. Each option allows you to browse for individual items or entire folders.

In the Store

These are just browser links to the apps and tapping them opens the app link in the browser. It only shows you 12 apps. To see more, you have to tap the link which takes you to the Windows Phone Store online. Disappointing.

On the Web

The last section on the far right contains more links to the web. These shortcuts take you to Microsoft pages to find a lost phone, see your Microsoft Account or visit the main windowsphone.com page.

Room for Improvement

It’s a good starting point, but the app is not perfect. It’d be nice if the Windows Phone app could do more, such as:

Sync with Windows Phone 7.x devices
Control where stuff gets sync’ed on my Windows 8 or Windows RT computer
Allow me to add music to my phone by albums without having to manage files or folders
Actually shop for apps and queue them for remote download on my phone without using a browser
Find, ring or erase my phone remotely without using a browser

The Zune client on Windows 7 was a great way to manage Windows Phone content, and I would really like to see this Windows Phone app be modeled more around the Zune approach. I’m certainly glad we have this app, but Microsoft seriously needs to keep working on it as this is a very basic version 1.

Day 9 Summary

A common debate these days is whether or not the Surface can replace a laptop. I still believe that you’ll need a laptop for more involved productivity work, but my Surface certainly takes me further in laptop-less territory than my iPad can. Being able to sync (and charge) my phone with my tablet certainly becomes a part of that equation, and a step in the right direction.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? How many devices in the Windows RT, Windows Phone & Xbox 360 trifecta do you own? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to the next post: Landscape vs. Portrait]

From iPad to Surface – Day 8: Top 10 iPad Apps Missing in Windows Store

Nick Landry — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 22:21:22 GMT

12,000 Apps vs. 275,000 Apps

31 months after its introduction, the Apple App Store has 275,000 apps for the iPad. If you include all the iPhone apps that still run on the iPad, that number jumps to a whopping 700,000 apps.

How can the Surface compete with this, given it just came out 12 days ago and only has 12,000 apps? For starters, 12,000 is more apps than anyone would ever use. I currently have about 75-80 apps on my Surface and even after 30 months of iPad ownership, I have 350 apps on it.

The app store numbers game is often quoted, but remember that it’s not about the number of apps, but rather making sure you have the right apps. Windows Phone has 10 times as many apps as the Windows Store, but as I wrote about earlier this year, there are still some key iPhone apps missing on Windows Phone. I figured it would be a good idea to do something similar here and quickly review the top 10 iPad apps missing in the Windows Store for Surface and other Windows 8/Windows RT users.

1-2. Facebook and LinkedIn

When Windows Phone shipped, Microsoft knew they needed a Facebook app, so they actually paid an outside firm to build an official Facebook app on their dime (with Facebook’s blessing, of course). Why is Surface then shipping without a Facebook app? Granted, the iPad shipped without a Facebook app and it took until October 2011 (18 months after launch) before we got one.

The same goes for LinkedIn. It took even longer before we got a LinkedIn app (2 years). Given how the LinkedIn iPad app is actually a mobile web app wrapped in a native shell, you’d think they could easily port it to the Windows Store.

The People hub/app on Windows RT does provide a very good level of integration to various social networks, including Windows Live/Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. That’s greatly useful and it does provide cool cross-network features normally not available in silo’ed apps, but there are also Facebook-specific features we want in a dedicated app, such as the Timeline, Groups, Fan Pages, Likes, and more. The same goes for LinkedIn Messages, Groups, News Updates and more.

3-4. IMDb and Audible

Amazon is a content company. They don’t care if you buy & consume their content on an iPad, Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD or Surface (though no love for the BlackBerry Playbook). As such, they made sure they had a Kindle Reader app available in the Windows Store on Day 1… and stopped there. Amazon actually owns a few of the most popular apps on iPad, including the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and Audible services. IMDb is the perfect companion to anyone that’s ever watched a TV show or movie and asked “Where have I seen her before?” or “Was Johnny Depp in The Matrix?”

Audible is the premier service for Audio Books. There technically isn’t an Audible iPad app, you’re instead stuck using the iPhone version on an iPad. That doesn’t matter since the nature of audio books is that you interact with the app less than 1% of the time when you listen to them. There is an Audible app for Windows Phone, but since Windows Phone apps can’t run on Windows RT (what a missed opportunity, topic for another day), we therefore need a dedicated Audible app in the Windows Store.

I really want these apps on my Surface. While we’re talking about Amazon, I would also like to see them bring more of their iPad apps to the Surface, including the Amazon shopping app, Amazon Instant Video and Amazon Windowshop.

5-6. Flipboard and Instapaper

I’m repeating myself here, I know. I love Flipboard as it’s the ultimate best news reader app on any platform, and my favorite app of all time. I won’t dig too much on Flipboard here, you can simply read last week’s Favorite Fridays post as I was hunting the Windows Store for a replacement.

Instapaper is one of the greatest services ever and credit goes to Scott Hanselman as he convinced me to start using it. Throughout the course of any week, I stumble upon tons of great articles via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email and most often via my expansive Google Reader feed. There are too many to read and I often want to remember them so I can read them later. Instapaper saves me from keeping 74 web browser tabs open. I instead “save” links for reading later via a single browser shortcut, and Instapaper saves them in my (free) account. Better yet, Instapaper strips out all the menus, ads and fluff from the web page, keeping only the core formatted text and graphics of the article, making it easy to read in the Instapaper app on a phone or tablet.

Instapaper even packages my 10 most recent articles into a Kindle eBook every Friday and emails it to my Kindle PaperWhite device. I often read saved Instapaper articles on my iPad though, especially when I fly somewhere. I need this app on my Surface.

7-8. Dropbox & Yelp

Windows 8 and Windows RT are beautifully integrated with SkyDrive. This makes it easy to manage my photos, music and documents between the cloud and multiple computers. Not everyone uses SkyDrive though, and even if they do, many have been using Dropbox for years and this is where they store their documents & files in the cloud. If the Surface is to be a true player in the mobile ecosystem, it’s important that we get a Dropbox app in the Windows Store.

On a different note, we need to remember that tablets are mobile devices too, and people use them on the road. Sooner or later, you’ll be looking for a place to eat or buy stuff. Yelp is the premier website, and now app, for people looking for a good restaurant. It’s not rocket science, we need a Yelp app on Surface.

9. e*Trade & Other Finance Apps

Tablets are great to keep an eye on stocks, financial news, indices and your personal portfolio. You can do it on a smartphone but the larger screen on tablets is really better suited for financial data visualization, especially if you want to place trades too. I’m no day trader, but I personally use the e*Trade app on the iPad and I would love to get a Windows Store app as well, not just for Surface, but also for use on all my Windows 8 computers.

Maybe you prefer a different finance app to track stocks & read financial news. Other key finance apps missing include CNBC Real-Time, Bloomberg, Fox Business and MarketDash by Yahoo Finance.

10. Cable & Network Streaming Apps

By now, most cable & satellite companies have their own apps on the iPad, including Comcast Xfinity, Time Warner Cable and others. Some can be used as a TV schedule guide, others even allow you to search & queue up on-demand movies to your cable box or program your DVR. As more and more people are watching TV on the road and on the go, we need these apps on Surface. Once you start using them, it’s hard to give them up.

Streaming video to your tablet is also a critical scenario on any successful tablet (sorry PlayBook). We already have the two key video streaming apps on Surface: Netflix & HuluPlus. That’s great start, but I want to see more, including HBO GO, Amazon Instant Video, a CNN app that let’s me stream live TV, and others.

Day 8 Summary

There are of course many more apps missing on Surface today. Your list may be different than mine. I could add the Safari Books Online app which lets me read 1000’s of technical books on my iPad, or two of the best productivity apps for the iPad: SharePlus and ReportPlus. When it comes the the latter two, I may actually be able to do something about it. Stay tuned.

