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Inspired by @sadukie I am going to list out my applications on my Window’s phone.

I’ve had a Windows phone for over a year now, I’ve actually had 3 different models.  I first had the HTC Surround, while it was a good phone I just didn’t see the need for the speaker setup.  Then I went to the LG Quantum because it has a physical keyboard.  Now, after my move to Verizon I am on the HTC Trophy. 

I’ve owned an iPhone for 2 years, and when the commercial says “there is an app for that”… they aren’t kidding.  The application list for the iPhone is impressive.  Unfortunately the same could not be said for the Windows Phone 7.  It had an OK list of applications, but not one that would blow you away.

However, the applications available have seemed to hit a level to where it does everything I need a phone to do.

I love the way the phone works.  It just seems to flow so much better than the iPhone.  I grew to hate my iPhone by time I got rid of it.  I’ve had the Windows Phone for over a  year and have no real complaints about the operating system.

Enough of the chatter.  Below is my list of applications.

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Utilities
Adobe Reader – Pretty much a must own if you want to view PDF’s.

WinMilk – A nice little to-do list for the phone.  Though the upgrades to OneNote in Mango somewhat make this a little less needed.  I do prefer the UI on WinMilk though.

BandWidth – Allows you to see how fast your internet connection is. 

QR Code Reader – Ever see those crazy blocks with all the lines in them?  Yep, this decodes them!

Flashlight-X – Ad supported flashlight application.  Uses the camera’s flash for a true flashlight experience.

CardStar – One of my favorite apps.  Allows you to get rid of all those pesky reward and membership cards.

ConnectivityShortcuts – One of the new things available with Mango.  Allows you to create a shortcut directly to a few settings.  Great if you find yourself turning them off or on

Remote Desktop – So I’ve yet to try this, just downloaded tonight… but if it does what it says, it is pretty much the only one available.

SkyDrive – Gives you some access to your SkyDrive.  Not a bad application to have, even if much of the functionality of this application is already built into the phone.

VNC Connect – Standard VNC application.

Games
Shuffle Party – A fun game to waste some time.  You can bowl, play the classic game, or an obstacle course.

Xbox Companion – This integrates with your XBox and allows you to control the main screen a bit.  While a cool thing to try out once, not something I found incredibly useful. Especially since I have the Kinect.

Backgammon Pro – An ad supported version of Backgammon.  Fun game to learn!

Flush – I was a little hesitant to put this on the list as I found it an OK game, but some of the levels just don’t seem possible!

Physi Bricks – A fun game that takes gravity and certain dynamics of the different types of balls you have to throw at the bricks.

Blocked In Free – The “classic” boxed in game.  Just a fun way to waste some time.

Minesweeper – The classic Minesweeper game with a few twist.  Loved earning achievements.

Media/News
Amazon Kindle – Just your basic Kindle application.

ESPN ScoreCenter – An application to allow you to monitor scores and sports news.  The navigation can be a little bit hard to grasp, but it does the job.

iHeartRadio – Access to all of the Clear Channel radio stations. 

INRIX Traffic – This is a really well thought out application.  It combines user reported crashes with crashes reported through official means.  Has helped me avoid problems several times.

Last.fm – Your typical Last.fm application.  If you use Last.fm, this is what you want.

Spotify – Spotify is the new kid on the block in the USA.  It is a nice application to interface with their service.

The Weather Channel – Out of all the weather applications, this is the one I liked the best.

Retail
Amazon Mobile – A nice way to interact with Amazon.  Allows on the fly price comparison along with a lot more.

eBay – This application was one of the most surprising for me.  Just an all around good application to work with eBay on your mobile phone.

Pizza Hut – This one is relatively new.  I used the iPhone version several times and the Windows version appears to be a good port.

Personal
Bible – LifeChurch.tv kind of owns this market and its no difference on the Windows Phone.  Top of the line application.

Google Integration
Flux – I’ve tried a lot of Google Reader applications.  This one has been the best by a lot.

GoVoice – The best Google Voice application around.  It went through a moment where I thought it was going to be abandoned by the developer, but he has started to work on it again recently.  It just works!

Social Media
MoTweets Pro – I’ve been giving this a shot.  It is a paid application, but overall I like it.  It is really for heavy Twitter users as it allows for support of multiple accounts.  It also seems to have Facebook integration.

