Thursday, September 23, 2010

[WP7Dev] What do developers still want?

The RTM version of the Windows Phone 7 development tools are now available for download. But what do the people who are using them think is still missing? What do developers really want added to the platform?

At the last WPUG meeting I asked some. Here are the results:

The most popular requests:
  • Cut & paste / clipboard support x7
  • Background processing / 3rd party multitasking x4
  • Camera APIs x4
  • Contact detail access (people hub integration) x3
  • Built in barcode scanning x2

Other requests:
  • A built in Physics engine
  • A complete implementation of HttpWebRequest
  • A personal details card that could be passed to apps to fill in my details
  • Ability to change system wide background colour
  • Access to tile sizing
  • Dynamic language support
  • Good twitter stuff
  • Integrated security with user's Windows Live account
  • Jump list silverlight control
  • Managed Facebook wrapper
  • More Metro integration from within XNA
  • Peer comms
  • Shared data between apps
  • Built in animations
  • SQL DB
  • Swipe navigation elements
  • VOIP
  • XPath

And then the things that people didn't realise were already there:
  • Bing Maps control x3
  • Multiple calendars
  • Pivot & Panorama controls
  • Support for accelerometer in XNA
  • OTA Updates

I'll let you draw your own conclusions from the results...
at September 23, 2010

3 comments:

  1. Ravi Shanker9:20 am

    I've just started looking through the tools,still digging through them~Can we access the music+video hub to get to know the songs stored on the device?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Matt Lacey10:22 am

    @Ravi You can integrate your app with the Music+Video hub via the instructions at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff769558(VS.92).aspx

    If you want to get details of what songs, etc. are in the hub, take a look at the Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media Namespace. (Yes, you can access this namespace/assembly from a Silverlight app.)

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ravi Shanker10:46 am

    Thanks a lot matt!

    ReplyDelete

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