I will be updating this post over the coming months as some (and hopefully all) of these apps get released in the Windows Store, so make sure to bookmark this page and come back from time to time.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Is your list very different than mine? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to Day 9: Favorite Fridays >> Windows Phone App]

From iPad to Surface – Day 6: We Need Groups!

Nick Landry — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 01:14:47 GMT

From iPad to Surface:
Bonus Post: You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?
Bonus Post: Developing Apps for Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8
Bonus Page: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows UI – Developer Controls for Windows 8 & Windows RT

Too Many Apps

I have 350 apps on my iPad 3rd generation 64GB. Three. Hundred. Fifty.

Thank goodness (or in this instance – Steve Jobs) for the introduction of folders in iOS 4.0, a feature that lets you group apps together under a common category of your own choosing. These folders make my home screen much more manageable on the iPad, with quick groups like News, Canadian News, Books, Social, Productivity, Finance and Entertainment.

Sure, the iPad has a nifty search feature allowing you to quickly find your apps (the Surface does too), but I like to “browse” when I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for. For example, if I’m in the mood to play a game on my iPad, I’ll pick a game based on the type of gameplay I’m looking for, such as role-playing, strategy, puzzles, action, music, card games, etc.

Windows 8 and Windows RT don’t have any folders. If you install a lot of apps on your Surface, thinkg will quickly get out of hand. I have the same problem on my Windows Phone, but it’s easier to configure the Start screen on my phone, and accept that not all apps belong on the Start screen. I can simply use the App List, the long list selector that lets me jump to a specific app letter, or the search feature.

On Surface, I don’t use the full app list. I like to put all my apps on the Start screen. At first glance, my Start screen looks nice. It’s full of live tiles, giving me lots of updates with a quick glance.

The problem is when I start scrolling right, and I see panels and panels of apps. I’ve only had my Surface for 6 days and I already have 72 apps and games on it. If I “zoom out” on my Start screen with a pinch gesture, this is what my full Start screen looks like (see screenshot below). You can create logical “dividers” or groups and name them (swipe down on each group).

Can you imagine this picture once I have over 300 apps like I do on my iPad? How will I ever deal with this? Things will get out of hand fast. I can use the search charm, and I will, but the beauty of the new Windows Start screen is in the live tiles. More and more apps will support them. Developers will find more creative ways to design innovative live tiles you’ll just want on your Start screen. Unpinning 90% of your apps from your Start screen kinda defeats the purpose of the Surface.

The problem persists if I decide to use the “All apps” button which is shown when you swipe from the bottom edge and up. You end up with a huge grid of apps and your group/divider names are gone (see screenshot below). You can get a quick selector to jump to a specific letter with another pinch gesture here, but I wish it acted like a filter since it’s still not easy to figure out where you are after picking a letter.

Microsoft Office 2013 has its own folder, but we are somehow not able to create these folders ourselves. Worse, if you are running a Windows 8 Pro computer or tablet, all those desktop apps will dump their dozens of icons in their own folders, turning it into a mess you’ll NEVER want to look at.

The Start screen is where it’s at, but we’re gonna need a way to group our apps. The current grouping feature only labels a group, but what we really need are real folders you can drill into. It took four versions for iOS to recognize this problem. I sincerely hope I won’t have to wait for Surface 4 or Windows 11 before we get folders.

Day 6 Summary

The lack of app groups on Windows 8 and Windows RT sounds trivial, but it’s one of those “every day quality of life issues” that affects you every single time you use your Surface, tablet, laptop or desktop. With already over 10,000 apps in the Windows Store, it’s not unrealistic to see users with dozens of apps already, barely a week after launch. Microsoft needs to address this problem very soon. They cannot afford to wait for the next major release of Windows.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Do you want groups or folders in the Start screen? How do you think Microsoft should address the lack of app groups? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to Day 7: Screen Quality Face-off]

From iPad to Surface – Day 5: Favorite Fridays

Nick Landry — Fri, 02 Nov 2012 21:17:37 GMT

From iPad to Surface – Day 1: Acquisition & Setup
From iPad to Surface – Day 2: Sandy Killed my Power
From iPad to Surface – Day 3: Under the Hood
From iPad to Surface – Day 4: Shopping for Apps
Bonus Post: You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?
Bonus Post: Developing Apps for Microsoft Surface, Windows 8, Windows RT and Windows Phone 8
Bonus Page: Infragistics NetAdvantage for Windows UI – Developer Controls for Windows 8 & Windows RT

What are Favorite Fridays?

What makes or break any smartphone or tablet is the selection of available apps. This is where the iPad truly shines, and this is also why I have absolutely no use for my Blackberry Playbook. You know you’re in trouble when there are no recognizable brands in your top 50 free apps. Surface doesn’t have that problem. There are lots of known apps & brands in the Windows Store. Some are good, some are bad, some are works in progress, and everyone has their favorites.

I decided it be cool to look at my favorite apps on the Surface and share my experiences with them every Friday.

Today’s Inspiration: Flipboard

If you’re a regular reader of my blog, or if you’ve read the first few installments of this series, you know by now that my favorite mobile app of all time, across all devices known to man, is Flipboard. Thank you to Jason Beres for introducing me to Flipboard when I started working at Infragistics.

Flipboard is the best News Reader client and fully supports Google Reader, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instapaper and also easily shares with other apps. It creates a beautiful magazine layout of all my feeds, uses natural gestures to navigate the stories, and it’s a pure pleasure to use. When you’re a news junkie like I am, both for personal and professional reasons, you need an easier way to quickly stay on top of thousands of news stories every week.

This is Flipboard on the iPad:

Flipboard was an iOS exclusive for a long time. It works on iPhone but is best used on an iPad. Flipboard started appearing on some Android phones through some exclusive agreements, but it’s still not a widely available Android app on the Google Play Store.

I looked for a Flipboard equivalent on Windows Phone for over 6 months. I’m also looking for a Flipboard equivalent in the Windows Store. I tried Zentomi, Feed Reader, FeedPoint, and Modern Reader. I don’t like any of them. In the end, my answer to a Flipboard replacement is the same on Surface as it was on Windows Phone: Nextgen Reader.

Today’s Friday Favorite: Nextgen Reader

Nextgen Reader is, in my opinion, the best Google Reader client on Windows RT, and also on Windows Phone (to date). I’m talking about the Windows Store version here, as I’ve experienced it on my Surface. Unlike Flipboard, Nextgen Reader does not include “official” news sources, nor does it allow you to turn your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feed into a magazine-style layout. Nextgen Reader is fed 100% by your Google Reader account.

Nextgen Reader is $3.99 on the Windows Store, and there is also an unlimited ad-free trial. Sure, there are free alternatives, but they are not even worth the download time. Just skip them and try NGreader. To be honest, I have no idea how “limited” is the trial because it seems full-featured and has no ads, but I bought it anyways just to support the devs.

Nextgen Reader, or NGreader for short, provides a classic “desktop” style RSS reader view with 3-column layout as seen below:

NGreader also provides a “Microsoft Design” (i.e. Metro-style) layout, called Modern View. You switch to the Modern View by tapping the app logo (not super obvious). I like that it allows you to sift though all your RSS posts chronologically. I don’t like how other RSS clients force you to look at all the posts in one feed at a time. This reading style allows me to gloss over Windows Phone, World of Warcraft, Microsoft, Business, MMO, Star Trek, Apple, Xbox, Politics, XNA, and Canadian news, all intermixed together, just like in Flipboard.

The navigation is simple. I can simply use gestures to go through various posts. If I want to dig inside a specific folder in my Google Reader setup, I can do so. I can jump to a specific feed as well. It’s very flexible and natural.

