Seismometer App on Windows Phone

Today, Microsoft released Windows Phone Operating System for various smart phone devices. A bunch of major manufactures cover this platform; such as, HTC, Samsung, etc… We’ve created an app for Windows Phone from scratch. It’s called “Seismometer” app (please note there is no “i” in front :)). This is our first app which got a spot in the Marketplace in the day 1 and I would like to thank everyone to have our app on the Marketplace. Microsoft studied a lot about existing market and development tools. Indeed, those tools are very confortable as you can imagine that they are experts who know how to involve developers. I guess, I don’t have to explain how this app works and check it out on YouTube!

ObjectGraph LLC, especially this blog, is known as iPhone developers; however, we have to confess that our mother tongue is .NET. We spend most of programming efforts on it. That’s how we feed our family. For us, adopting development for Windows Phone is very natural thing while we had very hard time to start with Objective-C and iPhone. I remember, there was no book on Amazon. Actually, there was one book about iPhone based on Jailbreaking technique which is kind useful for me to start with Objective-C. However, I had hard time to teach someone else since there was no organized knowledge base for this platform. Sample codes from Apple was like a super elegant Aston Martin which they were not really friendly for people who want to touch around.  Of course, there was mature community of Objective-C (not 2.0 at that time). But this fact did not make any difference to me, just like I did not distinguish difference between Objective-C and MetaOCaml back then.

Nowadays, the technology has to be decent and this is a minimum requirement to be successful smartphone device today. In addition, marketing and design investment might occupy remaining part - probably remaining 80% of the factor. I often see people turn their iPhone around to their friend and they say “Watch this app!“. In subways or buses, I often see people who just touch the screen for no reason (mostly, they just pushing down and pop with the spring action on the scroll view - over and over again) and this phenomena convinces me that iPhone’s graphic user interface itself is delightful. Microsoft might find their answers if they can answer to those questions: “Do my users want to show off their phone and apps?” or “Do my users waste their time just play on the screen for no reason?“. At least, I did not see those answers on Android yet. But Verison did good job to sell tons of android devices by giving another one for free if you get one. This could be another smart approach in the market. Anyway, I’m curious to watch this situation for next few months. Will it spread around the world? Will it sell in Japan or will it fail oversea just like miserable failure of XBox? Will it make a huge waiting line in front of Akihabara just like when Windows 95 was released in 15 years ago? In contrast, there was the longest line that I’ve never seen appeared in front of Apple Ginza, Tokyo when iPhone was released.