Twitter – The official Twitter application. More than sufficient!

Developer Unlocked
I recently “developer unlocked” my phone using ChevronWP7.  Unfortunately the “jailbreak” story in Windows Phone is still very new and not well developed.  Once this is a bit more mainstream the ‘black market’ applications available will rock.  Since I am unlocked I am able to “side load” some applications onto my phone.

Screen Capturer – One of the things I really missed from the iPhone was the ability to take a screen grab.  This fills that gap.

Built In
The podcast setup is really nice.  I have subscribed to many technical and personal podcast and they just show up on the phone when new episodes show up. 

Missing
Chipotle – Enough said!

Facebook – There is actually a Facebook application, but it is buggy when you scroll down.  When I moved to Verizon and my new phone I didn’t bother to install the app.  I just went to the mobile version as my primary method.  There is, however, extensive integration with Facebook on the main operating system.

So as I’ve blogged about previously I have a new Windows Phone.  Though, I did trade in my model from the HTC Surround to the LG Quantum.  I wanted the keyboard.

Today a feature that comes with every Windows Phone 7, saved my butt.  It started out with leaving a practice for my son’s 4th grade basketball team that I coach.  I put my phone and wallet in a bag that my assistant coach brought to return some items. I was thinking I’d keep the bag for a few days while I got the stuff home.  So the assistant walked out and started unloading the bag in my trunk and we went our own ways. 

Then I realized I didn’t have my phone.  I started back tracking my steps and I was worried that I put my phone on the top of my car before I started driving.  So I turned around and drove slowly, looking back the 2 blocks I drove.  No luck. 

Then I wondered if it was in my assistants bag and I rushed home because I know of the feature in the phone… I got home and logged into WindowsPhone.com and clicked the “Find my Phone” feature.  Within 30 seconds a map was displayed showing the phone was in my assistants driveway! 

I called him and told him what was up, and I went and got my phone… and my wallet .  What was his reaction?  “Man, you’re like somebody from the future.”

It saved my butt!  Here is what it looks like showing the phone at my house:

So it didn’t take me long, but I found my first bug in the Windows Phone 7 operating system.

It is a simple bug to reproduce.  It comes down to programming pauses and such into a contacts phone number.  Lets say you work at XYZ LLC.  Who’s number is 555-555-1212.  You program your coworker, Charlie’s number in as follows: 555-555-1212,2,222.  What this number will do is dial the main number pauses, hits “2” for entering an extension, pauses, and then enters the extension.

So now you have those two contacts.  Now somebody calls you from the office, which comes through as 555-555-1212.  You’d expect for it to display a call coming from XYZ, LLC.  However what happens is you are told the call comes from “Charlie” because he comes up first in the list. 

I’d hope the caller ID could be fixed to do an exact match search before it does the partial match search.

So here I am almost a week later with my HTC Surround.  Overall my impression of this phone is improving as time goes on.  It just works. 

In my prior post I mentioned that one of the features I liked was the ability to sync wirelessly.  Well, that didn’t pan out to well.  The software seemed to hang a bit.  So the Zune software needs some work.

I found my first bug in the software, and saw some areas for improvement. 

I’ll cover those in specific post because I don’t want it lost in the noise of one long blog post. 

However my overall thoughts are positive.  I love the speech recognition, it just works well.  The responsiveness of the phone is awesome.  The applications for the phone is still a bit weak, but its early.  It takes time to build out a great eco system.

The one thing I did notice is that WP7 apps cost money.  Not many free, high quality, applications out there.  A lot of, what appear to be OK quality for pay apps.  I think this will also change over time as the eco system builds up.  Right now you have a lot of early developers trying to make a few bucks off the early adapters.

I’ll follow up with three post in the near future, one more tonight.

1. The bug I found.
2. Improvements I’d like to see.
3. Applications I miss from my iPhone.

Check back soon.

So I finally fully representing my license plate, I AM A PC.  I am the proud owner of the HTC Surround, a Windows Phone 7 device.

Having spent the last two years on the iPhone 3G I got to know that device very well.  It wasn’t all bad, but there were things about Apple and its phone that drove me nuts.

I was eagerly waiting for the WP7 launch, and today was the day.