I can tap on any article when I want to read more. Even in this view I can swipe left to move on to the next article. I love that. NGreader uses Readability by default to simplify the article view and strip out menus, ads and such. Instapaper is also supported to “mobilize” articles. You can even manage the default “open article” method by feed. If a feed is known for offering disappointingly short RSS summaries (*cough* CNET *cough*), you can tell NGreader to show you the “mobilized” version of the article instead.

If you swipe from the bottom, you also get additional options like forcing a sync, marking everything as read, filtering a feed, pinning a feed to start, copying the article link to the clipboard and mobilizing the view.

Sharing Content

Sharing content is an important part of news reading. I often tweet from Flipboard as I find interesting articles I want to share, or I email links to my Buffer account so they get tweeted later. Sharing content in NGreader is done via the Share charm, which means that you can only share with other apps that support sharing, such as:

People: To share via Facebook or Twitter. The problem is it only shares the link and fails to add the title of the article to the message. This is bad.
You can share via other apps already installed. For example, I can share on Twitter via MetroTwit since I already installed it, and this method actually includes the title of the article too. This is good. Rowi and Tweetro also support the Share Charm.
Mail: To share via email, which includes the title and the link, and even an image if any was included in the article.
OneNote: This one showed up in my Share list, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’m getting some error about sharing to the current section because it wasn’t synced.

It’ll be interesting to see more apps show up in the Share charm here. Instapaper is the big omission for me. There is no Instapaper app on Windows Phone, but NGreader has built-in support for Instapaper in its Windows Phone version. NGreader on Windows Store sorely needs this feature since there is no Instapaper app in the Windows Store either.

Configuration Options

NGreader also supports various configuration options via the Settings charm, such as when to mark articles as read, disabling the “mark all read” feature.

The Settings charm also exposes Sync options, such as whether or not to sync upon start, changing the sort order, and controlling how many articles to sync & keep in the whole reading list, in starred items, per feed and within a folder. You can also control the number of items to download per feed.

Other Cool Features

I didn’t get a chance to talk about all the cool features in Nextgen Reader. Here are a few more:

Offline Support: NGreader caches articles and images that were already downloaded so you can read later when offline, like on a plane, or during a hurricane.
Completely safe Oauth2 Authentication to your Google Reader account.
Mark all items as read with a single click.
Pin multiple tiles to the Start screen.
Full keyboard support in Classic View with lots of built-in keyboard shortcuts.
Incremental sync engine.
Limit number of items to download per feed.

Things to Improve

Nextgen Reader is awesome, but it’s not perfect. Here are some improvements I’d like to see added in future updates:

I wished sharing worked like the Windows Phone version where I can simply tweet from the app. Going through the People Sharing feature is a nice level of integration but requires too many taps.
There is no support for Live Tiles yet, but the developers said it was coming.
More upcoming features that are currently missing: snapped view and portrait orientation.
In Modern View, the Back arrow in the top left corner allows you to go back to the Classic view. I often find myself tapping that by mistake to go back in my navigation.
The scrolling performance suffers in the list of feeds in both Desktop and Modern Views. Performance also needs some improvements to reduce stutters when navigating during a sync.
I need to be able to send a link to a built-in Instapaper feature.

I also wish NGreader offered some of the features I get in Flipboard:

Magazine-layout view.
Support for other news sources like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Partner with official news sources and publications to feature their content in the app.

Day 5 Summary

I’m not done exploring NGreader. To be honest, I only discovered and bought it today, but it’s already my favorite Surface app. Being able to quickly read news is the #1 use I have for a tablet. It remains to be seen if Nextgen Reader will truly replace my Flipboard on iPad, but so far things are looking good. This app should take me 90% there in terms of news reading.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Do you have a favorite Windows Store app so far? Let me know.

See you tomorrow! [Link to Day 6: We Need Groups!]

From iPad to Surface – Day 1: Acquisition & Setup

Nick Landry — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 20:12:10 GMT

I’ve been an avid iPad user since May 2010. I upgraded to an iPad 3, err… sorry, the “New iPad” in June 2012, which is apparently now already obsolete thanks to the introduction of the 4th generation iPad barely 6 months later. Thanks Tim Cook, really sucky move! In any case, I love my iPad. The device never leaves my side. I carry it everywhere around the house, I use it for work, emails, web surfing, apps & games. I carry it on vacation, on road trips, on the plane, when I read in bed, everywhere. I’m basically an iPad power user.

I have a lot of tablets. Aside from the iPad, I have an Asus Transformer TF101 running Android ICS, a Blackberry Playbook (the saddest tablet ever), I also often used a Samsung Series 7 Windows 8 tablet from work (aka the \\BUILD tablet), and I even have an old Motion Computing LE1600 Tablet PC and one of the failed Microsoft UMPC’s. My iPad is my favorite, by far!

Yesterday I bought a Surface. I figured it might be interesting to chronicle my experiences as an avid iPad user transitioning to a Surface. I probably won’t give up on my iPad anytime soon, but I’ll try to explore the possibility, and what the benefits and struggles are.

Day 0: Buying the Surface

Today is technically Day 1 since I bought it yesterday. My wife and I headed to the Microsoft Store in Freehold, NJ. This was actually my first time in a Microsoft Store. My first thought upon walking in was “It’s about time!” Apple’s Stores have been hugely successful and it’s not hard to see where Microsoft got the inspiration. My wife’s first words were actually “It’s just like an Apple Store!” I just hope Microsoft opens stores a lot faster and in more countries. My older sister tried to buy a Surface in Montreal and apparently they are nowhere to be found still.

I opted for the 64GB Surface RT. This is the largest storage option, and you can still add a storage card for another 64GB, which rocks! The Surface Pro running Windows 8 Pro is not available yet, it should come out in 3 months. I’m not sure why since Windows 8 is done, but I suspect Microsoft wanted to introduce a cheaper model first to appear more competitive.

If you are still not too sure about just what is Windows RT, make sure to read my blog post on this very topic here.

What sucked is that the only 64GB option comes bundled with a black Touch Cover. You cannot just buy the 64GB Surface alone. The Surface is basically $499 for a 32GB, $599 for a 32GB with Touch Cover, and $699 for a 64GB with Touch Cover. Microsoft teases you with these flashy Touch Covers but if you want to use one with a 64GB Surface, you basically have to buy two keyboards. I wanted the blue Touch Cover since it matches the Infragistics logo, but I’m not gonna dish out $120 for a second keyboard. That was a weird move on Microsoft’s part. They’ll probably change that in the future but once again early adopters get the shaft.

Oh, and thanks for the Surface sweetie! This was actually a belated birthday gift from my wife. I told her back in September before my birthday “Don’t buy me anything sweetie, there’s something else I want and it’s coming out at the end of October…”

Configuration & Apps Installation

The Surface configuration is pretty seamless. The guys at the Microsoft Store insisted on doing it on-site and I agreed, if only to make sure I didn’t get a bogus device. Since I already have a Windows 8 computer tied to my Microsoft Account, all those setting carried over, including my lock screen image, desktop image, email settings and other accounts, keyboard settings (I use a French-Canadian mapping) and others. It’s pretty cool.

The next step was installing some apps. The Windows Store allowed me to quickly filter through all my apps I’ve purchased to date but that were not installed on this Surface. The Surface comes preinstalled with a nice set of apps:

Office 2013 for Windows RT, which gets updated when you initialize the Surface
Mail, Calendar, People, Messaging
Photos, Music, Video
Bing, Bing Maps, Bing News, Bing Travel, Bing Finance
Internet Explorer 10
Camera
Games
Windows Store

Here are some of the key apps I went with so far:

General Productivity: OneNote MX, Skype, Lync
News & Weather: WeatherBug, USA Today, NBC News, The New York Times, The Globe & Mail
Entertainment & Leisure: Netflix, Kindle, Hulu Plus, Zinio, ABC Player, ComiXology, Flixter, Dilbert
Social: MetroTwit, Tweetro, Rowi (still can’t find a perfect client for my needs)
Others: Remote Desktop, Windows Phone Connectivity App, Bank of America, eBay, Fresh Paint, Wikipedia

I also got a lot of games, but I’ll save that discussion for another day. For some reason it looks like the Engadget app was pulled, I’m not sure why. I really liked AccuWeather on my Windows 8 laptop but it’s clear they had not tested it on Windows RT since the performance degraded dramatically. In fact, that was something I noticed on many apps. I guess now that Surfaces are out, many of those app developers will get to test their own apps for performance and usability, and then introduce much needed changes.

