Not soon enough

Steve Ballmer was recently questioned about Windows Mobile. His answer sounds like a typical business response. It’s full of fluff and lacking any real answers.

Microsoft is launching WinMobile 6.5 later this year, and WinMobile 7 sometime in 2010. 6.5 has so far failed to impress many — it certainly has not become an answer to the iPhone OS or the Android platform. Not much is known about WinMobile 7, save for the most important fact: It’s due out in 2010. I would like to reiterate; WM7, which is supposedly Microsoft’s answer to the iPhone OS and Android platforms, isn’t coming out until 2010. That’s over two years after the iPhone came out (actually, the iPhone was released in June 2007, but the SDK came out in March 2008, so I’m giving them some bend here).

Microsoft is shooting for 2010 to be where Apple was in 2007. And let’s not forget, Apple likes to shoot for where the puck is going to be, not where it is. If Microsoft wants to impress, they’ve got to pull it together and stop resting on their desktop-marketshare-laurels.

Jason

A Little About Me

Much like Jason, I too, am a budding Computer Scientist. I’ve been working in the industry for just over a year, studying the field for approximately five years, and programming for even longer. I have studied at two major Canadian universities, Carleton and Memorial, and have worked on both commercial and open source software with IBM. So now, after years of saying I would actually do it: I am starting a blog on software development, and in particular, mobile software development and UI design.

Like I said, most of my recent interest has been in mobile application development, particularly on the Android platform. Aside from that, I love designing and working with user interfaces. In fact, I am currently working with IBM on the Eclipse SWT project.

This internship has exposed me to the creation and manipulation of SWT-based applications, and has even given me a chance to work on an incubation project known as SWTBot. Working with SWTBot has given me a pretty decent grasp of concurrency and the synchronization needed between non-ui threads and an application’s UI thread. Essentially, the purpose of SWTBot is to hook into a Java application’s UI thread and pass in faked user-driven events, thus simulating a user that doesn’t actually exist. This can then be useful for functional, UI-driven testing, all based on the JUnit test framework: a proven, open source unit testing framework for Java.

All things aside, I will not be focusing on building automated test frameworks. Development for Android will be the center of my activity, so expect lots of writing on mobile application development from both Jason and I, on iPhone and Android development, respectively.

Josh