I looked at the two current devices available at the AT&T store.  The Surround and the Samsung Focus.  The Focus felt cheap in my hand.  Just seemed like it would break rather easily.  So I went with the much sturdier phone, the Surround.

After a night of use my first impression is… “Why’d they mimic the iOS 3.0?”  This phone has everything my iPhone had… last year.   No ability to copy and paste, and no global inbox.  Now the good thing is that both of those will be taken care of in updates, copy and paste has been confirmed… and I can only assume the other.  My next impression is that the phone is a lot like any Windows PC you buy, a lot of crap loaded on it.  Thankfully, it is very easy to remove all of the adware provided by AT&T.  Just hold down on it and click ‘uninstall.’  My third impression is that the contact management needs work.  The iPhone struggled here as well, but they gave me the ability to just use my Windows contacts and I was able to easily organize that. 

Finally, my last reaction is that I will grow to like this phone a lot.  It is a newer processor so it is certainly faster than my old iPhone.  One feature that I really like is the wireless sync.  No longer do I have to connect my phone to my PC to sync.  I just have to plug it into a power source and let it sit on my home network and it will sync all of my new songs, pictures, and podcast.  As the application choices grow this phone will be much better, it may even take care of the global inbox issue before an official fix is in place.  The UI is certainly different than the iPhone.  More sliding, less tapping. 

I’ll check back in in due time with a follow up, but that is how I feel after a night of use.

For those that know me, you know that I am no fan of Google.  I don't trust them in many ways.  I don't trust them with my personal information and I don't trust them to keep features I like or come to rely on.  They have a history of launching the next greatest thing, to only kill it within the first two years.

I've been able to stop using Google for most things. With one exception, email.  The reason being that Yahoo and Hotmail are each missing one feature.  The ability to use my own smtp server.

Both services will allow me to 'send mail as' other accounts, but it is really an email hack.  The actual from email would be the Yahoo or Hotmail address of the account.  The Reply to would then be changed to my personal email.  The problem with this is two fold.
1. Other web servers will sometime see this as spam.
2. Sometimes the "from" that the reciepient see's is, "From user@hotmail.com sent on behalf of user@example.com".  I don't want people to see my main service email. 

So, Hotmail and Yahoo... do me a favor and give me this one feature.  I'm ready to jump ship, I just need your help.

Something you probably shouldn’t notice, but this site is now running under .NET 4.0. 

If you notice anything odd, please notify me. 

Last week I came into the office to find my box was completely hosed.  I kept getting a compile error that the webengine.dll could not be found. 

I tried many different uninstalls and reinstalls of .NET but it wouldn’t fix the problem.  However I notice that even though .NET was uninstalled, it wasn’t.  I went looking for a tool to completely uninstall .NET and found this website.

After using that process to uninstall .NET and then rebooting, I reinstalled .NET and was good to go.

Was one of the most frustrating work days I have had in some time, have never been so close to being beaten by a technical problem like this.

In a prior post I asked for some help on browser stats on certain sites.  The goal being, to answer the question if IE 6 is dead.  The answer really is, it depends.

Lets first show some of the numbers:

Now as you can see only two of these sites are over 10%, these two site are two of my largest visited sites in these stats.  Where 10% means millions of visitors.    Two key things to note is that with many of these sites had two to three times the IE 6 traffic just one year ago and I did remove a few sites who had stats well outside the norm.  One clear fact is that IE 6 usage has plummeted this year. 

Site 1 was the third highest IE 6 usage, this was not unexpected for me as this site has a older age bracket that uses it.  But the fact that it was as low as it was shocked me.  Just six months ago, the IE 6 usage was 25%. 

Now for the sites that showed the lowest IE 6 usage, is also fairly explainable.  Sites 7, 6 and 2 are not WELL traveled sites and their usage would likely be younger.  Younger people will own newer computers and IE 6 is Eight years old. 

So is IE 6 dead?

It depends on three things. 

1. The size of the project you are on.  If you are working on a site that may be hit by millions of people, then no it is not dead.  If your site is a fairly minimal site, then I’d not support IE 6. 

2. Is IE 6 capable? IE 6 is 8 years old and it will have limitations.  If those limitations are deal breakers, then you either have to change the plan for your project or you have to drop support for IE 6.