At first glance, there are some key apps that are NOT available on Surface yet, and there are some I’ll miss most. Hopefully they come soon, or in some cases, an equivalent could do the job. My top missing apps for now are:

Flipboard (I cannot live without it)
Instapaper
Audible
Amazon (shopping)
IMDB
Safari Books
Engadget
CNN (I want the Live TV feature, this is what I use most in it)
Facebook & LinkedIn (surprising, isn’t it? some functionality is exposed via the people hub but it’s not enough)
Yammer
SharePlus & ReportPlus (but I work for the right company to get this remedied)
Dropbox (I use SkyDrive more, but I honestly make use of both)
e*Trade, Bloomberg & CNBC RT
HBO GO, Xfinity (from Comcast)

I’m not done hunting for apps, that’s actually a fun metagame. There are also a lot of games I want to see on Windows RT since I own over 100 iPad games and play quite a few regularly. Now that the Unity 3D engine is bringing support for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, we’ll see many more iOS & Android games getting ported to the Microsoft world. The Windows Store shipped with over 7,000 apps, which is impressive considering it’s more than any Day 1 tablet store compared to iPad and Android. But we’re not competing against Day 1, the Surface is competing against iPad + 31 months. There’s a lot of catching up to do.

Before and After

My Surface initial configuration is now done. As an iPad user, my “first glance” tablet experience went from this:

to this:

You can immediately notice the blatant difference. “iPad vs. Surface” essentially boils down to “Chrome vs. Content”. The iPad OS is all about providing a grid of launcher icons in a beautifully pleasing experience, complete with a fully customizable desktop background of your choice (love my Windows-esque background?), glass reflections, shadows and more. The problem is those launchers don’t tell you much. I don’t use the default weather app on the iPad because apparently it thinks it’s always “73 and sunny”.

That 377 number on my mail icon is the most useless number ever. It’s the number of unread emails I have in my linked inbox. If I check my iPad 30 minutes apart, I have no idea if the last count was 369, or 372, or 376. It’s useless, unless you’re one of the 7 people worldwide who can actually stick to the “Inbox Zero” technique for more than 2 days. The same goes for the other apps, all they give me is a count, and if you use folders, this count gets aggregated, making it even more useless.

The Windows 8 Live Tiles (inspired from Windows Phone 7+) immediately give life to my Surface. Upon providing my Microsoft Account credentials, my photos automatically got sync’d with SkyDrive, my people hub got populated with my friends, co-workers and contacts, including favorites, the mail app automatically picked-up my personal, Infragistics (Exchange) and Google mail settings, and more.

I was saddened to realize you cannot set the Start screen background to what you want on Windows 8 or Windows RT. You can chose from about 20 or so patterns and chose from a palette of color schemes, but you cannot use your own photos. I hope this changes in the future.

Taking a Screenshot

I discovered a cool trick on the Surface since I needed to post a screenshot for this post: how to take a screenshot on Surface. Simply press & hold the Windows button at the bottom of the Surface on the device itself (not the keyboard cover), and then just press the DOWN VOLUME button on the left side of the Surface.

The screenshot will be captured and saved in your Pictures Library under a Screenshots folder, which you can access with the built-in Photos app.

Onward to Day 2…

I actually have many more observations about my Day 1 but I’ll save some of them for tomorrow to keep this post under control. In the coming days, I’ll be talking about the Desktop on Windows RT (yes, there is one), my Twitter client woes, the level of SkyDrive integration, using the Surface as a productivity laptop, the device hardware itself, and more. I’ll also dissect the best and worst of some of the popular apps on Windows RT.

If you have any questions about Surface, including suggestions for future topics to explore in this series, questions about my experiences with the Surface vs. the iPad, or any other tablet I mentioned, feel free to ask them below, or contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the tools for you. You can also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Did you buy a Surface or other Windows RT tablet? Are you waiting for the Windows 8 Pro tablets? What are some of the key apps you want to see on Surface? Or are you just happy with the tablet you use today? Let me know what you use out there.

See you tomorrow! (provided Sandy doesn’t knock out my power in New Jersey) [Link to Day 2: Sandy Killed my Power]

You Want to Buy a Surface, but What is Windows RT?

Nick Landry — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 21:50:04 GMT

There is a new version of Windows available today: Windows 8. Every time you hear about Windows 8, you hear about how vastly different it is from Windows 7 and its predecessors. Then you head to a Microsoft Store, or stumble into one of those pop-up Microsoft Stores at your local mall, and you see the Microsoft Surface tablet… also wildly different from your Windows laptop or iPad. Or maybe you saw the Surface on TV. Sooner or later, you’ll hear or read about the operating system on the Surface: Windows RT.

What the heck is Windows RT?

If you’ve been following all the Microsoft news, Surface news, Windows 8 news and such, this blog post is not for you. If you still don’t know how Windows RT is different than Windows 8, you can read the boring corporate FAQ from Microsoft, or you can keep reading.

Windows RT is a Flavor of Windows 8

Windows 8 follows in the footsteps of Windows 7 and the versions that preceded it. It has the traditional desktop look & feel, it should run every single one of the apps you have on Windows 7, it runs on desktops, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, ultrabooks, hybrids, and tablets. You will primarily use a keyboard and mouse to use it, but it also works very well with touch screens. It has some cool new features, it’s crazy fast, boots in seconds instead of minutes, syncs your files & settings in SkyDrive automatically, and much more. Since it requires far fewer system resources than Windows 7, virtually every Windows 7 or Vista computer can run Windows 8, and even some Windows XP systems will be upgradeable. If you have Windows 7 today, an upgrade to Windows 8 is actually well worth it, especially since it’s so cheap.

Windows 8 comes in different flavors:

Windows 8
Windows 8 Pro
Windows 8 Enterprise
Windows RT

Windows 8 is the default edition most home users will get. Windows 8 Pro is the typical edition you’ll find on work & business PCs and laptops. The Pro edition provides more features corporations care about, like data protection, extra security, remote desktop, joining domains and such. The Enterprise edition is virtually the same as Pro, but it comes with a few enterprise-specific extras, and is only available via volume licensing (i.e. you can’t buy it at Best Buy or on Amazon). You can see a side-by-side comparison of the Windows editions in this Microsoft product page.

Before I dive into what Windows RT really is, it’s important that I clarify some key differences between Windows 8 and Windows 7.

Windows 8: Where is the Start Button???

Yes, you might have heard (or noticed) by now: the Start button, the one we’ve had in the lower-left corner of our Windows screens since Windows 95, is now gone. Removed. Fired. Axed. The Start menu has been replaced by the Start screen:

The Start Menu was basically only a launcher, a way to start your apps. You’d see a list of application shortcuts, grouped by folders, giving you access to your recent documents, the Control Panel, pinned applications, and you’d be able to search for stuff, from documents to programs and the Web.

The new Start Screen in Windows 8 also acts as a launcher. Every tile on the screen is actually a shortcut to an app, but it does so much more. These tiles are Live Tiles. They are part of the Metro Design Language by Microsoft (yes, I know, I called it Metro, until they have a really good name, I’ll keep calling it Metro), and were introduced in the Windows Phone 7 Start screen in 2010.

