Thought Delimited

Just got back from the first Washington DC jQuery UI Meetup (more on that in a later blog post). One of the co-presenters was a Microsoft Developer Evangelist who happened to have on him a prototype Windows Phone 7 device and was willing to demonstrate it for anyone who was interested. So I got to take a look at it and wanted to share a bit of what I saw while the memory is still fresh.

If you haven't seen any of the photos or videos of what Windows Phone 7 looks like (check out Engadget), the UI is very different from that of the iPhone or Android. Instead of icons and distinct applications, you have tiles that you tap to enter certain "hubs", and within these hubs can be added app-like functionality. For example, the hub concerning photos not only serves as a photo gallery for the photos stored on the phone, but also provides the functionality for uploading your photos to Flickr or Facebook or for viewing photos in your friends' Facebook albums. Another distinct difference is that the UI menus can span across multiple horizontal screens, so sometimes you'll see text cut off on the right side indicating there's more going on just off to the right. 

I knew most of that prior to seeing the actual phone, but I was curious to see how it actually worked in practice. It actually looked kinda cool: the scrolling and screen transistions were smooth, and the removal of the need to fit text into the width of the handheld screen allowed Microsoft to use bigger font sizes for the text, making the screen very readable even from a few feet away.

But in other ways, the UI was more subtle: it has a celluar radio strength indicator at the top of the screen like the iPhone and Android phones do, but the text was small and the background was transparent, letting the wallpaper image show through underneath. And as we waited to see new Facebook updates from his friends (Facebook functionality is integrated into the OS), he pointed out the marching horizontal line of green dots that appeared at the very top of the screen that indicated that data was being updated. It was barely noticeable, but very unobtrusive.

The interesting thing I found about the "hubs" concept was that each hub area was distinctive (different background, different text color), which really emphasized the idea that you were in a different area or aspect of the phone, not just a standalone app. And he wasn't switching from one app to another to do things: he was navigating around or deeper into the current hub to access certain functionality.

Another attendee asked him what the platform would be for developing apps for Windows Phone 7, and he told us that developers could build apps for these phones using either XNA (which I'm unfamiliar with and too tired to look up right now) or Silverlight. Given the struggle Microsoft has had in promoting Silverlight as a competitor to Adobe Flash, it'll be interesting to see if the ability to develop mobile phone applications with Silverlight will further Silverlight adoption. I should also note that earlier in the conversation, he'd mentioned that the first version of Windows Phone 7 wouldn't support browser-based Silverlight or Flash (simply because there wasn't time to put that into the first release), so I took that as a sign that Microsoft plans to allow Flash (at least browser-based Flash) on these devices.

I think that about covers it. While I personally plan on remaining an Android user, I do think Microsoft's doing something interesting here, and I'm curious to see how it plays out.