3. Is the time needed to work with IE 6 in the budget? In the last project I was in, it took us four weeks to work out all of the IE 6 issues.  That is not free time and if the customer isn’t willing to pay for this time, then IE 6 should be dropped.

I will not support IE 6 on any personal projects moving forward.  7% and declining is not worth the hassle.

One of the biggest reasons this conversation needs to start ramping up is the simple fact that large sites and services, even Microsoft, are starting to drop support for IE 6.

Microsoft Office Web Applications
YouTube
Microsoft Sharepoint 2010
Apple’s MobileMe

That is a fairly important list for my quick search online.  Plus the two sites that had the most IE 6 usage in my list above, will be dropping official support for IE 6 in 2010!  Why then?  Because their corporate computers are being upgraded to Windows 7, so there isn’t as much political need to have IE 6.

On this site, I actually display a warning if you visit with IE 6.  I have for some time, and I think at some point soon I am be ornery and block IE 6 users.  I want that browser to die and whatever that takes, I’m going to support it.

I have been an ASP.NET developer since I joined the team at Cintech in 2006.  I’ve been in the web form world and all the wonders of the PostBack page model since then. 

Then around the end of 2008 I remember hearing some noise about an ASP.NET MVC project released by Microsoft that got some bad reaction.  Talking about how it wasn’t a good start to MVC.  I never took the time to look deeper as I had other things going on in life, and was happy with my PostBack world.  Turns out this was a project called “Oxite” that is hosted over on CodePlex.

Then July of this year I took a job with a long time friend at Epsilon.  My friend is a Java developer, and through our conversations he kept telling me about this “MVC" way of doing web development.  About how it is so different than how he was being forced to develop on the .NET project we were working on together. 

The more he talked the more I got interested in learning about this new ASP.NET MVC that Microsoft had released.  Around this time CINNUG hosted a firestarter event going over ASP.NET MVC.  I took a Saturday to attend the event and learn some more.

In general I’m eager to learn more and put some of this in action.  This is when I went looking for that project that Microsoft put out.  Upon finding Oxite I see that it was basically a dead project.  The only thing I could find was a post on Erik Porters blog stating this in the comments:

October 08, 2009
Jeff, there is news coming about Oxite, but unfortunately I can't share anything until some other news happens. :( It's looking right now like that news is still a month and a half out. Really sorry! :(

Now this is on top of the fact that Oxite had not moved much since July.  Check ins, yes.  But nothing worth writing home about.  Then in the comments there was some guessing that Oxite was going to become “Orchard”, which was discussed as being a full featured CMS backed by Microsoft, though still being open source. 

Now I had high hopes for Orchard.  Since Oxite had been dead for months, I figured this new Orchard product would be ready to go when released.  I was stoked and waiting for it to be released.  I was all set to move this site to use the Orchard codebase.  When it got officially released I downloaded it, compiled it.. then ran it locally.  Wow, was I ever disappointed.  Orchard is months away from being usable, so here we are in the community with nothing to use.  From what my brief research shows me, at least a year after the release of ASP.NET MVC we have made very little progress in expanding this for people to actually use. 

As harsh as this may sound, I blame Microsoft and I blame the Oxite team. A person named Adam created a discussion on CodePlex stating the following:

October 12, 2009
Guys,

At the moment, I feel that Oxite is hindering developers from creating new ASP.NET MVC blog engines because Oxite is already there, on the other hand, the current official release of Oxite is missing load of features and cannot be compared to other popular engines.

If you are not planning to release soon or you are very busy, just declare this project as no longer supported to open the chance for other developers to start their own engines...

Regards,

Adam

I totally agree.  People don't want to waste their time recreating the wheel when there is a project already out there.  But here we are, over a year has passed and we have very little ‘real’ stuff to show.

Microsoft needs to get its act together.  Many great developers are abandoning the .NET platform for platforms like Ruby, and if you lose developers you lose the market.  Customers don’t care what platform people use, they just want their problems solved.  If those problems are solved and the developer chooses a non-Microsoft technology, then Microsoft loses.

Maybe Orchard is the answer.  Maybe six months from now this blog post looks like the most foolish blog post on the web.  For now, however, I’m still looking for the next big thing.  What comes after .NET for me professionally?  .NET won’t be around forever and being a fairly young man, I have to look toward the future to keep myself professionally relevant.