Live Tiles can receive application updates and notifications, showing you the data you care about without even launching the app, such as the first sentence and sender of recent emails, how many text messages you received, breaking news from USA Today, weather conditions in your home area, etc. You can rearrange the Start screen and tile layout however you want, and the screen scrolls horizontally. The Start Screen works just as well on a PC or laptop with a rigid screen as it does on a touch screen or tablet, but the horizontal scrolling definitely works better on touch screens. You can use a scrollbar at the bottom to scroll with the mouse, or move your mouse cursor to screen edges to scroll, but multi-monitor users like me (I use three at home and at work) will curse at this omission.

If the Start Button is gone, how do you show the Start Screen? Using one of the following options:

Press the Windows key on your keyboard (or the Command key if you use Windows on a Mac)
On touch screens and tablets, swipe your finger from the top edge of the screen and flick all the way down.
Move the mouse cursor to the bottom left of your screen. A thumbnail of the Start Screen will appear (also a pain if you use multiple monitors and you try to hit the corner on any screen other than the leftmost one).

When the Start Screen is shown, to go back to the desktop you can simply hit ESCAPE on your keyboard, or tap/click on the Desktop tile.

Windows 8 = Desktop + Start + Windows Store Apps

Windows 8 has a standard Windows desktop and will run all your Windows 7 apps. When talking about standard Windows applications in the traditional Windows 7 sense of the word, or applications designed for the Windows 8 desktop, let’s simply call them “Desktop Apps”. For the geeks out there, these are apps compiled to run on an x86 or x64 CPU architecture. So is there another type of app? Yes, these are Windows Store apps (aka Metro apps).

Microsoft introduced the Windows Store in response to the Apple App Store on iOS and Mac, and the Google Play Store. Windows Phone has had its own store called the Windows Phone Store (formerly known as the Windows Phone Marketplace) since 2010, but its Windows big brother did not, until now.

I won’t dive into the technical details of what Windows Store apps are, this is not meant to be a developer post. In a nutshell, Windows Store apps are designed to run in a special isolated environment, and the only way common folks can get them, is via the Windows Store. Desktop apps can be installed by downloading an installer from the web, via a USB stick or a DVD-ROM. Windows Store apps cannot, you have to buy them from the Windows Store (hence the name). All Windows Store apps are hosted by Microsoft, and developers must submit them through a certification process before they can be made available in the Windows Store, just like the iPhone and iPad with iOS apps.

Windows Store apps run full screen, just like the Start Screen. You can’t overlay a bunch of windows next to each other. Only desktop apps can do that. Windows Store apps can be “snapped” to the left or right, leaving the rest of the screen for another Windows Store app, allowing you to multitask, like surfing the web and reading your Twitter feed, or working on a spreadsheet in Excel while watching a Netflix movie.

What About Surface & Windows RT?

Back to Windows RT & the Surface. Microsoft Surface is a device that comes in two flavors: The Surface Pro runs Windows 8 Pro, the Surface RT runs Windows RT. I gave you this preamble about Windows 8 because I called Windows RT a flavor of Windows 8, but it really isn’t. Windows RT is a separate Windows product that shares some compatibility with Windows 8.

In essence:

Windows RT = Windows 8 - Windows Desktop

Windows RT is a Windows version that is made to run on a different hardware architecture (i.e. ARM) that is optimized for lower power devices, like tablets. Windows RT is basically a version of Windows optimized for the Microsoft Surface, and all the other rival tablet devices running on similar chips. What does this mean for you? It means the traditional Windows Desktop has been removed from Windows RT. Technically, the desktop is still there for some first-party Microsoft apps (like Office), but other application developers will not be able to run their apps on the desktop, so you might as well forget it’s there.

Windows RT only runs apps that come from the Windows Store

Only apps that have been certified by Microsoft and made available on the Windows Store can run on Windows RT. The Windows Store is shipping with the most apps of any device store at launch, and you can already find the everyday stuff you’d want: Netflix, Office, Skype, Amazon Kindle, Hulu Plus, Evernote, YouTube, eBay, Flixter, and thousands more.

The good news is that since each Windows Store application runs in a completely isolated space, it’s virtually impossible to write a virus, worm, malware or spyware for a Windows RT device. Yes, you heard me: on a Windows RT device, you no longer have to fear viruses and malware.

The other cool benefit? If you buy apps in the Windows Store, you can use those apps both on your Windows 8 PC or laptop, and your Windows RT tablet, like the Surface.

Windows RT cannot run all those apps you already have on Windows 7, Vista or XP.

You cannot install apps from a CD, DVD, USB stick or web download using Windows RT. Your traditional apps like Photoshop, QuickBooks, Office 2010, Roxio Creator, AutoCAD, Microsoft Publisher, TurboTax, etc. will NOT run on Windows RT devices. The same goes for your current PC games like World of Warcraft, Skyrim, Borderlands, Torchlight, Call of Duty, Civilization, etc. They will NOT work either on Windows RT devices, whether you bought them in a store or on Steam. The Steam client won’t work on Windows RT either.

What you will see, of course, is software vendors and game studios create specific versions of their software products and games for the Windows Store. There’s been a similar trend in the Apple App Store as we have seen more and more popular brands ship iOS versions. Microsoft Office *is* available on Windows RT, in fact it comes preinstalled on it, but you need to use the special Windows RT version. There are already 1000’s of apps in the Windows Store and that number will grow FAST since the target market includes ALL Windows RT devices (including Surface RT) and ALL Windows 8 PCs, laptops, notebooks, netbooks, ultrabooks and hybrids. The Windows family commands about 90% of the desktop market, and a significant portion of those users will migrate to Windows 8 as they buy new computers, or upgrade their current machines to Windows 8 over the next few years.

Note that some tablets run Windows 8 Pro – not Windows RT – and those tablets (like the Surface Pro), will be able to run all these classic desktop apps.

Windows RT can surf the Web and run all Web Applications

Windows RT comes with a special version of Internet Explorer 10, which means you can surf the web and access anything, even use web-based applications built with Adobe Flash. However Windows RT cannot run Rich-Internet Applications based on Silverlight (ironic, isn’t it?), so there is a chance that some rare content might not be available to you. Fret not, the whole world is standardizing on HTML5, which is supported in Windows RT and Internet Explorer 10.

Windows RT is efficient and always on

Just like iOS devices (e.g. iPhone, iPad) and Android devices, you can turn on your Windows RT tablet and use it instantly without any booting or waiting for “Sleep mode” to resume. Windows RT also consumes less power, so your tablet will run for 7-8 hours or more, unlike your laptop which probably fetches 3-6 hours.

Surface RT can be used to replace a computer. Combined with the built-in Office, you’ll be able to do a LOT. Some power users will prefer to use the full Surface Pro, and others (like me) will keep relying on a beefy laptop for their advanced work, even though they’ll also use a Windows RT tablet.

Summary: Don’t Panic

Windows 8 is an evolution. Windows RT is a revolution.

Things will be different. Change is hard. Remember the Office Ribbon debacle from a few years ago? Now we all agree it’s a much better way of working in Word or Excel. The same goes for Windows 8. People will complain at the lack of a Start button for a while. You’ll hear how there aren’t enough apps for a while. It doesn’t matter. Like any change to our habits in life, it takes about 2 weeks to get used to things (that’s how long it took me to cut sugar in my coffee 13 years ago). You’ll get used to the Start screen, and soon enough, you won’t be able to live without it. You’ll want to carry a Windows RT Surface around, and you might even want to pick-up an Xbox 360 and a Windows Phone to seamlessly connect your friends, your info, your documents, your apps, your games and your life.

If you have questions about Windows RT, Windows 8, Surface and other Windows devices, including Windows Phone, feel free to post them below in the comments section. You can also contact me on Twitter at @ActiveNick or by email at activenick@infragistics.com.

If you’re a developer interested in building apps for Surface, Windows 8 and Windows RT, Infragistics has the tools for you. You can also follow @infragistics on Twitter.

Will you upgrade to Windows 8? Are you planning on buying a Windows RT device? If so, which one?

Windows Phone 8 is Coming – Build Your Apps with NetAdvantage for Windows Phone 12.2

Nick Landry — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 18:30:20 GMT

Windows Phone 8 is just around the corner. There are now over 110,000 apps in the Windows Phone Store. Combined with the release of Windows 8, the new Microsoft Surface, and sexy new hardware devices from Nokia, HTC and Samsung, it looks like the Windows Phone momentum is about to go into overdrive and its position gets cemented as the third mobile ecosystem. Infragistics has been supporting application developers for over 20 years, and I’m here to tell you this support is continuing for the 28K+ approved Windows Phone Store developers, and the other 100K+ developers exploring Windows Phone.

NetAdvantage for Windows Phone is excellent for building compelling mobile consumer apps as well as reliable corporate apps & mobile BI dashboard solutions. It is the only product on the market with a core set of rich enterprise-class Line of Business and Data Visualization controls to serve your Windows Phone development needs.

In our new 12.2 release of NetAdvantage for Windows Phone, we introduce commercial-grade versions of six popular UI widgets, including:

Auto-Complete Box
Context Menu
Date Picker
Time Picker
List Picker
Toggle Switch

We are also introducing CTP versions of really cool controls we just couldn’t wait to release, including the highly requested Windows Phone Calendar control, as well as our versatile Tile Manager. Combined with the current offering of more than 20 controls, and a brand new Samples Browser app, the new collection in NetAdvantage for Windows Phone release 12.2 provides a unique toolbox of rich & flexible controls for mobile developers who aim for the top spots in the Windows Phone Store.

Product Features

AutoCompleteBox (new control)

The AutoCompleteBox is a control that combines a text box and a drop list, providing item suggestions to the user as they type text in the control. It allows developers to benefit from a powerful UI optimization technique to limit the amount of free text entry by the user. Developers can customize the display of items in the list, use data-binding to populate the list, control how the list items are filtered, and more. Key features include:

Custom Layout. Specify your own data objects layout in the drop list.
Data binding. Bind the drop list to any collection of objects.
Filtering. Control how the drop list is filtered based on the input text using the FilterMode property, providing options for case sensitivity and which part of the data items are filtered against (beginning, or any part of the text).
Custom filters. There are two approaches to custom filters:

Filter based on the string representation of the data objects (by setting the TextFilter property).
Filter based on the whole data item (or any of its properties).

Drop list display control. Control the amount of time in milliseconds or the minimum number of characters that should be entered before the filtered list is populated and displayed to the user.

ContextMenu (new control)

The ContextMenu is a dynamic control that can be displayed on demand based on a user interaction. Common scenarios for the context menu typically involve a Tap & Hold gesture by the user on any given screen element to pop the menu open, although it can be associated to other common events as well, such as a button click. The ContextMenu is a very useful tool to recreate a first-party Windows Phone experience where advanced options need to be presented to the user without cluttering the screen with additional application bar buttons, menu items or controls. Key features include:

State & Behavior. Control and test the visible state of the pop-up context menu in code, and affect the zoom and fade behavior of the background when the context menu is visible.
Data Binding. Populate the context menu with data from any collection using data binding.
Scroll Menu Items. Scroll menu items within the context menu pop-up window when there are too many items to display at once.
Styling. Style the context menu and items according to the look & feel of your application.

DatePicker & TimePicker (new controls)

The DatePicker and TimePicker controls are two of three selector controls included in this release that allow developers to recreate a popular first-party Windows Phone data input experience. DatePicker and TimePicker are TextBox input controls that can be tapped by the user to display a separate window used for date / time selection. The DatePicker selection window contains three infinite scrolling lists, letting the user easily select a day, month and year without any typing required. The TimePicker selection window also features infinite scrolling lists, letting the user easily select the hour and minutes. You can use the 24 hour time format, otherwise an extra selection is made available for AM/PM. Key features include:

Culture Format. Easily provide date and time selections to your users in your apps without requiring any typing, and do so in any calendar culture and time formats supported by Windows Phone.
Customization. Customize the full-screen date and time picker pages by building your own.

ListPicker (new control)

The ListPicker control is third of three selector controls that allow developers to recreate a popular first-party Windows Phone data input experience. ListPicker is a TextBox input control that can be tapped by the user to display a separate window used for the selection of an item in a custom collection. ListPicker is basically the Windows Phone equivalent of the ComboBox control. Key features include:

List Selection Mode. Use in-place list selection or a full screen selection page in your apps.
Multiple Selections. Choose between single or multiple item selection.
Data Binding. Populate the list picker’s selection of items from any collection of objects.
Data Templates. Customize the XAML template to be used for the items in the selection list.

ToggleSwitch (new control)

The ToggleSwitch is a simple control that enables users to turn an application option on or off. It is the Windows Phone equivalent of the checkbox and has two check states: On and Off. Key features include:

Data Templates. Customize the XAML template to be used for the content and the header of the Toggle Switch in each state.
Customization. Select the foreground color of your choice for the “On” state, or use the default accent color from the user’s chosen theme.
Dynamic State. Dynamically change the Content of the Toggle Switch depending on the current state.

Calendar (new CTP control)

The Calendar control for Windows Phone provides functionality similar to that of the month view in the built-in Windows Phone Calendar application. It is designed to display Days, Months and Years. The control enables the following key features:

Navigate. by tapping the arrows in the header area or using drag gestures to navigate to the next/previous month; or by tapping over the header title which displays a month/year looping selectors allowing the user to choose a different month and/or year.
Select. by tapping over a day cell. This functionality is available when the SelectionMode=”SingleDate” is set (by default). You can disallow selecting of cells by SelectionMode=”None”.
Customization. Customize specific date cells, such as adding weather icons, moon phases images, event types, etc. with the CalendaDayButtonTemplateSelector.
Display Agenda Content. by AgendaSource property of the control which accepts IAgenda data with StartDate, EndDate and Content of the agenda.
Restrict the Display Date. by DisplayDateStart and DisplayDateEnd properties.
Deny Selecting of Specific Dates. by adding them to the BlackoutDates collection of the Calendar.

Tile Manager (new CTP control)

The Tile Manager displays content on the phone display using rectangular tiles, which are arranged sequentially creating multiple rows of tiles. The mobile user can maximize a tile, which automatically minimizes the remaining tiles. However, the minimized tiles will remain in view along an edge of the control, so your end users can quickly maximize and shift their attention to new content.

The xamTileManager includes the following features:

Animations. The xamTileManager has built-in animations that play during state transitions. You can supply your own animations to customize this experience.
Data Binding. You can set the xamTileManager’s ItemsSource property to automatically create Tile objects based on your data model.
Drag-and-Drop. Your end users can drag tiles and rearrange them at run time using touch gestures.
Explicit Tile Layout. You can arrange tiles into explicit columns and rows using concepts already found in the Grid panel (Column, Row, ColumnSpan and RowSpan).
Saving and Loading Layouts. After your end users modify the layout at run time, you can save the changes and restore them between application sessions.
State-Based Item Templates. You can define item templates based on the state of the tiles. The xamTileManager will automatically apply the proper item template as your end users change the state of a tile.
State-Based Size Constraints. You can restrict the size of tiles based on their state.
Tile Resizing. Your end users can resize tiles using resizing indicators.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Can I try your controls? Is there an app in the Windows Phone Store?

Of course! Just visit http://bit.ly/IGWPApp to download our free NetAdvantage Samples Browser from the Windows Phone Store. We completely redesigned it from the ground up for easier navigation, with more samples than before and the ability to see the XAML and C# code behind.

Is NetAdvantage for Windows Phone compatible with Visual Studio 2012?

Yes, you can use NetAdvantage for Windows Phone release 12.2 in Visual Studio 2012. Visual Studio 2010 is of course still supported too.

Does Infragistics provide controls for Windows Phone 8?

Yes. The good news is our controls are compatible with both Windows Phone 8 projects and Windows Phone 7.5 projects. This way you can build apps for the new devices but you don’t have to abandon all the current Windows Phone 7.5 (and soon 7.8) users out there.

How much is NetAdvantage for Windows Phone?

$195.00 USD for the Standard Edition, per developer seat. You can get our Community Edition (forums support only) for $95, or add Premium Support for a total of $695.

Can I get a free evaluation of your controls before I buy them?

Yes you can, simply head over to the NetAdvantage for Windows Phone downloads page (linked here), create a free Infragistics account and download a free evaluation version. The installer also includes the full source code to our new Samples Browser.

Do you have native controls for other mobile platforms, like iOS or Android?

Yes we do! Make sure to try NUCLiOS, the world’s most powerful native controls for iOS developers, and IguanaUI, our free Android Controls Community Pack. You can also purchase all of our mobile controls together via MobileAdvantage for $695 ($495 for the Community Edition).

Native apps are dead! I want to build cross-platform apps in HTML5!

I must respectfully disagree with you. Native apps have their place when you want to create a unique user experience that follows each platform’s guidelines, when you want the best performance, when you want to take advantage of deep platform specific features, or when you want to create a truly competitive app, be it paid or free. However you are right that many scenarios can also be implemented using cross-platform HTML5 apps wrapped with PhoneGap.

We have an answer for that too: Ignite UI: the World’s Most Advanced JavaScript & HTML5 UI Framework, which is based on / 100% compliant with jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile. You can use it to create advanced web applications, mobile web sites, and also cross-platform mobile apps by wrapping your Ignite UI app with PhoneGap.

Build Mobile

So there you have it. Eight new controls for Windows Phone 8 (8 for 8, get it?), a whole new Samples Browser, a new bundle for multiple mobile platforms, and the best support you can ask for. When you do build some cool apps with Infragistics controls, no matter what platform you target, make sure to let us know. Go download it now and get started today!

If you have any questions or suggestions on which mobile controls you’d like us to focus on next, you can post a reply below, visit the NetAdvantage for Windows Phone forums here, contact me on Twitter via @ActiveNick, or by email at activenick@infragistics.com. Also make sure to follow @infragistics on Twitter.

What mobile apps are you building?

NUCLiOS: The Most Powerful Native Controls for iOS Developers

Nick Landry — Tue, 16 Oct 2012 19:16:21 GMT

iOS sure has come a long way…

iOS was initially introduced as a platform for consumer devices via the iPhone in 2007. The rise of the Apple App Store in 2008 quickly made the iPhone the top consumer smartphone choice for enthusiasts and knowledge workers alike. The iPad then revolutionized the tablet world in 2010 by bringing iOS to a more business friendly device, going beyond its initial positioning as a media consumption device. As more and more businesses are adopting Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) programs, iPhones and iPads are starting to dominate within the enterprise. With this shift comes a need for corporate applications designed & built for iPhones and especially iPads.

For two decades, enterprise developers have turned to Infragistics controls for help in building the best in state of the art user interfaces for the Windows platforms and the Web. Until today, Apple developers have had to resort to various open source offerings to augment the Xcode UI toolbox as this space suffered from an absence of premier component vendors. For the first time in its history, Infragistics now offers a suite of native iOS controls named NUCLiOS, continuing our tradition of excellence and bringing over 20 years of UI controls design experience to Apple iOS developers.

NUCLiOS provides the core controls developers need to build high performance, highly visual iPad & iPhone applications. This initial release includes the two most requested types of controls regardless of developer platform:

an advanced iOS Data Grid
a set of powerful & versatile iOS Charts

Our iOS controls are built with performance and style in mind. They’re ideal for all Apple developers, whether you build mobile apps for the general consumer market or for the enterprise. You can use NUCLiOS controls in native iOS projects built with Objective C and Xcode. NUCLiOS makes it easier, faster, and more affordable to create high performance, visually stunning native applications for iPad and iPhone devices. If you’re already an iOS developer, NUCLiOS offers a simple yet powerful API that will be familiar to you.

If you have your own in-house iOS development team, reduce the financial risk of prototyping and developing applications for iPads and iPhones. Our data class helpers make it easier for your developers to connect to your enterprise data. NUCLiOS makes it easy and cost-effective to create high performance enterprise-ready mobile application for the iOS platform.

Make the most of BYOD while saving money and reducing risk by developing and deploying high performance visually stunning applications for the world’s most ubiquitous tablet – the iPad. NUCLiOS supports powerful styling, allowing your development teams to create the look & feel within the guidelines of your company brand.

Key Features

NUCLiOS provides the most complete and productive Chart & Grid solution for iPad and iPhone developers. We are confident that you will love working with our controls and reap the benefits of our powerful control architecture:

Native Objective C Chart control for iOS, supporting over 20 different chart types or series, markers, trend lines & financial indicators, ready to be combined for advanced composite charting
Native Objective C Data Grid for iOS which can be used either for advanced data binding scenarios, or as a flexible user interface layouts tool. The grid featured styling and templating capabilities for maximum customization, data binding, and the ability to group, filter, sort, and more
Simple yet powerful API that is familiar to all iOS developers
Controls optimized for maximum performance on the Apple mobile chips
Support for massively high volumes of data, as much as the Apple devices will allow
Stunning visualization with themes support for the most professional-looking user interfaces

NUCLiOS goes beyond these key features. When it comes to control development on iOS tablets and smartphones, performance and battery life are critical success factors. We’ve done a lot of work in both of those areas to make sure that your users will get a premium experience when interacting with applications built with these new iOS controls.

NUCLiOS GridView

The NUCLiOS Grid is more than your typical tabular grid: it’s a powerful control that can be used either as a data-focused grid for both consumer and business applications, or as a versatile layout tool that allows you to create compelling user experiences on the iPhone, but especially on the iPad. With this control, you get the ability to style & template the grid to look like almost anything.

The NUCLiOS Grid can also be used as a single column list when other important elements need to be shown on the iPad, similarly to the native iOS Mail client, or when the screen real estate is precious, such as is the case in iPhone applications.

The key Grid features in NUCLiOS are:

Grid Data Binding & Data Source Helper – To get data into the grid, we’ve implemented a helper that will make it easier to bind arrays to the grid. Developers provide an interface that implements a protocol that the view knows about, and the protocol methods provide the information that the IG grid needs to display data.

Grid Navigation – The Grid supports multiple interactions to navigate through the data:

Selection: Select individual rows or cells with tap gestures
Scrolling Shortcut: Developers can benefit from API methods to programmatically scroll to a specific cell or row in an animated way.
Shortcut Bar: Use the built-in shortcut bar similar to the one showcased in first party iOS applications to quickly jump to a section or category in your grid data (e.g. alphabetically jump to the letter you want).

Grid Interactions – The Grid is highly interactive and is designed with a touch-first approach:

Pull-down to Refresh: Also known as “Pull to Reload”, this built-in feature allows users to refresh the data in the grid by pulling the latest data snapshot, whether it comes from a local database or a remote REST service.
Custom Cell Gestures: The grid provides the developer with the ability to specify a custom gesture on any cell.

Grid Context Menu – Press and hold on a cell to display a custom context menu:

Grid Data Manipulation – The Grid also allows users to interact with its data in various ways:

Row Re-ordering: Drag individual rows to charge the layout of the grid data, fluidly reordering the other rows as they are animated to their new position.
Cell Re-ordering: Drag individual cells across the grid and watch as the other cells are reordered through smooth positioning animations.
Row Insertion & Deletion: Select a row and insert a new one in its place, animating the others as they get shifted down. Alternatively, you can select rows for deletion by highlighting them, or swipe across a row to display a delete button as is seen in other first party iOS apps.
Cell Insertion & Deletion: Select a cell and insert a new one in its place, animating the others as they get right & down. Alternatively, you can select cells for deletion by highlighting them individually.

Grid Data Filtering – Enable filtering on any grid column by using the filteringKey property of the IGGridViewDataSourceHelper.

Grid Data Layout – The Grid supports flexible layout options to present your data exactly the way you want it:

Grouping and Section Column: Display an additional fixed column that contains section data.
Sorting: Sort your grid data by one or more columns.
Load More: You don’t need to load all your data at once. The grid can automatically fetch the next page or set of data, providing enhanced perceived performance and the ability to virtually present an unlimited number of data rows.

Grid Formatting & Styling – From photo albums and slide shows to movie collections and sales reports, the NUCLiOS grid can be styled to look like almost anything:

Styling: Benefit from complete styling flexibility, allowing you to emulate first party iOS apps, match your own brand, or any custom look & feel desired.
Star ( * ) Sizing on Columns: Allow the grid to automatically resize columns based on the available width leftover on screen.

NUCLiOS ChartView

Render iOS charts with hundreds of thousands of data points that are capable of millisecond updates, sparing nothing to achieve blazing speed. Enable heavy-duty iPad data visualization and analysis on large volumes of data with high performance using the more than 20 chart types included. Support for the Motion Framework™ within the Data Chart control allows you to build highly engaging visualizations and provide smooth playback of changes in data over time, giving life to your data through fluid animations.

The key Chart features in NUCLiOS are:

Chart Data Binding – Leverage the Infragistics Data Source Helper to wire-up your charts to various data sources and benefit from simplified data binding. The data source helpers are similar in concept to what is described above for the grid control. They populate the Data Chart control based on the values supplied in the array which is fed to the data helper.

Chart Navigation – Use natural multi-touch gestures for panning & zooming to to drill-down to specific data points, or zoom out to see the big picture of your data.

Chart Display – Customize your charts through several configuration options affecting the axes and legends, including:

Multiple Axes
Legends / Multiple Legends
Custom Axis Scale

Chart Markers – Choose from 10 different types of markers to easily show your data points on the various chart types, including squares, triangles, circles, hexagons and more.

Chart Multiple Series – The iOS data chart control is designed for modularity of chart series. Multiple chart series are supported to create composite charts for better data comparisons on the same surface.

Chart Category Series – From line and bar series to spline area and waterfall series, the iOS data chart supports all your “bread & butter” charting needs for every day scenarios.

Area Series
Bar Series
Column Series
Line Series
Point Series
Spline Area Series
Spline Series
Step Area Series
Step Line Series
Range Area Series
Range Column Series
Waterfall Series

Scientific Charts – From wind patterns to performance metrics, Polar & Radial series can expose new insights in many scientific data sets.

Polar Area Series
Polar Line Series
Polar Scatter Series
Radial Column Series
Radial Line Series
Radial Pie Series

Chart Financial Series & Financial Indicators – Financial charting scenarios with support for both Candlestick and OHLC bar charts, and many built-in financial indicators are supported.

Financial Price Series in Candlestick Mode
Financial Price Series in OHLC Mode
Financial Indicators: Average Directional Index Indicator, Absolute Volume Oscillator, Accumulation Distribution Indicator, Average True Range Indicator, Typical Price Indicator

Chart Scatter Series: Also known as Scatter Plots or scattergraphs, you can benefit from this type of mathematical diagram in your iOS apps using Cartesian coordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. You can also enable trend lines to facilitate data analysis, and choose from the following types:

Bubble Series
Scatter Series

Chart Trend Lines – Support for multiple types of trend lines for each series on your chart. Trend lines are also compatible with the Motion Framework to provide smooth animated transitions when the data set changes. The supported trend lines include:

Cubic Fit
Cumulative Average
Exponential Average
Exponential Fit
Linear Fit
Logarithmic Fit
Modified Average
Power Law Fit
Quadratic Fit
Quartic Fit
Quintic Fit
Simple Average
Weighted Average

Chart Theming – Use chart themes to give a chart a consistent and color coordinated look and feel. Simply set the IGChartView theme property to one of the predefined themes

Pricing, Availability & Getting Started

NUCLiOS is available now, starting at $295.00 USD for the Community Edition, which includes forum-based support. If you want the option to contact our team of support experts by phone or email, you can choose the Standard Support edition for $495.00 USD. Just like all other NetAdvantage controls by Infragistics, our NUCLiOS controls are royalty-free. You simply need to pay for each developer seat and you can write as many apps as you want.

If you write mobile applications on multiple platforms, you’re encouraged to go for MobileAdvantage, which gets you access to Infragistics’ multi-platform mobile developer tools, allowing native app development on iOS and Windows Phone, and mobile web development with HTML5, jQuery & jQuery Mobile using the new IgniteUI. If you’re an Android developer, we also just introduced our new IguanaUI Community Pack of native Android controls, absolutely free! Check them out today.

The following chart summarizes your purchase options to buy NUCLIOS:

Product	Pricing/Availability Notes
NUCLiOS – with Priority Support	$995
NUCLiOS – with Standard Support	$495
NUCLiOS – Community Edition	$295
Infragistics MobileAdvantage Bundle Includes NUCLiOS iOS controls, igniteUI HTML5+jQuery, NetAdvantage for Windows Phone	With Priority Support: $1195 With Standard Support: $695 Community Edition: $495
Infragistics NetAdvantage Ultimate Bundle	With Priority Support: $2395 With Standard Support: $1895

What if you want to try the controls from an end-user point of view before you experiment with them?

Of course, you can try all these controls for free before you commit to any purchase. We are confident you will love working with NUCLiOS and all our mobile controls. You can download a free evaluation of NUCLiOS here, or the entire MobileAdvantage suite here. Additionally, you can try the NUCLiOS Samples Browser by downloading it from the Apple App Store here.

NUCLiOS Requirements

Native iOS development requires Objective C and Xcode (version 4.3 or higher) as mandated by Apple. We’ve been asked if we could provide controls to do iOS development on Windows, but this is simply not allowed by Apple both on technical and legal levels. All native iOS development must be done on a Mac computer. Our iOS controls are used within Xcode just as you would any other Cocoa controls for iOS development. Apple makes the rules, not us.

If you prefer to use C# instead of Objective C, Infragistics does provide NUCLIOS bindings for MonoTouch (see below).

NUCLiOS and MonoTouch

f you’re a .NET developer and want to build native iOS apps using C#, our friends at Xamarin offer a product called MonoTouch which allows you to write mobile apps, including iOS, entirely in C#. Infragistics is currently working on NUCLiOS bindings for MonoTouch, allowing you to use our controls in MonoTouch iOS projects. The bindings are currently in beta and they’re already included in the NUCLiOS installer. Make sure to try them out and give us your feedback in the NUCLiOS forums.

Beyond Charts & Grids

This is only the beginning of the iOS journey at Infragistics. We'll be sure to release our NUCLiOS roadmap soon enough. We are proud to introduce our first release of NUCLiOS and we can promise you there will be many more controls in 2013 and beyond. If there are specific controls you'd like us to prioritize, be sure to let us know on the NUCLiOS forums.

Contact Us

It’s time to get started! Download the NUCLiOS trial on your Mac, fire up Xcode and take your iOS apps to the next level. When you end up publishing cool new apps based on NUCLiOS, make sure to let us know, we would love to showcase your work. We also value your feedback. Make sure to post your comments, feedback and questions on the NUCLiOS forums. You can also follow @infragistics on Twitter. As the product manager for NUCLiOS, you can reach me at activenick@infragistics .com or on Twitter via @ActiveNick.